Content Marketing, Thought leadership | 31 January 2018
From goldfish to horses: content marketing in 2018.
By Alexa Jones
Find out what varying attention spans mean for content creation and how goldfish and horses hold the key to success.
First up, sorry goldfish.
There’s so much wrong with that throwaway phrase “you’ve got the memory of a goldfish”.
It seems we’ve all been giving goldfish a bad rap, and they don’t have the incredibly short attention span we’ve been mocking them for all these years. In fact, it’s precisely because they’ve got such a capacity for memory that they’ve become a model system for studying the process of learning and memory formation. Amazingly, records of research with goldfish go all the way back to 1908.
It’s also similarly not true that the human attention span is shrinking and has reduced to a matter of seconds. Pop culture has got it wrong: instead of flitting from subject to subject, our attention span flexes to match the expectations of the task in hand.
Human attention spans match expectations.
It’s not a question of how long we can concentrate for, but determining what a particular task is demanding from us — and matching our attention to that. It’s all about what the individual brings to the situation and the expectations they have around that situation that decides how they’ll react.
We've got a wealth of information in our heads about what normally happens in given situations, which frames our expectations. And those expectations and our experience, directly mould what we see and how we process information at any given time. For example, if you attend a lecture, aware that it will last an hour, you are likely to then focus your attention on what the lecturer is saying for the whole duration.
Content creation — horses for courses.
When it comes to content, though, there are broad generational differences when it comes to preferred levels of attention. Recent research reveals a generational split. Millennials favour shorter, more visually-rich content, whereas older audiences prefer longer-form content. As a result, millennial B2B buyers go for videos and infographics when making decisions, while older buyers lean towards in-depth white papers.
It makes sense to think of content marketing as a case of horses for courses. It’s smart to produce a range of content, to cover a varying audience’s needs. Produce longer-form content for older readers and shorter, more bite-sized content for younger readers.
As we’ve explored before, the best approach to developing content is to invest in longer, in-depth pieces that you then repurpose into shorter, more ‘snackable’ content. For example, start with a white paper and use that as the basis for blogs, a webinar, an email campaign, infographics, and snippets designed for sharing on social media.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you work out your content needs, just get in touch.
First up, sorry goldfish.
There’s so much wrong with that throwaway phrase “you’ve got the memory of a goldfish”.
It seems we’ve all been giving goldfish a bad rap, and they don’t have the incredibly short attention span we’ve been mocking them for all these years. In fact, it’s precisely because they’ve got such a capacity for memory that they’ve become a model system for studying the process of learning and memory formation. Amazingly, records of research with goldfish go all the way back to 1908.
It’s also similarly not true that the human attention span is shrinking and has reduced to a matter of seconds. Pop culture has got it wrong: instead of flitting from subject to subject, our attention span flexes to match the expectations of the task in hand.
Human attention spans match expectations.
It’s not a question of how long we can concentrate for, but determining what a particular task is demanding from us — and matching our attention to that. It’s all about what the individual brings to the situation and the expectations they have around that situation that decides how they’ll react.
We've got a wealth of information in our heads about what normally happens in given situations, which frames our expectations. And those expectations and our experience, directly mould what we see and how we process information at any given time. For example, if you attend a lecture, aware that it will last an hour, you are likely to then focus your attention on what the lecturer is saying for the whole duration.
Content creation — horses for courses.
When it comes to content, though, there are broad generational differences when it comes to preferred levels of attention. Recent research reveals a generational split. Millennials favour shorter, more visually-rich content, whereas older audiences prefer longer-form content. As a result, millennial B2B buyers go for videos and infographics when making decisions, while older buyers lean towards in-depth white papers.
It makes sense to think of content marketing as a case of horses for courses. It’s smart to produce a range of content, to cover a varying audience’s needs. Produce longer-form content for older readers and shorter, more bite-sized content for younger readers.
As we’ve explored before, the best approach to developing content is to invest in longer, in-depth pieces that you then repurpose into shorter, more ‘snackable’ content. For example, start with a white paper and use that as the basis for blogs, a webinar, an email campaign, infographics, and snippets designed for sharing on social media.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you work out your content needs, just get in touch.
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