Every creator operates at the mercy of the audience. To produce content that gets the eyes, you need to have a target audience and understand that target audience. To understand that audience, you need to know what they value, what gets their attention, and what keeps it.
Attention, in and of itself, is at the very foundation of success in the sports media industry. You need to first get the attention of your audience members, and then – in what may be an even more challenging endeavor – you have to keep that attention.
The longer you can keep your audience’s attention and extend their stays on your platform, the more growth potential you have – both for brand development and revenue generation. It’s easy to summarize, but it’s much more difficult to accomplish. Here are some tips to move in the right direction.
5 Ways to Keep Your Audience’s Attention on Your Platform
1) Offer Promises and Sequentially Deliver on Them
The best way to think about audience attention is to parse the topic all the way down to its foundation. How do you get and keep an audience member’s attention? There are, of course, nuances – especially with the rise of social media. But when we talk about a target audience that has an inherent interest in your subject matter, attention comes from their desire for value.
Will this content answer the question I have, or give me the insight I seek, or guide me to a conversation I can immerse myself in? Will this be worth the time and effort I spend to consume it? These questions are just a few examples of how an audience member might prospect for value. Thus, to answer an audience’s value query, you must make promises of value relevant to their interest, and deliver on those promises.
How you deliver ultimately depends on your brand vision and your mediums of content production. But if you can make clear that there is a value offering present, that goes a long way toward establishing a level of audience attention.
2) Use Visual Stimulation to Reinforce Attention Demand
As mentioned above, while the value offering and delivery itself is an important part of obtaining an audience’s attention, there are nuances – especially in a sports media industry that is heavily reliant on social media, and where marketing is becoming much more important.
To get an audience member’s active, conscious attention, promising and delivering on the value offering is a great way to start. To subconsciously earn the attention of potential audience members, you can rely on sensory inputs: Specifically visual stimulation.
A great many resources fall in the category of visual stimulation: Advertisements, thumbnails, graphics, video clips, etc. If you can blend eye-catching visual aids with attention-grabbing value offerings within the content itself, it’s another big step toward ensnaring an audience.
3) Give the Audience Pathways to Interact and Engage
There are many ways to supplement the attention demands of your content, but this might be the most important. If you can give your audience pathways to interact and engage with your content, you can open a door to new levels of growth.
Based on your brand offerings and the mediums through which you produce, how you spur audience interaction and engagement will be different. If your brand exists primarily through written content, you might input a comments system or shepherd a community. If you’re a video producer, you might have live chats or comments sections. If you have tools on your site, you can market those to audience members who seek interactive exercises.
Answering the audience’s call for value is the first step. And in this day and age, it’s becoming more and more common that audience members want to be a part of something. They want to be included and immersed. By giving them pathways to interact and engage, you help with that.
4) Create an Ecosystem of Internal Links
Beyond simple value offerings and interaction pathways, another way to keep your audience’s attention is to create easy diversions to related content.
If an audience member has clicked on an article or a video, there’s a level of interest already present. By infusing links to related content, you can capitalize on that interest and enhance your value offering.
5) Promise Continued Offerings of Value
You can measure audience attention across varied intervals of time. The task of catching an audience member’s attention occurs over a very short time span. The task of keeping an audience member’s attention through an independent piece of content varies based on medium.
To keep an audience member for the long haul, however, you need to expand your promises of value beyond individual works. Many brands and platforms speak for themselves in this area, having long track records of content production to go off of. Even so, being consistent, having ongoing series, and using “watch next” or “read next” features can let the audience know there’s more to come.
Playbook
- Offer promises of value and sequentially deliver
- Use visual stimulation
- Help the audience interact and engage
- Create an internal link ecosystem
- Extend value offerings into the future
