What do you have to say to get your client’s attention? What if what you had to tell them is critical to their success, and you have to get the message across—how would you say your marketing message to make sure they paid attention to you?
As business owners, and marketers, we are all faced with the dilemma about how to design a marketing message will be heard amidst the clamor of every other marketing message out there.
“If I could have your attention, I would love to point out the basic components in a marketing strategy that will help you grow your business.”
Did you already mentally tune out? Thought so…
What if I said to you—
“Top-earning coaches/consultants do this one simple thing every day to grow their business.”
Did this statement create more interest, and curiosity in you?
The most basic way of getting someone’s attention is to break the pattern of predictable, and expected behavior. Common sense, or predictable messages, don’t attract attention because a person intuitively already ‘gets’ what they hear. People “tune out” because they’ve heard the same message many times before, and aren’t expecting any new information.
To get peoples’ attention, avoid the generic story everyone else is saying, and say something unexpected.
So, what are the key elements in getting peoples’ attention, and just as important, how do you keep their attention once you get it?
You do this by stirring two essential emotions—surprise and interest.
Surprise
When our ‘guessing machines’ fail at predicting what we expect to happen next, this creates the emotion of surprise. Being surprised jolts us to attention, because we want to pay attention to learn about something we ‘missed.’
Unexpected, surprising ideas are more likely to stick in our brains because they force us to pay attention and think. We, as humans, want to find the answer, to solve the question of why we were surprised.
Think about the core, singular point you want to get across to your clients, such as, 1) how to increase sales, 2) how to get healthier, 3) how to get good grades, and so on. Break a pattern, stump people’s guessing machines about what they think you will say, and state something surprising and unexpected about the topic or situation.
Interest
To keep someone’s interest once you have it, the easiest way is to point out, or ‘open a gap’ in a person’s knowledge. You do this by generating curiosity, or creating a mystery.
You generate curiosity, and create a mystery by posing questions that lead the reader to think, What don’t I know that other people know?, What will happen next? How will it end? Curiosity occurs when we feel a gap in our knowledge. You, as a marketer, must open a gap in knowledge, before you close it with facts.
Our tendency is to tell people the facts. However, you must first convince them they need these facts. The idea is to get their interest, highlight some specific knowledge they’re missing, through:
1. Posing a question (How many moons does Jupiter have?)
2. Pointing out a knowledge gap (Which restaurant is the cleanest in ________?)
3. Presenting them with situations that have unknown resolutions (Who will win Men’s Figure Skating in the Olympics?)
To create interest is all about finding a way to spark and elevate interest about a particular situation or topic; and, by adding an element of surprise and unexpected behavior into your marketing communications, you’ll be able to successfully attract more of your desired clients’ attention!
Do you use any surprise and interest tactics like the ones I mentioned? If so, can you give an example of how you’ve used them? Make a comment on my blog.
