When you read you begin with ABC. When you win clients you begin with…

…Attention.

OK, OK. It's not exactly Richard Rogers.

But it is accurate.

If you can't get the attention of your ideal clients then all the wonderful things you've got to say in your marketing count for nothing.

All those amazing ways you have of proving you're the one they should work with. All ignored. Because you couldn't get them to notice you.

It's one of the biggest causes of people feeling stuck and unable to progress. And not knowing which option to take because nothing seems to work.

And the problem is exacerbated, I think, by our obsession with tools and technology.

“Ah, I'll use Facebook Ads to get their attention”.

“Dammit, that didn't work. I'll try messaging them on Linkedin”.

“Last roll of the dice, I'll try calling them…”

But as I'm sure you know, it's not the tools you use that make the difference. It's how you use them.

And there's a science to getting and keeping someone's attention.

A fledgeling science admittedly. But there are some things we definitely know based on the study of perception and memory.

Importantly, there are three key steps to attention that you have to get right.

Ben Parr sums it up well in his book “Captivology” (definitely worth a read if you get the chance).

The first step is immediate attention.

This is the stuff controlled by our good old lizard brain and it largely works on autopilot. It's what makes you immediately turn to look when you hear a loud bang. Or pay more attention to things coloured blood-red than pale blue. Or hear your name across a crowded room.

The second step is short attention. This is where we focus on the things our immediate attention homed in on and we begin to actively process them. This goes on in our working memory and in order to conserve energy, our brain focuses on novelty and filters out things it thinks it already knows about.

Finally, the most important step. Long attention.

Immediate and short attention are the first and necessary steps in the process. But it's long attention that makes sure a potential client has you top of mind when they're ready to hire someone to help.

Long attention is based on value. Whether that’s the personal value of mutual enjoyment I talked about in terms of relationships last time. Or it's “hard” value in terms of “what's in it for me” that keeps them listening.

You've got to get all three steps working to succeed.

Not necessarily perfectly. You don't need to be brilliant at each one.

But you've got to have something for each step.

If you ended up on my email list from one of my Facebook Ads, for example, you might remember my ad probably stood out a bit and looked different because I amp up the contrast on images and make them look unnaturally bright and dark.

Then when you click the ad, you got offered my Value-Based Marketing Blueprint. A new idea you hopefully hadn't seen before.

And then, fingers crossed, you found my regular emails valuable.

So you kept paying attention.

Maybe not to every single one. But enough that if you want to improve your marketing or learn some new approaches to winning clients, I'll be there in your thought processes.

That's the way it works.

Get attention. Keep attention. Use it to win clients.

Do-re-mi.