The Other ABM: The Rise Of Attention-Based Marketing
As a B2B marketer, nobody needs to tell you how hard it is to get a buyer’s attention. When you get someone to click and they give you a moment of their precious time, how do you hold on to their attention and convert it into meaningful engagement with your content?
If we’re being honest, we, as marketers, don’t do a particularly good job of sustaining buyer attention. We don’t make it easy for our prospects to self-educate. We send out an email with a link to a landing page and a form to get a single piece of content, and then we “rinse and repeat” next week with another single content offer – when our most engaged prospects are eager to learn more right now.
Attention-based marketing comes of age
Attention-based marketing – the other ABM – has arisen out of a recognition that your buyer’s attention is yours to lose. The idea is that, by shifting the balance from capturing to keeping attention, B2B marketers can better accommodate the educational needs of their most engaged prospects and identify the content bingeing behavior that is a telltale sign of real sales readiness. Engaged buyers research in concentrated bursts, engaging with a lot of content in a short period of time, and those who “binge” on content are 2.4X more likely to be sales accepted leads.
Watch and learn: How attention-based marketing works
In this short video interview with Demand Gen Report’s Andrew Gaffney, Elle Woulfe, VP of Marketing at LookBookHQ, shares the key takeaways from her FlipMyFunnel session with long-time LookBookHQ client Thomson Reuters Legal. Elle discusses how marketers can focus on retaining buyer attention and staying relevant to the finite list of accounts they are targeting as part of their named account strategy. She also explains how B2B marketers can measure how prospective buyers within a named account engage with content once they open it to determine which accounts are sales ready and which aren’t.
Ready for more?
If you want to take a deeper dive into attention-based marketing, view Elle’s full FlipMyFunnel session. You’ll learn why attention-based marketing is the next big thing for B2B marketers. You’ll also hear Kyle Johnson, Marketing Automation Lead at Thomson Reuters Legal, share how Thomson Reuters is removing friction from the buying process, increasing funnel velocity and gaining critical insight into content engagement by holding on to buyer attention.
Takeaway for planning season
As you plan for 2017, now’s the time to identify the MarTech investments that will really move the needle next year. Start thinking about your marketing tech stack in terms of which solutions focus on capturing buyer attention (getting clicks) versus holding on to it (getting people to actually spend time with your content), and how you can achieve better results by making a simple change to the way you serve up your B2B content after your busy buyer clicks
