How to Get Customers Attention and Stand Out in The Crowd

Growing a business and getting new customers comes down to gaining as much exposure as possible in any area. The first thing you need to do is to reach more audiences with your online content and campaigns. Thus, having an attention-grabbing marketing strategy to your advantage is key.

If you find that your business doesn’t have the attention that it needs to have, you may have fallen into the trap of creating a brand that can’t draw anyone’s attention. This is dangerous because customers won’t know your existence while they are already inundated with generic advertisements every day.

Slowly, your business may fade into obscurity. That sounds a bit scary, doesn’t it?

Most entrepreneurs know it’s vital to have a thorough plan to promote their businesses. However, many of them have so many questions when it is already time to decide on the best strategy. Your strategy’s success would depend on the target audience, how you carry out the plan, your target audience, and, of course, your business’ type.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced most marketers to face moderate to significant budget cuts; this means you need more than ever effective ways to reach out and connect with potential customers.

In this article, let’s better understand the best tactics to get customers’ attention and grow your business. With online competition this strong nowadays, you need to approach this issue with all the seriousness it deserves. Don’t worry, I will be by your side; let’s get started!

Why is it getting harder to get customers attention?

The whole world has evolved drastically over the past few years. Think back to 2010: Apple just released the first iPad; Instagram and Pinterest had barely launched, and just one in four subscribers used smartphones to read emails.

Today, marketers face many unchartered territories as new channels and platforms enter the market at a record rate, and smartphone usage grows exponentially. All the modern comfort has led to an alarming decrease in the human’s attention span.

A recent research from the Technical University of Denmark shows that our collective global attention span is narrowing down to only 8 seconds due to all the amount of information presented. So much demand for attention that now we can solely focus on each new “trend” in a few seconds.

Imagine the attention span consumers have for your business, your website, your social media, and even your products. To stay top of mind among consumers, it is essential for you to keep up with increasing your brand’s impressions, whether you like it or not.

“Marketing is a contest for people’s attention.”- Seth Godin said in his book “Purple Cow”.

I recommend using marketing to engage and acquire customers’ attention through non-invasive means, such as social media, for modern brands.

The concept of attention in marketing is not new either, dating back to more than a century ago with the introduction of the AIDA Model Elias St. Elmo Lewis. This model explains four key stages of a marketing funnel - Attention, Interest, Desire, Action - which every customer has to pass through before purchasing.

As you can see, getting consumers attention is the first step for any successful purchase. With that in mind, let’s get to the next section.

Prepare your approach

If your business is struggling to gain customer attention, then you need to revisit your system, pitch, and value. What do you think your business can do for people? What are your competitors offering? Think about your brand’s pitch, values, and what makes you unique in a saturated market.

Here are the steps for preparation before applying tactics into grabbing customers attention:

1. Develop unique value propositions

Often, the biggest problem a new company has is the lack of originality. There are millions of small to medium businesses in, and your business may find it hard to offer customers any unique benefits.

If you now create an eCommerce platform that is exactly the same or has no points to compete against a major competitor like Amazon. Your business will soon see flatlining, with no attention, not to mention purchase from consumers.

You can prevent this by ensuring that any business you want to launch comes with a creative pitch. You need to develop unique value propositions for your business, which are presented by answering questions like:

• How can your business help buyers achieve their goals?

• How can your company do so in a way that competitors can’t?

• How can your products offer a new experience?

You must have a clear vision of your unique value propositions - not a set of vague promises that anyone can read and forget about in the next day.

2. Figure out your right customers

One of the greatest mistakes to make as an entrepreneur is trying to design a company that’s too general. You need to identify your specific market niche that you’re going to sell to, then identify your group of target customers with shared interests and needs.

For example, a general store in a small but popular coastal town should know that its customers are often locals, fishers, and many tourists. From that knowledge, its focus should be on shoppers who want to go out to the sea, which means it needs to ensure that its products aren’t a standard collection of general goods like in the city. It needs to have more customized products like fishing lines, bates, or sunscreen.

Your business, on the same note, needs clear target customers to chase. Identify the people you want to market your products towards and design your offers, services, and marketing campaigns towards that target.

3. Focus on creating customer connections

When you try to reach out to more customers, it’s vital to humanize your business. You can do this by encouraging employees to have genuine conversations with customers and or by creating marketing campaigns that create a human image for your business.

When you talk to customers on any channel, you should inquire about customers’ personal life, interests, hobbies, and needs. By creating a positive emotional connection between your brand and customer, you can foster brand loyalty that helps your company succeed in the long term.

Brand loyalty is the reason big companies can have consistent sales and word-of-mouth effects, which are both helpful for growing a business and improving a brand’s reputation.

4. Identify your customers needs

Last but not least, your business should strive to form a connection and gauge how your brand may be able to fulfill customers’ needs in their personal lives.

