It’s easy to be unsure about the route to take in your marketing because there are so many conflicting stories about people, especially the “Gen-Zs” having attention spans that are comparable to that of a goldfish.
According to the Collins Dictionary, Generation Z or Gen Zs as they are popularly called are members of the generation of people born between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s who are seen as confident users of new technology.
Numerous marketing issues are brought on by this ambiguity of short attention span. This fallacy has recently fuelled the trend of short content, in which marketers produce quick-to-digest chunks of content with click-bait headlines to reduce reading time. The issue is that when relying solely on short content, audience retention, and content quality often suffer. In-depth, engaging experiences are abandoned in favour of seeking immediate success.
Luckily, there’s more to measuring it than it may seem, but before knowing how to measure it, let’s take a look at what “attention marketing” is, and why it is important to businesses today.
The primary objective of attention marketing is to capture and hold your audience’s through efficient but non-intrusive advertising, placing it above all other criteria. The goal of all marketing teams is to capture the audience’s attention.
Not completely ruling out the “goldfish” attention span myth that claims humans now have an eight-second attention span which is shorter than a goldfish’s nine-second span. The goldfish attention span myth has one significant counter-argument to contend with: “binge-watching”, “binge-reading”, and “binge-listening”.
The Covid-19 era brought about the normalcy of “bingeing” which has been fully integrated into today’s culture. According to a Netflix survey, 61 percent of subscribers engaged in binge-watching regularly, watching two to six episodes of the same production at a time. The results further showed that most preferred this style of view over one episode at a time. This benchmark was highlighted through the ‘Stranger Things’ release, which saw about 361,000 people watch the entire second season upon its release.
We are all aware that we cannot binge-watch indefinitely, which is why Netflix periodically asks viewers if they are still watching. once a substantial number of episodes have automatically started. It turns out that attention span is more intricate than it initially appears to be.
Researchers found that rather than being a single process, attention is actually a collection of smaller processes that are engaged in various settings, such that one’s attention is either sustained, selective, or divided.
Sustained attention is simply the ability to focus on one activity for a long period of time. It is the type of attention you might have in business meetings, exams, or while watching a movie.
Selective attention is the ability to focus on one thing in particular while there are many other distractions around. This is how we’re able to focus on a conversation with a friend at a busy train station, and how we can hit our targets while working from home regardless of the varying distractions.
Divided attention is the type of focus that takes place during multitasking. We’re able to split between two tasks at once. This means we can take notes during a meeting or write an email while cooking lunch. We struggle to keep divided attention up for long. We are usually less productive at both things when we try to do them simultaneously.
The duration of each varies from person to person and is appropriate in different situations. The crucial point for business owners to note is that people are more likely to retain knowledge and make fewer errors when they pay sustained and selective attention.
Even though the short content trend is on the rise today on social media, the attention it demands from audiences is divided, and for businesses, that sort of content risks getting sidetracked and missing important information.
As humans’ attention span isn’t depleting, but rather becoming demanding, and that is because things are being processed more intensively than usual, the dopamine effect — the hormone that makes people “feel good” — which is released every time they do something rewarding comes into play.
To further leverage this, interactivity during the reading process of a business web page can increase sustained attention and maintain high interest in longer texts.
Hence, the solution to increasing the “goldfish” span is producing immersive content of high quality. Personalisation, particularly at the beginning of a content piece signals relevance and encourages attention-selective behaviour, which in turn increases engagement.
