Part of the reason for our fuzzy understanding of the length and quality of our potential customers’ engagement level is because it’s often so fragmented. For example, someone can scroll through Facebook, passing several ads while half-watching TV and talking to their partner. Even if this fictional person liked your social media ad, can we be sure they properly absorbed it?
Mike Follett – one of the founders of Lumen, a leading attention technology company – has suggested we can combine data to quantify how much money we need to spend to garner 1000 seconds of attention across various platforms.
By thinking of attention as something that can be traded or has a set value, businesses could develop a way of implementing measurable attention metrics more comprehensively. This would boost ROI for marketers while creating content that resonates and entertains audiences far more than it currently does.
Of course, there are multiple channels businesses could use to hook as many fish as possible. For example, while it’s relatively easy to see how long, on average, customers spend reading each blog post, Royal Mail stats show that 14% of addressed mail leads to conversations about its contents with another person, so print marketing could help boost your attention value outside the online bubble.
Once you understand the impression your content leaves on viewers and have the metrics to back it up, you can choose where and how to distribute it for maximum, cost-effective results. Now, that’s worth thinking about.