Both on a small scale and on a large scale, you need to create an emotional connection with your customers to learn more about what your brand can do to satisfy their needs. An open line of communication can show customers that your company is responsive and can satisfy customer needs.

When you run a business, ultimately, you are trying to serve customers.

Which means that whenever you come up with a strategy to market your store, upgrade your product, or reach out to consumers, you need to keep in mind at all times this question: What is your business’ offer that people need and won’t be able to find elsewhere?

Once you can answer this question, your business will attract great attention.

Best tactics to get customers attention

Now, let’s see how you can use different tactics of marketing to get the most out of your budget and attract customers attention. The result will be an attractive brand that can stand out on the market with its own unique selling points, making sales without invading consumers personal space.

Position your brand as an expert

To acquire potential customers’ attention, you should try to position yourself as a credible and trustworthy source of information in the industry.

This can be a hard task, and you may need some time to establish your brand in such a position. But once you do, consumers will gladly buy from your brand and recommend your products or services.

Here are some things you can do to push your brand forward as an expert in the industry:

• Have a blog, then write about evergreen or fresh topics with unique insights into your industry. Focus your content on exploring the customers’ pain points and offer them relevant solutions that work. For example, Our AVADA blog provides the best in-depth knowledge for entrepreneurs and drives us hundreds of thousands of visitors every month.

• Take part in podcasts or webinars, where industry experts often gather to share their knowledge.

• Write guest posts for relevant websites and blogs in the industry.

• Engage with your customers in specialized or local groups.

• Or collaborate with industry experts and KOLs.

Just make sure that each content you create for your prospects can add value to their lives and is worth consuming; you will surely attract customers’ attention.

Earn referrals and recommendations

You’ve probably heard this many times: It costs much more to gain a new buyer than to keep an existing one.

Without a doubt, your current customer base holds more than just monetary value for your brand. They can be brand ambassadors and promote your products in their own private circles and keep word of mouth about your company spreading far more than your expectation.

Word-of-mouth recommendation is one of the most effective ways to attract customers attention and ultimately more customers. Most consumers highly value the product recommendations from their families, friends, or colleagues, while 74% find word-of-mouth a key influencing factor in making purchasing decisions.

To leverage word-of-mouth marketing and spread your business’ reputation, try some of the following techniques:

• Ask your customers to leave testimonials or reviews on your website or other digital channels. Set up an automated and convenient process for them to leave reviews through emails with AVADA Email Marketing.

• Start a referral program and reward your loyal customers for their engagement.

• Connect with thought leaders in your industry or relevant KOLs - who can speak good words about your company and be social proof for your company’s trustworthiness.

• Offer discounts and giveaways so your customers and followers can engage with such content on social media channels then spread the words about it with their networks.

• Engage with your customers to create original content and post it on your media channels.

Create events

Whether in-person or virtual, events can help you reach everyone you know, and the impact to draw intention is undoubtable. With the current situation of a pandemic, many companies have turned to virtual events to connect with their audience and provide a meaningful experience.

Before that, many small businesses have leveraged this practice and hold public events so that they can communicate directly to potential customers. You can use these events to get email addresses and other contact details of people interested in your company or have them sign-up for discounts and freebies. You can also create a hashtag for event visitors to share about your event on social media and get them further involved with your business.

Be visible in your local area

Nearly half of all Google searches are local, and many of these searches make consumers call or visit a local store within the very same day. If your goal is to attract more customer attention, your website needs to have high ranks within those searches, meaning doing a local SEO.

Properly optimized, and your website will be able to get top ratings in local searches. Through relevant keywords, NAP details, anchors, and relevant links to trustworthy sites, can you do this? Your site should also send good behavioral signals to Google, with a positive click-through rate, check-ins, etc.

To appear in local searches even better, sign up for a Google My Business listing. You need to make sure your NAP and other business information that your customers find useful and relevant are provided. This means writing info about working hours, address, website, etc. You can also use GMB to share news, events, discounts, special offers, and more.

Other things that influence your search result’s position are, for example, the number of reviews, diversity in testimonials, and social signals, social media engagement, etc. Optimizing these and you will see your company appear on top of local searches.

Use your data

To attract customer attention, you must have a very clear idea of who your target audiences are so that you can target them with your marketing campaigns.

You can’t expect to have good results if you have a general idea about your target audience, defining them as millennials or women in their twenties. A clear vision of your ideal consumer will help your marketing message get specific, and your campaigns will resonate with your target even more.

Use the data you have on your customers to create a detailed buyer persona, and if possible, several of them. This way, you can segment your campaigns according to groups’ preferences.

Data you need to collect are:

• Personal information: Age, gender, and location of your customers are a must-know, as well as their income, family status, and education.

• Values and Goals: What they value the most in their lives + Their professional and private goals.

• Job: What type of industry do they work in? What is the position they have in the company?

• Pain points: The challenges your customers are facing.

