The Factory Blogger...

Attention spans aren't what they used to be. Some of you won't even get past the end of this sentence.

Intellectual heavyweight Nicholas Carr has just released his thoughts on the matter in his new book The Shallows - what the internet is doing to our brains.


Carr argues something we marketing types have known for a long time. People have short attention spans.

The very nature of how we use the internet means that we have a tendency to leap from article to article and only digest a very small proportion of what we read. In fact, a growing number of lecturers cite that many of their students can only concentrate on text for between 30 seconds a minute before becoming distracted.

Are you still reading? Good. So how does this affect the world of business?

It is more and more important to grab someone's attention with your sales and marketing literature. To do that you need to understand how and when people will take notice of your outbound communications.

If you want to get noticed in today's communication saturated world you need to keep your messages short and to the point. A fantastic tool for helping you do this is AIDA. This is short for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action and it is a rule that all marketing communications should follow to be successful.

Grab a readers Attention; if you do this correctly you should then hold their concentration long enough to stimulate some Interest in what you are trying to say. If you have done your targeting correctly, the recipient should then begin to realise they need your products or services (Desire might be too strong a word but it makes for a good acronym). All you need to do then is leave them with a clear instruction as to what Action they need to do next, call this number, fill in this form, take it to the counter etc etc.

So, as we all get more and more stupid it would seem it's going to become more and more of a skill to capture someone's attention. True to AIDA, if you want to know a bit more about this, give us a call on 0113 290 9244 (sorry, I couldn't resist that last bit).