Your customers are supposed to ignore you.
We’ve made that argument before, and we weren’t being glib. There’s a good reason for it. To understand why people ignore marketing, it helps to understand that ignoring things is one of the ways our brains function normally.
At any given moment, there’s far more information around us than we can—or should—pay attention to. Our brains have to prioritize what matters and filter out what doesn’t. Research on selective attention shows that this filtering helps protect our limited working memory from irrelevant information. Without it, concentrating on anything would be considerably harder.
Ignoring most of what comes at us isn’t a flaw in the system. It’s part of what keeps the system working. It’s frustrating for marketers, but it’s our shared reality. We can complain about how hard it is to get someone’s attention, or we can respect the challenge and get better at earning it.
Your biggest competitor probably isn’t who you think it is
For decades, we’ve asked audiences a question when talking about marketing amid information overload: Who’s your biggest competitor?
As people start calling out company names, we start showing images of all the other things competing for their customers’ attention: phones, email, meetings, news, family, traffic, entertainment, work, and everything else that fills a normal day.
This is your competition.
Of course, the other companies in your category matter. But at the moment you’re trying to get someone to notice an ad, open an email, or read a webpage, your biggest competition is everything else demanding that person’s attention—probably not your competitor’s trade ad.
That’s why one of Outmark’s core values is Respect. Respect the client and one another, but also respect the challenge. Your customer isn’t sitting around waiting for your next email in your nurture sequence, or looking for your ad in the stadium. They have work to finish, problems to solve, people who need them, and more information coming at them than they could possibly process. Attention is not something marketers are entitled to. We have to earn it.
Familiar things are easier to filter out
Our brains don’t just filter information in the moment. They also learn from repeated experience. One example is called habituation. Imagine working in an office with a steady hum from the HVAC system. After a while, you barely notice it. But if the hum suddenly turns into a horrible grinding noise, you probably will. Habituation allows the familiar and inconsequential to recede so changes that might matter have a better chance of getting our attention.
Now think about a trade show. Three booths sit next to each other, with different companies, logos, and colors, yet every one promises some version of “Innovative Solutions.” Or visit a few websites in the same industry. One company is committed to quality, service, and customer satisfaction. Another offers a seamless experience. The next is your trusted partner. The companies themselves may be quite different, but when their marketing becomes interchangeable, familiar business buzzwords become easy to filter out.
We’ve all seen this before. If nothing in the message connects with something that matters to them, filtering it out is a perfectly reasonable response. This is one reason marketing that begins with the competition so often becomes easy to ignore. We see what everyone else is saying and doing, then produce our own version. The result may appear entirely appropriate for the category, yet give the customer little reason to pay attention.
Repetition can’t make an irrelevant message matter
Marketing has an understandable response when people aren’t paying attention: do more. Run the ad again, send another email, add another touch, or increase the frequency.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with repetition. Frequency helps people encounter us, recognize us, and remember us. Familiarity can be extremely valuable when the thing becoming familiar is something that matters. But repetition and relevance do different jobs.
Repetition can help a relevant message become familiar. It can’t make an irrelevant message matter. The difference gets lost surprisingly often. If an audience isn’t responding, the answer may be more exposure. But it may also be that we haven’t given them anything worth noticing yet. Increasing the number of interruptions doesn’t solve that problem. It just gives people more opportunities to ignore us.
We can’t overpower the brain’s filtering system with more irrelevance, and we shouldn’t try. We need to respect the filter.
Relevance starts before we write the ad
“Be more relevant” isn’t particularly useful marketing advice. The harder question is how.
It starts further upstream, by understanding what is happening in the customer’s world before deciding what we want to say to them. What are they trying to accomplish? What keeps getting in the way? What are they worried about? What have they already tried? What would a better outcome actually look like to them?
Those answers can come from formal research, but they don’t have to. Talk to customers, listen to sales calls, read reviews, ask customer service what people complain about, and pay attention to the questions prospects keep asking. Look at the language customers use rather than assuming they use ours.
Then get specific. “Innovative Solutions” could be for anyone, which means it doesn’t give anyone much reason to think this is for me. A message describing a problem someone has been wrestling with for six months is different. So is an image that looks unmistakably like their environment, a headline that names a frustration they recognize immediately, or an example that makes them think, Yep. That’s exactly what happens here.
That moment of recognition matters. Instead of asking someone to interrupt what they’re doing to figure out why our marketing might be relevant, we’ve done more of that work for them.
Don’t make the customer work to see why you matter
Understanding the customer doesn’t help if we bury what matters underneath everything we want to say about ourselves.
Good marketing makes the important thing easier to see. Words matter, but so do the image, design, hierarchy, context, and overall experience. People don’t encounter a headline in isolation and then patiently work through our reasoning. They experience the communication as a whole, often while doing something else. Clarity, specificity, and restraint all help the customer recognize more quickly that something may be relevant to them.
We should also be careful not to mistake attention-getting for relevance. We can surprise someone, annoy them, make something flash, manufacture outrage, or write a headline they can’t resist clicking. We may have successfully interrupted the filter, but that doesn’t mean we’ve earned anything beyond the interruption.
The better opportunity is to understand the customer well enough that something in our marketing deserves a little more of their attention. People ignoring marketing isn’t evidence that attention is broken. It’s evidence that attention is doing its job. That makes marketing harder, but it also makes the assignment clearer.
Our job isn’t to defeat the filter. It’s to understand the customer well enough to give them something worth letting through.
