Grab, Retain & Multiply Customer Attention

I want you to do a little exercise if you are already in business or want to be in business and think about the one who’s going to buy your products and services. Who is it? That’s going to give you that attention. I want you to do this exercise. Think about who your ideal customer is. Think about what happens to them in their day. What happens when they wake up? Is that the time that they’re thinking about you? Well, chances are, they are not. They wake up and maybe go to the bathroom. They may take the phone with them. They do their Facebooking, check WhatsApp and email.

They come out. They want to go for breakfast. They have their kids to drop to school or something. Throughout the time, they’re probably listening to an audiobook or playing music in the car while they’re going to the office. In the office, they get caught up with colleagues, etc. They do their work and lunch. They take a break, etc. They do millions of different things during the day without ever thinking about you or your product. Many of them will probably do if they have pain that is kind of acute enough. Pain that is loud enough.

We’ll go there in just about a second. 99.9% of the time, customers are so busy going through life that they will never have an opportunity to think about you or think about your product. A lot of people think that because they have such an exceptional product. The moment you tell the customer about your product, the moment they see your ad, they will be drawn to buy your products.

But the answer is no. That doesn’t happen like that. Because today not only are you fighting with a hundred of the old world distraction, which is all of the traffic and dropping the kids to school and gossip at the office. And although those used to exist, even a hundred years back. But you’re battling with the host of New World distractions as well. You have constant WhatsApp, emailing, and Facebooking going on. And then the emails from the office, work from home, zoom calls, and things like that.

People don’t even pay attention to their own kids. They are just so busy in the smartphone. All of these things are commanding a customer’s attention 24/7. How do you stand out, how do you grab their attention?

That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Imagine that your customer is sitting on a train, and this train is going a hundred kilometers per hour. They look out of the window and see a little Banner, which is about your business. What are they going to do? Are they going to take the pain to stop the train? Would they get out off the train and visit you? Even if that Banner has a phone number, would they want to take the phone out and take down your number? The chances are zero. There’re hundreds of things passing by your customers’ eyes every day, and it is too much trouble to actually do something about it.

What would you need to do in order to not be that spec outside the window, among hundreds of different things happening outside the window? Be the guy who’s selling the tea inside the train. Does everybody on the train buy his tea? The answer is no. Everybody doesn’t, but he sure has a thousand times more chance to actually sell to that particular customer than being a spec outside the window.

Let me talk to you about how this process works in the mind of the customer. A person wrote it down in 1898. Before India gained independence, these American fellows were actually getting into the mind of the customers; re-engineering and figuring out how a customer used to think. What they did was, they said to imagine your sale/product at one hand. In order to get this above the ground, you’re going to have to have a few things.

  • A convinced customer

You have a committed customer, and this customer has gotten out of home because they have a pain that is painful enough that they say today they have to solve it. Your one committed customer by himself will not make your business viable. So assuming that you have enough committed customers at the other end to hold up the sale. That is how businesses used to work in the old times.

This thing is called placement-based demand. They would place themselves in a position where enough committed customers pass by every day. Even if they get 3-5 customers a day, their whole business becomes viable. That’s how they used to do business in the old days.

They will do things like put up an office in the middle of the town’s number one commercial area. Let’s say MG Road. The number one commercial area that would guarantee enough committed customers would pass by there. They shop every day and would make enough purchases so that the whole business becomes viable. However, this won’t work in today’s time because not only are you competing with other competitors, who may not be in the same similar product, but who have access to your customer’s money. So, what about the money that your customer has? Every person has a limited amount of money to spend in a month because they have a salary and a budget. If your product is important and exciting, you still compete with literally every other company that has access to that customer’s money even though they are selling something totally different from you. So what do you do? You need to figure out how to get more customers who may not be convinced that they need your product immediately and then have a predictable model of convincing them.

  • A customer who desires

Now you have a customer who doesn’t have pain, but they have a desire. Imagine you’re going to boot polish business. There are people who really like blue coat dresses. They have a desire that they should be the best-dressed person in the room. They have a desire that they should wear a nice suit. You see many people in India wear nice suits even though they may live in towns which are not so cold.

