Capturing Your Target Audience's Attention!

By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer

I learned something significant this past week, synchronized swimming is an Olympic event and has been since 1984. Where have I been and how was I unaware of that?

While at the gym with no less than 30 television monitors positioned everywhere, it was the Olympic synchronized swimming that caught my attention.

I was mesmerized as a group of young women launched one of their teammates thirty feet in the air with their legs while submerged upside down in the water. The flier did a double half pike and safely returned to their waiting arms. Wow! The only thing that could have made it better is if they had started their routine with a haka dance before jumping into the pool.

It got my attention! And this got me thinking about how much effort B2B marketers put into capturing the attention of their target audiences. You have only several seconds  before they move on to something else. What can you do about it?

Your organization likely publishes a newsletter. Perhaps it is weekly or even daily that goes out to a database of, I’m guessing, mostly disengaged readers. And let’s be honest with ourselves, it’s been filled with the same old, tired, executive-approved messaging for as long as you can remember. This is a great place to experiment with attention-getting messages.

You can very easily add some images and create cool subject lines. And I encourage you to do that.

But in the complex B2B solution-provider space you must do better than that and here are two ideas.

• Project that you know your customer’s customer and a great way to do that is with an image. I’ll use the B2B biopharmaceutical space as an example. If you’re a contract development and manufacturing or a clinical research organization, your customer is seeking to deliver a drug therapy to a patient. Why not feature a patient in your next email newsletter?
• Tell your customer about something they don’t know. Again, if you are in the B2B space, you likely solve some common problems that your customers have. And a good number of those customers aren’t aware they have those problems. Let them know about it and introduce it in the subject line of your email, whether it is a newsletter or it’s from a salesperson trying to build trust with a prospect. Make sure to quantify the cost of the problem for your prospect, back it up with credible data, and let them know you have a solution. 

Try these tactics for a while and I guarantee your target audience engagement will increase.