Data-driven marketers are obsessed with acquiring customers and converting sales. However, this is not the starting point. What is most important is getting the customers’ attention.

It is not the landing page.
It is not product pricing or the packaging.
It is attention.

However, attention has become both a currency and a battleground. Also called brand awareness, it is capturing your customers’ interest.

Unfortunately, the digital landscape is a double-edged sword. It allows you to reach your customers through different media channels, but it also means their attention span is at an all-time low. The competition is fierce; hence, capturing users’ attention is harder.

Users don’t want to see ads again, so they reject cookies to avoid retargeting and simply scroll past the company’s posts.

How do we gain customers’ attention?

Here’s what worked for me while managing paid media campaigns and digital marketing strategy in the last 5 years:

1. Create content your audience wants.
Create interesting content the audience truly wants. These can be articles, videos, and infographics. When I led the digital marketing strategy for AXA, we created multiple blog posts to teach our users about Insurance and Investment.

2. Design interesting Ads.
DigitalMarketer said an interesting ad stops the scroll while your customers are on any digital platform. This is your brand grabbing their attention. So, think scroll-stopping headlines, emotion-led copy, user-generated videos, testimonials, GIFs, etc.

3. Native advertising wins.
The ad should look natural, almost like it is not an ad. If a social media post does well organically, turn it into an ad. The customers have shown interest and use the content to find more audience with the guaranteed distribution of Meta & Google’s platform. Let the ad look organic to the target audience.

4. Retargeting is underrated.
Retargeting is severely underrated, yet it is such a critical lever in digital advertising. It is a kind reminder to your customers to continue or complete a buying journey. At AXA, I created retargeting campaigns based on the user’s interaction with our landing pages. I then created lookalike audiences and uploaded our contact list to the ad platforms. With this, we were able to recapture our audience’s attention and reduce drop-off rates.

5. Don’t force the CTA.
Although you need to grab the customers’ attention, be gentle with your call to attention. Don’t force the CTA, especially for top-of-the-funnel campaigns. You can start with soft CTAs like “Learn More” or “Explore”.

Grabbing attention is about being more relevant and more helpful, and ultimately providing solutions to the customers’ problems.

How do you grab customers’ attention for your brand?