“Study Shows Bacon is Beneficial to Your Health”
Now that I got your attention, I have to disappoint you. Unfortunately, the beneficial effects of bacon on your health have not been proven (yet). But, what’s been proven numerous times, is the relevance and effectiveness of attention grabbers in marketing.
Digital marketing experts estimate that most Americans living in large cities are exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day. This is a huge volume of ads being thrown at a single individual every single day. But how many of those 4,000 can you recall right now? Probably one or two.
So, what makes those two ads stand out from 4,000 other ones? One of the reasons is that they use strong enough attention grabbers.
There’s a principle in marketing better known under the abbreviation AIDA. TechTarget defines the AIDA marketing model as
“a marketing, advertising and sales approach methodology designed to provide insight into the customer’s mind and represent the steps needed to cultivate leads and generate sales.”
AIDA stands short for:
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
This article will primarily focus on the first ‘A’ of the formula – attention.
Of course, it’s easy to grab attention if you can afford to send a man to the edge of space and have him free-fall out of a ship that carries your logo on it while the entire world watches it broadcast live. Just like Red Bull did with their Stratos publicity stunt.
It’s easy if you’re Red Bull, but what if you can’t afford such high-level publicity stunts? Is there a way to grab your audience’s attention if you’re a small business or just starting out with marketing?
Of course, in the world of digital marketing, you’re more or less limited to what you can fit onto a web page. That being said, your attention grabbers can be built out of the following elements:
- Words
- Photos
- Sound
- Video
- Illustrations
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. In this post, I’ll present you with 4 awesome attention grabbers that will do wonders for your lead capture.
4 Effective Attention Grabbers to Get You More Leads
1. A compelling headline
When it comes to any piece of online content, a headline is one of the first things people see. In most cases, based on the headline itself, users will decide whether to read the rest of the content. The same goes for printed newspapers, as well as for blog posts and website copies.
In fact, a study by Copyblogger shows that while 80% of your users will read your headlines, only 20% will continue to read (or watch, or listen to) the rest of the content. That’s why you need to make sure that one line of text counts and use it to grab your readers’ attention… and don’t let go of it.
In order not to “let go”, you need to offer them equally high-quality content as well. That’s why the so-called clickbait headlines don’t work anymore.
Here’s how you can write quiz titles that serve as great attention grabbers, but you can apply these pieces of advice to almost every other type of online content as well.
2. Case studies that say “I did it, so can you too”
Top Rank Blog defines a case study as
“an analysis of a project, campaign or company that identifies a situation, recommended solutions, implementation actions and identification of those factors that contributed to failure or success.”
Content Marketing Institute has listed case studies as the 5th most used marketing technique, immediately after social media, newsletters, blogs, and website articles. Furthermore, 63% of marketing professionals consider a case study to be an effective marketing strategy.
More importantly, case studies are great attention grabbers and extremely effective means of lead capture.
If you’re looking for additional inspiration, we have prepared detailed instructions and templates that will help you write a case study that will showcase your company’s success, generate leads, and grab everyone’s attention.
3. Fun and engaging online quizzes
Most of the time, quizzes are fun and all-knowing. They can tell you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about yourself, everything you never wanted to know, and even what you didn’t know you needed to know.
Even though they may sometimes seem silly and useless, quizzes are one of the most powerful attention grabbers out there. But they are actually much more than that. In fact, if you’re not using online quizzes, you may be losing out big time on potential leads and sales.
It all started with Buzzfeed quizzes. From then on, it started spreading like wildfire. Businesses and brands of all shapes and sizes started making quizzes an integral part of their to-do marketing list. Facebook quizzes have gradually become one of the most effective attention grabbers out there.
There’s some serious psychology behind the popularity of online quizzes, actually. The secret behind such an engaging nature of online quizzes lies in the fact that people are taking quizzes in order to satisfy some innate needs like self-confirmation, recognition, introspection, and personal engagement.
We mentioned case studies as a great example of attention grabbers. Well, we also have some case studies that prove how effective attention grabbers quizzes actually are.
For example, Dr. Kellyann Petrucci, a weight-loss and natural anti-aging specialist and the author of Dr. Kellyann’s Bone Broth Diet, used LeadQuizzes to build her email list.
Her attention-grabbing quizzes helped her generate 40,145 leads in just 5 months. That’s an amazing cost per lead of only $0.38!
If you would like to learn more, we’ve prepared the most comprehensive guide on how to create your own quiz and use it to grab your audience’s attention and generate more leads and sales.
4. A landing page video teaser
As lots of people can’t be bothered to read huge (or even not so huge) chunks of text nowadays, video has proven to be another one of extremely effective attention grabbers you could use to generate more leads.
If you include a video to your landing page, you need to make sure it’s relevant to your sales message and includes a strong call to action. Once you’ve grabbed your viewer’s attention with the video, you need to get them to keep reading. Include a CTA like “in the video description, you’re going to discover exciting news about losing weight quickly and safely.”
3 Tips for Creating Effective Attention Grabbers
1. Avoid too obvious and too prominent branding
People generally don’t like to feel they’re being sold to or being persuaded into something. That being said, a person’s intrinsic reaction to too prominent branding is to pull back.
During a research conducted by Teixeira, it was observed that in many cases people would just stop watching video ads the very moment brand logos started appearing on the screen. Longer brand exposures and larger logos, especially the ones positioned in the center of the screen, seem to be particularly frowned upon.
Sure, you want to grab their attention, but you also want to keep hold of it! Keep this in mind when creating your own attention grabbers.
2. Play on the card of your customers’ emotions
Great attention grabbers will appeal to people’s emotions and boost their ego. Usually, content that causes people to feel joy, amusement, or awe is much more likely to grab their attention. If it makes them feel smart about it, it’s even more likely to serve as an outstanding attention grabber.
3. Grab their attention within the first 8 seconds
As the average attention span of your typical consumer has plummeted down to lousy 8 seconds (they say goldfish have longer attention span), you need to make sure you grab their attention very quickly.
That being said, you should probably avoid using long videos or at least try to communicate your main message at the very beginning of the video.
I hope this article has succeeded in grabbing your attention for at least a little bit. More importantly, I hope it’ll help you create some effective attention grabbers for your future marketing efforts.
