MindPower Marketing Tips; December 2007
Word Count 515; Reading Time 2 minutes

This month’s MindPower Marketing Tip looks at how we can win the attention of customers and prospects.

Before you can make a sale, you need someone’s attention. But that is becoming a very scarce resource.

Increasingly, to prosper in this environment, your marketing is going to require new strategies and a new mindset.

More on that in a moment…

First, here are six reasons why it’s now so hard to get attention:

• Paradox of choice: With so many different ways to solve our problems and satisfy our desires, it’s harder for people to decide what to buy – so selling is more difficult.
• Lack of focus: 24/7 connection makes endless demands on our attention.
• Advertising pollution: Marketing messages everywhere mean we begin to blank them all out.
• Technology advances: Continual innovation and new versions of everything drain our attention.
• Information overload: So much new information every day makes it hard to discern what’s important.
• Interruption overload: Constant interruptions from emails, instant messages, text messages and phone calls drain our ability to stay focused.

Getting noticed
So how do you get noticed and win trust in the age of attention deficit?

According to Rich Schefren in the Attention Age Doctrine (which identified the six reasons above), the secret is to build a name for yourself by becoming seen as an expert in a specific field – or his term is ‘maven’.

Download the Attention Age Doctrine free

To do that, you have to hang out where your customers and prospects hang out. These days that will probably be online at one or more of the following:

• Blogs and forums.
• Expert sites like Wikipedia.
• Broadcasting sites like YouTube.
• Networking sites like MySpace.
• Product review sites.
• Social bookmarking sites like Digg.

But succeeding in this environment will increasingly need a different kind of mindset.

People don’t trust marketers – they trust people like themselves: their peers. Hence the new term P2P or peer-to-peer marketing.

In this environment, you have to start by ‘joining the conversation’ – rather than overtly selling.

You then want to gradually start leading conversations in your chosen field of expertise. Before you can do that, according to Schefren, you have to be willing to give away great value to win attention.

That’s not just the traditional free report, newsletter or white paper.

Great value means something that produces “real, practical, quantifiable benefits in their lives.”

By doing that, you gradually build trust.

When people trust you, they will give you their attention.

When they grant you attention, you win influence.

Influence inevitably leads to action, which in business invariably means sales.

New marketing
We are, he says, on the verge of a new kind of marketing, which could be either a ‘gold rush’ or a disaster for each of us, depending on how well we adapt.

For more on getting noticed in the age of attention deficit, you can download Rich’s free report

What do you think are the challenges of marketing in the age of attention deficit? Why not post your own comments and suggestions here?

See you soon for another MindPower Marketing Tip.

In the meantime, for some holiday fun to lighten that serious message – check out these cartoons (or comics if you prefer) on the fun side of marketing online

P.S. Download The Attention Age Doctrine at www.MindPowerMarketing.com/attention