In our digitally-driven, fast-paced and noisy world, attention is an increasingly premium commodity. You’re probably familiar with the feeling of being bombarded with information on a constant basis. Many describe how we now live in an ‘attention economy’ where, in exchange for free information, people have transitioned from customers into products. The truth is, the idea that attention is a scarce commodity is not a new one, at least not in the field of Economics.

That’s not to say things haven’t changed significantly. Over the last 50 years, we have gone from being exposed to some 500 brand messages per day to an average of 5,000. Capturing even a fraction of the attention of your target audience is becoming increasingly difficult.
And with an ever-growing push towards short-form content and instant gratification, you might think that bombarding your audience with daily snippets of content is the way to remain relevant. Little and often seems to have become the go-to method recently. Which is why your LinkedIn feed is probably like mine: full, noisy and increasingly annoying.

“Ironically, you might be posting yourself into irrelevance.”

There is a real problem with this approach, in that you run the high risk of joining an entire sea of people doing the exact same thing. Anyone trying to grapple with LinkedIn’s algorithm will be all too aware that with the current state of play, businesses run the risk of disappearing into a swamp of similarity. In this incessant competition to keep ahead, grab more likes, get more views – at any cost – authentic human connection is scarcer than ever before. Ironically, you might be posting yourself into irrelevance.

So, how do you avoid being just another blip in an endless scroll of options and attention-grabbing tactics?

“Why should I care?”

To be really relevant, brands need to find a way to make an enduring connection to the people they are reaching out to, and that connection needs to respond to that most fundamental of questions that your target audience is asking: “why should I care?”

To prosper in this new world, businesses can no longer afford to be impersonal, positioning themselves as mere service or product providers selling to anonymous receivers.

I know it sounds basic, but your customers are not customers. They are people. And people need meaning and connection. And the way in which meaning has been conveyed since the dawn of man is via the art of Storytelling.

Storytelling is one of humanity’s most enduring traditions and the basis for everything we do as a species, an insight revealed in Yuval Noah Harari’s ground-breaking, erudite and immensely readable treatise on the history of Humankind: Sapiens. If you can tell the right story, you can captivate (literally) billions of people.

“Brand Storytelling is a business’s way of making a lasting connection with the people they want to be heard by.”  

Your audience lives in a world of stories and are genetically wired to love and respond to them. Brand Storytelling is a business’s way of making a lasting connection with the people they want to be heard by. It’s the story behind your brand, why it exists and, most importantly, why it matters to the people who matter the most.

In short, a captivating story is your primary opportunity to be unforgettable.

“With more choice than ever before they will remember and indeed decide to work with you based on how you make them feel.”

In our digital age where we have become obsessed with statistics, ROI, CPC, likes and views we too often forget that emotion is more powerful than logic. We’re stuck in a world of the rational and we’re ignoring the intuitive. Your audience may not actually remember what you do or say, but with more choice than ever before they will remember and indeed decide to work with you based on how you make them feel.

We use these words like “customer” and “client” and “acquisition” and “target” and we forget that at the end of the day they are people, and people do business with people. There’s a risk in forgetting. Personally, you lose your heart and commercially, your work loses its soul.

Think about that in reverse: what you do might not be as important as how you do it. What you’re selling, might be second in importance to the feeling you instil in your customer.