Omnichannel Engagement Problems

Why Glance Content is the Future of Digital Attention

The attention economy is like a game, we always want new stimulation

With the recent buzz surrounding peach, we are realizing how omnichannel is evolving in real-time. Not only are millions of people joining the internet each year, the pace of change is accelerating as more startups find market fit. Where vine failed, maybe peach will succeed! That learns from slack, that learns from the cloud and learns from the rise of user-generated-content, you know who, the selfie generation. It's a trello, cloud, CRM/ERP and machine learning world out there, and social media is even a bit behind the times. 

As companies monetize themselves, they fail and fall short on providing customer experiences that make them sustainable. We can see this when in how big corporate social media companies evolve. However, in real-world where young Millennials ( <25) and GenZ ( <20) are showing us the future of mobile engagement.  There are multiple issues: 

• declining attention spans 
• multi-channel proliferation 
• micro & glance-content competition 
• video content on the rise 
• content marketing morphing into content sharing (as Millennials create more and consume more channels than ever before)

As digital marketers and in Retail marketing both online and brick and mortar, these issues have to be addressed with how we do content marketing. The old idea of if we create high quality content, the audience will come organically, is in 2016 rightfully dead.

In fact, in 2016, expect automated marketing to truly find new avenues. One great example is SaaS loyalty marketing automation for stores on cloud POS. As consumers, how we consume online content is changing, as the stream of things (SoT) gets more dense and the speed increases. Who knows what will happen to content when AIot hits, as machine intelligence and internet of things merge to create a new layer of digital reality superimposed everywhere in physical space. 

What clear is content marketing isn't enough. We need new strategies to boost outreach, content distribution and lead-generation, some of these are: 

• content that's optimized for seconds of attention (not minutes, micro-content) 
• Content's that's authentic that leverages User Generated Content 
• Content that does influencer marketing well
• Content that has high potential to go viral 
• click-bait that's life hacking, not too niche specific just for SEO 
• we have to do video content better, that's native to the channel in tone, strategy and execution (timing, length of content, it all matters!) 

The Rise of Glance Content 

Glance content are those channels that literally occupy seconds, which we check multiple times a day. Don't be fooled, just because it doesn't get long-term engagement doesn't mean it isn't "engaging". Think about how you actually go online on a mobile device. It's broken down into many content snacks. So glance content is simply content optimized for the real world of digital engagement. 

Usually for a young mobile audience, these may get 10+ checks a day, if the majority of our time spent on our smartphone is in Apps. I could quote statistics on all of this, but let's just say we take this for granted in 2016. Many people will be literally diverting their attention "online" hundreds of times per day. It's no longer a question of just whether your website is optimized for mobile viewing, it's a question of is your content marketing on social channels and your blog optimal for it as well. 

What are the high-traffic and fastest growing channels?

• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Peach
• Snapchat 
• Tumblr
• Reddit 
• LinkedIn 
• Quora
• Medium

You will notice the majority of these that I have mentioned here are apps, or Millennials will be viewing them pretty much exclusively on mobile. What do I see on such an app? I see micro-content, in other words glance content that's worth typically 8-15 seconds of my time. How to create an impression in seconds?

• Make an emotional experience that's inspiring, educational and positive all in one
• Inspire and do story-telling 
• Have a call-to-action embedded 
• Tie it with a trending theme or corporate social responsibility CSR event (the modern day version of "public relations"). 

What can I do Better?

• Better analytics, A/B Testing 
• List content is eye-candy
• Optimize landing pages, headlines, subject lines, first paragraphs (that's where the engagement gold lies) 
• Images improve engagement (old school twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn updates obviously perform better with images)
• A successful YouTube channel is worth it 
• Doing glance content is essential (Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr) 
• Doing a product video (can boosts conversation by up to 85%)
• A post with a video, will boost links by 3X. 
• Get customers to create the content, doing social media without user-generated-content in 2016, does not make sense. 
• Don't just do Email Marketing, A/B test some SMS marketing 
• Don't do scripted customer success videos, do more spontaneous authentic ones 
• Create a forum on your website/support where customers can interact and help each other and create a community. 
• Invest in emerging channels more, be an early-adopter, e.g. Blab.Im, Tumblr & Peach. Tumblr is actually growing faster than Pinterest and Instagram in terms of percentage. 
• Invest in talent that has an affinity with glance and video content, UGC campaigns, #hashtag promotions, virtual and influencer campaigns and who have a proven track record in content distribution optimization (CDO). 

Glance content is not just about creating stunning visuals (think visual title = eye candy), it's about integrating it with story-telling, UGC, CSR, trending topics and your branding tone and catering it to your audience personas, whatever it may be. Glance content is actually adapting to the preference of Millennials, who are driving digital evolution forwards. We have to recognize as retail marketers, they are the future consumers. In fact, most of the indie retail stores (50% +) I come across, cater specifically to them. 

The bottom line is glance content channels are growing faster (infographic). Let's not call this visual marketing, that's too broad a statement. This is micro visual content that is inspirational (quotes, selfies, beauty, people, short videos). It's the youth and public creating content themselves (UGC). It's all those times we check our smartphone in a given day, it's society on the drug of a multi-device digital reality. 

It's omnichannel let loose in a digital playground, it's people gamified to be smartphone and app addicts. It's peachy and it's IoS flavored, it's Snapchat ready to explode into a billion micro stories and moments, it's micro video with a different twists on each channel. 

If you hear Facebook boasting about numbers, video views or LinkedIn boasting about 400+ million, recognize this says nothing about engagement and about the quality the channel offers its actual users. Those kinds of vanity metrics may still please VC and the dumber monetization plans around, but they are just that, vanity metrics with no real world sustainable engagement factor. In all likelihood the quality of engagement on older channels is declining, so all they have left is to boast about the number of millions users who may sign in once a month. 

Glance content is so much more than visual marketing, it's a new way of how young people relate and create digitally. It's a micro-blog like Tumblr, where the channel has not been totally corrupted by monetization that values the size of the network (quantity) over the customer experience (quality).