Strategy+Design

I recently watched an excellent webinar from BtoB Online called “From Caveman to Customer: What the Evolution of Storytelling Means to Marketers”. (Featuring Lynn Randall and Laura Lear.) This presentation talked about how our brains have adapted to our use of technology and how that has changed the way we respond to storytelling. There were a few points that I found very interesting and wanted to share. Understanding these changes in the way we think and behave is important to making sure you are creating the right kind of content for your audience.

In any form of communication, if something doesn’t grab our attention in the first 9 seconds, we opt out and stop paying attention. That amount of time used to be a higher number, but now that we have become accustomed to having constant access to technology, our brains have adapted. We now expect to receive information much quicker than we used to. We have also become more reliant on technology and people around us to remember information for us. We don’t hang onto information for as long as we used to, because we have the ability to quickly look things up on the go. For this reason, people seem to have an easier time remembering stories rather than information presented as facts and figures.

Another interesting point that was mentioned in the presentation is how people’s brains respond to online relationships compared to relationships that have developed in person. Many people would probably guess that online relationships would be slower to develop and would not be as deep as relationships that have been forged in person. However, this is not the case. Studies have shown that online relationships actually progress more quickly and become deeper than many in-person relationships. The chemical reactions that occur in the brain during the course of these interactions are the same whether you are communicating online or in person.

So what does this all have to do with marketing? Well, it tells us that your online marketing efforts are capable of reaching people in the same way as a face-to-face interaction. Any conversations you have online with customers or potential customers hold just as much weight as they would if they were standing right in front of you. What this means is that you need to really focus on what goes into your content marketing strategy. In order to reach people and be memorable, you can’t just throw information at your audience – you need to tell a story. Whether this story is through the use of infographics, images, blog posts or however you choose to present it, it needs to capture people’s attention quickly and it needs to engage them. Present your online content in a similar way to how you would present it in person, and you will get a better reaction.