By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
Tigercomm, a marketing firm with numerous clients in clean energy, released an e-book titled How Clean Energy Companies Can Engage Customer Prospects Faster in an Attention-Scarce World, which it says is designed to help companies market themselves better.
As clean energy becomes more commoditized, the e-book argues it’s more difficult for one company to stand out from every other company. And with a finite number of legitimate customers, that can be frustrating.
“Across clean economy sectors, sales and marketing teams we talk to share a growing frustration: It’s gotten harder to get customer prospects to engage,” the authors say. “They’re all too familiar with sending that 7th “touch base” email to a prospect they’ve connected with at the trade show and hearing nothing back.”
The authors argue this experience has three major components, ones they call the “VAR Phenomenon”
(Volume, Attention, Relevance), which they define as the following
● Volume – Customers are exposed to an enormous volume of electronic content – which grows by 50% each year. Americans now spend roughly 10 hours a day in front of computers, smartphones, tablets and other devices.
● Attention – The sheer weight of all that content has drastically shortened attention spans, by at least 20% since the mobile revolution. According to a study by Microsoft, people now have an eight-second attention span, less than a goldfish, which can manage to focus on something for roughly nine seconds.
● Relevance – Shrinking attention spans mean that to attract a sales prospect’s attention, content must be relevant to their needs at the moment they recognize they have that need. The fact that someone searched for and selected a story or website is a strong indicator of relevance.
Once they’ve identified what they see as marketers’ top difficulty, the e-book explores numerous ways to capture that short attention span and target customers with the information about clean energy they need to make the decision to cal the companies in question.
To read the executive summary, click here.