7 Tips for Ecommerce Marketing Success: Tip 5

Captivate your audience.

You must get creative with your marketing.

You’re probably thinking “Well…duh.” Marketing is largely about being “creative,” after all.

But now-a-days, you have to take is a step further.

Marketing is no longer about getting your message in front of your target audience. Marketing is about engaging with your audience, providing relevant and interesting content that your audience actually wants to see.

It used to be much easier to get your audience to listen to you…or at least to see you. People were more individually focused in decades past. Watching the commercials on TV was part of the experience. Sure, you could mute the commercials with a little effort, but what else was there to do? With no pause or rewind options, you could not go far, and with no smart-devices to turn to, captivating your audience was easy (relatively speaking, of course).

Today, it is not so easy.

If your commercial or advertisement is boring, your audience will simply look away. There are endless alternatives of where to turn your attention. Traditional TV commercials largely go unwatched as DVRs have become common place, and forced commercial experiences during steaming video aren’t much better. Visitors simply browse to another tab or turn to their smart-phones until the 60 seconds of commercial torture are over.

On the web, the case is just as bad. Web browsers have become so accustomed to being bombarded constantly by advertising messages, they simply ignore anything that isn’t extremely relevant to them in that very moment.

How do we as marketers get our audience to pay attention?

By approaching marketing differently.

Marketing = Entertainment

Marketing is no longer only about your product and your message. Marketing must be entertaining…entertaining enough that your audience chooses to pay attention despite all of their other entertainment options at any given time.

And don’t forget that people have a short attention span. Always think about how you can captivate your audience in the first few seconds no matter what the channel, or you will lose them.

This is extremely difficult, but to stand out amongst the crowd, it is a must.

Change your perspective. Your marketing must be as much entertainment as it is sales. The goal is to make your marketing something your audience actually wants to watch. It cannot be purely self-serving.

Take a look at Dollar Shave Club or Poo Pouri (potty humour aside)…

These companies main advertising channel is YouTube. They have developed highly entertaining commercials that people are watching just for fun.

But once you watch, you’ll see that these commercials are not only highly entertaining… they are highly convincing.

With over 20 and 34 million views each respectively, these YouTube videos are incredibly effective in getting these brands in front of their audience, entertaining them, and ultimately capturing them as customers.

These companies are successful largely due to their innovative and entertaining marketing creative. So take a page out of their books and try to find a way to combine entertainment with your marketing.

Don’t miss tip #6 coming up tomorrow!