Why should companies calculate attention?
Summary
We have entered what many experts call the attention economy for some years now. Because of its scarcity, attention has become a real currency used, to date, among companies and their audiences. Attention allows brands to generate revenue, so it is crucial to understand why they should measure it.
Key Points
- 20% percent of users who stay on content for more than three seconds make purchases.
- Active attention is what companies want to achieve
- Engagement can be higher if the content is highly emotional.
Understanding the importance of attention
We live in an almost entirely digitized world. Every company, brand, or person communicates online by sharing content every day to attract attention and convert the target audience to purchase their product or service.
That has made attention a scarce commodity, so much that it has become a real currency of exchange between people and companies. Thus, as these events unfolded, the era of the attention economy was born.
Many companies try to capture their audience’s attention, but very few know how to calculate and use attention to their advantage.
Brands that know how to get accurate attention data have numerous benefits over their competitors. Some of these are:
- The generation of more revenue from their audience;
- A better understanding of their target audience so they can use this knowledge to optimize their marketing strategy;
- And the creation of more value for their customers. Allowing them to create relevant content that their audience is willing to consume instead of just publishing random posts hoping these will get noticed.
Calculate Attention
Because we live in a data-driven world, and attention is one of them, more and more companies should invest in tools that can return reliable metrics on attentional audience levels.
By measuring attention, you can understand how to improve the content of a marketing campaign. That will enable companies to spend less on budget and increase conversion and sales rates.
A Nielsen study shows this by stating that 20% of users who stay on content for more than three seconds make purchases.
For content to generate a profit, companies must measure how much time their audiences spend on it. In fact, over the years, several ways of measuring user attention have developed.
The most famous examples of tracking attention are heat maps created by mouse movement over different parts of the screen, scroll tracking, or eye tracking.
These methods, while the most popular, are not the most effective. For example, through scroll tracking, one cannot know whether the user is reading content or has left the device on standby.
Therefore, it becomes difficult to distinguish between active and passive attention through these methods.
Active attention is when users consciously pay attention to something, and it is what companies need to understand how the target audience interacts with marketing campaigns.
In contrast, we talk about passive, or involuntary, attention when the user is not aware of what they are looking at, so the content forces itself on our attention.
Both types of attention are essential because, for example, the content attracts the user in a passive attention phase. So the audience will devote their active attention only if the brand succeeds in capturing it.
GIF by SproutSocial
How to engage your audience more
Because of the multiple stimuli we are subjected to daily, attracting and holding people’s attention has become more complex. That is due to a process created by our mind called “Selective Attention“.
The brain will devote attention only to a particular stimulus that has been able to attract and keep our interest high.
However, there is a method to keep the attention of one’s audience high. Specifically, we talk about engaging the user on an emotional level.
Empathizing with one’s audience is crucial, so we decided to discuss it in a specific paper to help understand how to improve audience attention to one’s marketing campaign.