Why do they do that? Because they have a desire to look good. This is the kind of person who wouldn’t have pain. If you send them a message that says, using my Teflon shoe polish, your shoes will be spanking clean. Even ten-year-old shoes are going to look brand-new. Then they’re going to be more likely to get convinced by that message and make a purchase.

The only difference is that desire by itself is not directly convertible into a purchase. The message may hit the customer’s mind, and they might think about it once or twice, and then they may do some research around it.

  • A customer with merely an interest

Then you have customers who have merely an interest. They don’t have a desire. This is something that they think about once in a while. They only dress well when they’re going out for a party. Otherwise, they’re like, okay, I don’t care about it.

Now there’s a different message you’re going to give to them, which is if you go to parties and if you go out to weddings, how do you feel when you’re fully dressed? And at that time, you realize that your shoes are not polished for the last three months because you don’t like to wear them every day. You don’t want to dress well every day.

So how do you feel when you’re all dressed in nice clothes, you’re wearing your best clothes, probably in a lighter color, and then you can handle boot polish. Wouldn’t it be great if you could polish your shoes once and then literally forget about them? So this is something called interest. They merely have an interest because they’re not somebody who dresses well all the time.

  • A customer who’s nowhere around

Then you have customers who are nowhere around. But what you can do is you can grab their attention. They’re not going to buy immediately. They’re not going to buy in the next six months. Just throw out a message saying that you exist. The thing stays in their mind, and whenever they come across your brand, whenever they go to the mall and find your product on the Shelf, they might recall that they have seen this thing sometime. It’s like 1000 rupees or 500 rupees. Let’s get it.

Now you have this thing called attention, interest, desire, and commitment. This model was founded by an American guy in 1898. These guys were reverse-engineering the process in the customers’ minds before we got our independence from the British. So imagine what these guys were up to.

In the old-time, there were enough convinced customers that would pass by because there were not many brands. There were not a whole lot of options for people to buy those. Not a whole lot of activity going on in the economy because the economy was still growing. Today, the economy is glutted. Not only is the economy glutted, but it is oversupplied with literally everything. You’re oversupplied in this market because the internet has made it cheaper, more accessible, and more open to the average consumer. So for them, it’s just a huge shopping mall, and they’re not even sure what they want to shop for.

So what you got to do is you’re going to get out of this mentality of “I’m going to find enough number of convinced customers.” What if you don’t? You got to play by the rules, which say if you don’t find enough convinced customers daily to make your business viable. What are you going to do? You’re going to build a process that gets an interested customer to buy a product, a desirous customer to buy a product, and convinces a customer who has a pain that needs to be solved right now to buy a product.

Then you’re going to build something called databases of customers whose attention you’ve got. It doesn’t matter whether they wear shoes or not, whether they wear clothes or not. It doesn’t matter as long as they’re human and they are over 18 years old, or they have their own credit card, they have their own purchasing power. Even 12-year-olds today have purchasing power through their cell phones and all of that. You want to build these databases as big as possible, as wide as possible, as much as you can within the budgets that you have. All of this is a pay-to-play again. This attention is a pay-to-play game because you could be doing product demonstrations, shooting YouTube videos, building the best website in the world, but without traffic, which is without people actually watching that stuff. That thing is not going to connect.

If you want people to show up, you’re going to pay somebody to bring them over. So it’s whether you pay Google, Facebook, a newspaper vendor to use your pamphlet, you pay your telemarketing agency, or you pay an SMS marketing agency. Whatever it is, you can do it as much as your budget allows.

You want to build these huge databases of people who have seen you at least once because the next time they see you in a physical shopping mall or the internet; they’re going to drop down to one of these three: committed, interest, desire. Only when they see you a second time will they drop either to the interest, the desirous, or the committed stage. At that point, you need to have a process that actually brings them through all of these stages all the way to a purchase.

Today, if you’re not playing this game, one weight (commitment) alone is not enough to pull the other side (purchases). That is what marketing strategies are about. I mean, I didn’t invent it. The Americans invented it before the turn of the last century. So this is how it works.

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