Steve Sachs is chief executive officer of OneSpot, a content personalization and intelligence platform company.
What do CPG marketers need more than anything to make their content marketing programs work? The answer isn’t more time or marketing budget, and it’s not more page views or shares of their content. The answer is attention. Real, genuine attention.
What does real, genuine attention look like? It’s when a busy person makes the decision to click on a piece of content you’ve created. But that’s not all. This person is really hungry for the information you have and is willing to spare a limited amount of attention to engage with it. Even with other marketing messages, work emails, social media updates and text messages happening all around them, they have decided to read something related to your business in this precious moment.
This kind of attention is extremely rare in 2017. The human attention span today is said to be eight seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2000, according to recent studies. That’s less than that of a goldfish’s nine-second attention span.
Where’s all the attention going? It’s going everywhere, siphoned across micro-moments during which people are barely able to hang on to a single piece of content or message before they are whisked away to engage with something else.
This, in a nutshell, is why real, genuine attention is so scarce. “So what?,” you might ask. Perhaps your strategy to gain more attention is just to create more content. If you fall into that camp, it’s worth paying attention to new content marketing research that suggests that approach won’t get you very far. According to our recent survey of 1,500 consumers designed to better understand their attitudes, preferences and expectations for personalized branded content, nearly half (45 percent) won’t spend time with it if it’s not relevant to their interests. Forty-two percent of consumers are less interested in a brand’s products and services if the content it provides is not personally relevant.
What’s more, a report from Beckon — “Marketing Truth of Marketing Hype” — shows that while marketer content tripled over the past year, engagement stayed flat. The study looked at over $16 billion in omnichannel marketing spend and performance data and found that while marketers are investing a lot in content creation, it’s not driving more consumer engagement. The missing piece? Personalization.
In battling attention scarcity for your content marketing programs, personalization is ultimately the winning strategy. Marketers can no longer ignore consumers’ expectation of personalized content at every turn. With these key two concepts in mind, you can start winning more of those precious moments.
Personalization creates a positive impression of your brand
When consumers engage with technology, they expect to be presented with content that’s specific to their individual preferences. That’s why technology giants like Amazon, Netflix and Facebook have dominated the consumer content space. Our study found that 87 percent of people reported that personally relevant content positively influences how they feel about the brand, and 60 percent say they have a stronger connection with it when the content is personally relevant.
This connection leads to a stronger relationship and engagement with your brand, which influences consumers to put your product first when presented with an assortment of content options to choose from.
Personalization drives sales and recommendations
CPG brand marketers that focus on providing exceptionally personalized customer experiences across touch points are the ones who not only earn people’s attention, but also their dollars. Seventy-eight percent of those surveyed said that personally relevant content increases their purchase intent for a brand’s products and services. Half also said they would pay more for those products and services when the content experience is individually personalized. But the benefits of personalization don’t just stop there — 64 percent said they will recommend a brand if it successfully delivers personalized content.
As CPG brands develop more and more content, generating larger amounts to choose from, the challenges of capturing and maintaining attention multiply. It’s clear the only way to attract a customer’s attention today is by producing quality content to create personally relevant experiences that, in its specificity, communicate the irresistible message, “This is just for you.”