• Influences and sources: The place your customers search for information, the people they trust, the kind of content they consume.

When you can answer the above questions, you will be able to produce content and campaigns that fit your prospects’ needs, thereby significantly raising the odds of converting them into customers.

Partner with like-minded businesses

When you form a partnership with like-minded businesses, you open up more opportunities to attract customers’ attention. Note that like-minded businesses are far different from competitors.

For example, a local men’s suit store can collaborate with a local dry cleaning store, and together they can market each other’s services to their customers. They can create campaigns like offering promotional discounts, coupons, and general support to each of their respective customers. They can also take the partnership to another level by hosting an in-store event together, increasing loyalty among both businesses, and sharing email lists for the other company to help promote the partner.

The key is to identify the suitable partners for your unique business that wants to target the same target market you do, then both partners work together to gain more visibility and sales among each other’s customers.

If you want to maximize your efforts, aim to create a long-term partnership rather than a one-time experience. This can help both partners in gaining customer attention, sales, and more success.

Get more involved with your community

Facebook groups, local networking groups, official organizations, and countless other like-minded groups offer a terrific way to connect with business owners, community leaders, and potential customers.

Your involvement can be many things: from attending networking events to hosting meetings in your store, or volunteering based on your expertise to give back to the community. All of these involvement efforts will not only connect you to new potential customers and business advocates but also help your brand become a familiar face for your community.

This knowledge of the community is powerful if you apply it to your marketing campaign and overall business strategy, particularly if your business depends primarily on the customers’ niche interests.

Best examples to succeed with getting customers attention

All the tactics in the world would not prepare you for the real world, so here are some examples made by other brands on how they can draw customers attention.

Snackable content

Although your audiences are exposed to a lot of information, they still enjoy learning new pieces through content that comes in consumable pieces, like snackable content.

The type of content paves the way for your company to educate your audience without wasting much of their time. Have a look at the example of a LinkedIn email above.

The idea for snackable content is simple with three steps:

• Identify the potential customers’ problems and challenges

• Become a reliable source of expert information

• Create engaging content in bite-size

You can create a series of relevant emails to deliver your content in many parts and make your emails, even more, engaging with an app like AVADA Email Marketing.

For example, a newsletter series on using a product can be delivered to subscribers every weekday.

Viral content marketing

Going viral is not an exact science that any brand can achieve, but it can be done. Viral campaigns are a fantastic way to attract mass attention and become popular because they touch your audience on a deeper level – making them laugh or tear up thinking of their own lives.

For example, the video above from Dollar Shave Club helped them gain 27 million views and skyrocket an unprecedented success as a new razor company.

Think about how your viral content idea can be addictive and unique, then surprise your audience with a completely different story. Even if your content doesn’t go viral, it is a good idea to keep trying and renew yourself as a brand. Who knows, you may end up with some game-changing campaigns.

Trend or current news

An industry trend or a hot news has a large group of readymade audiences because people are talking about the topic in real life, whether on social media or real life. When you ride on the trend or current news, it is called newsjacking.

If you take advantage of a hot subject to create your blog posts, surveys, or a video and an infographic in order to join the conversation in your own unique way, you are able to get instant attention from customers.

Such content is not just highly shareable, but also naturally attracts media attention. If you know what’s going on in your industry and the world, then it won’t be hard to create relevant and valuable content that helps you reach out to a broader group of audience.

Podcast

Podcast is a hot type of content right now, and it can be both educational and fun to listen to. This type of content is a popular option for people consuming content on the go. In 2021, 55% of people in America have listened to a podcast of some types.

Podcasting is an excellent way to build a new audience for your brand and get noticed. But you will need to do some kind of preparation – name, format, topic, etc. – before you can host a successful online podcast.

For example, you can listen to the Marketing School podcast by Neil Patel and Eric Siu - which offers bite-sized episodes (5-10 minutes each episode) about digital marketing tips, tactics, and trends.

Interactive content

Most marketers agree that interactive content can grab attention more effectively than static content.

You can use different types of interactive content – such as games, contests, quizzes, interactive calculators, and assessments – to create a two-way conversation with the target customers. This helps create a much-needed fun element in your brand’s content.

Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin have started offering many native features to create simple interactive content tools like quizzes and polls. Also, you can use these platforms’ stories to get the audience to take notice and interact. See how Netflix uses Instagram’s stories to create pop quizzes and interact with movie watchers.

Final words

In nowaday’s information age, there is no doubt that grabbing and holding an audience’s attention is essential for any brand on the market. One of the easiest ways to do this is by standing out in the crowd by making your brand messages fresh, exciting, and relevant.

Don’t forget to develop your brand’s unique core values because you’re not just looking for any kind of attention; you want to get positive reactions from the target customers who really matter to your business.

What do you think? Have you figured out how to get customers attention and promote your brand? Share your ideas in the comment section!