Consumers have so many messages launched at them every minute of every day that it can be challenging to catch customers’ attention and land sales. Making a few minor adjustments can result in more conversions and higher revenue.
How Do You Grab Customers’ Attention for Sales?
The Small Business Administration estimates there are 33.2 million small businesses in the country. Even though you aren’t competing directly with every other company, there is a limited amount of attention available. You have to stand out in a noisy world filled with ads, promotions and chatter.
No matter what industry you’re in, you should know where the competition stands so you can do something unexpected and more suited to your audience’s expectations. Engaging users means you draw their focus away from everything else going on in their lives and keep it on you. If you want to catch your customers’ attention, try these steps:
1. Know Your UVP
What is your unique value proposition (UVP)? What do you offer customers that no one else in your industry does? For example, you might have the best price, top-notch customer service or the highest quality products.
The key to finding a UVP you can use to engage new customers is understanding what they care about. Most users don’t care that you have great company culture. They want to know that because you have a great company culture every employee they encounter will go out of their way to help you out.
2. Understand Human Attention Spans
Humans can’t focus but a few seconds at a time. In 2000, the average attention span was 12 seconds. Today, it is a mere eight seconds or so. Knowing you must grab people’s attention fast and keep it as long as possible changes what you put above the fold on a website page, how you lead with an elevator pitch and even the way you format an article.
For example, if you write a piece of content, most readers will skim over it. Are you covering the main points in the subheadings? Can someone skim over your text and get the gist of what you’re saying?
Knowing you have to grab them as quickly as possible and then keep them engaged changes the way you design your sites and the entire buyer’s journey.
3. Create Buyer Personas
The more you understand your customers, the better you’ll relate to them. Create a buyer persona for each customer type. Give the persona a name, personality and even an image. Once you have an idea of the personas, you can write articles to a specific audience, segment your mailing lists and even come up with offers those buyers are most interested in.
Build strong buyer personas so you have an idea of their pain points and why they turn to a business like yours in the first place. Then, build out a UVP that shows why you’re the best choice to solve their issues.
4. Speed Things Up
How fast does your website load? Will users hang around and white. In a survey of marketers, researchers found around 85% didn’t meet Google’s basic standards for loading speed, taking more than five seconds to load.
Every second that passes loses you more potential customers. People bounce away in frustration, particularly on mobile devices, where load times can be even slower. Invest in the best server you can afford. Ask your designer to reduce anything slowing down the page loading. Track results and see what a difference it makes in landing sales.
While you can’t control everything about page load times, you can fix the issues you have control of, such as how many scripts you use on a page and how compressed images load.
5. Become an Expert
When you have a problem, do you want a professional to solve it or someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing? People need to trust you and know you’re the top authority in your industry. Establish your expertise by answering questions, covering solutions for pain points and sharing your knowledge in various forums.
The more knowledgeable you are, the more likely customers will rely on your brand for answers to their problems. If you or your staff lack knowledge in any areas, brush up on them and gain expertise so your business stands out as being the top authority on those topics as well.
Try New Tactics
Be authentic and honest but don’t be afraid to try new ideas and ways to land new customers. If something doesn’t work to convert leads to customers, switch up what you’re doing and look at how your competitors close sales. Catching customers’ attention and closing the sale may look like different things for different audience segments. Pay attention to what works best and replace what doesn’t until you hit the right combination.
