You Only Have 3 Seconds

If you operate an ethical vegan business or any organisation at all, publishing content is necessary to increase your brand’s visibility, your business’s service/product offerings, and your organisational mission. Unfortunately, because every brand on the planet is publishing content on the same primary marketing channels (social media, email, and web), competition for audience attention is beyond fierce. If you want to have a chance at converting followers and subscribers to customers and clients, you have less than three seconds to grab their attention with your content.

Here are four pieces of advice for creating scroll-stopping content for social media and email marketing:

1. Invest in “disruptive” images and graphics for social media marketing.

Take the time to browse your competitor’s social media content and create visual assets that look different from the status quo. Your audience’s social feeds most likely look similar to your feed. Think about what kinds of images make you stop scrolling and identify what about that content caught your attention.

2. Spend more time creating subject lines.

In your email marketing, the subject line is the most important component. If they don’t open it, they’ll never see how awesome your email actually is. Take the time to craft a few short subject lines that will stand out in their inbox. Then test which subject line gets the highest open rates.

3. Test and then test again

Always test versions of every kind of content. This advice is especially true if you have working avatars*, “buyer personae” or one-page personality profiles of your customer segments. Your messaging only works if it deeply connects with your customer. Keep testing iterations of your messaging until you see an uptick in engagements.

For more on avatars, see Tip 1 in our free download 10 Tips to Build an Ethical Plant-Based Business that Lasts.

4. Use thoughtful thumbnails for videos

When posting videos on social media feeds, take the time to publish a thumbnail that does more than just denote it as a video. If your audience can’t make out what’s happening in the video, they will not bother watching it.

Remember that it doesn’t matter how much time you spend creating content, it’s wasted effort if you can’t grab your audience’s attention in less than three seconds.