Prospective financial services clients are bombarded by distractions every day, including vibrating smartphones, email pings on laptops, and constantly streaming episodes of favorite programs on television, not to mention everything being served up on Apple watches.

All of this taken together has created the Impulse Generation. It’s a generation not based on birth years. Instead, it’s formed around shared behavior: a dependency on the web and a wide array of devices to access information quickly, easily, and, perhaps most importantly, CONSTANTLY.

Unfortunately for marketers in the financial services sector, the desire for quick satisfaction and constant connection makes it challenging to earn – and hold – people’s attention. In fact, a study conducted by Microsoft reveals that the human attention span has dropped to eight seconds – falling by nearly one quarter in just a few years. What’s worse is that many sources report people decide whether to click to view content online in less than one second. The lack of focus and attention is particularly challenging for firms in the financial sector that promote solutions that people may not be interested in and can be complex, and time-consuming to explain.

This guide explains how wealth and asset managers can break through the attention barrier and connect with prospective and current investors.

Move From Bland Narratives to Tight Storytelling

Compared to flat narratives, people are more likely to respond to stories, especially about individuals like them. When people have unlimited choices of what to engage with, they are less likely to be attracted to traditional long-form copy, much less act on it. Stories are about experiences, which are more likely to attract people and compel them to act. Examples include retirement success stories or how a unique investment type helped someone achieve their personal financial goals.

Allow Investors to Take their Own Journey Through Your Content

Typically, financial firms develop material with a single narrative, point of view, and outcome. However, linear one-dimensional stories make it difficult to gain the attention of potential and current investors because they are planned, expected, and usually long. A complete whitepaper about an investment solution won’t grab people’s interest in today’s eight-second attention span world.

What’s required is to move from simply producing big chunks of content to telling stories in digestible bits. Tell them through short blog posts or videos that allow people to take their own journey in their own way. This will enable multiple possible ways to interest them and keep them engaged. By telling nonlinear stories, you’ll engage your audiences through captivating experiences they’ll stick around for and act on.

Create Engaging Content

To break the eight, it’s critical to think outside the box and develop engaging, authoritative, and thought-provoking content. It needs to spark emotion so prospective and current clients feel a deep connection with it. They won’t want to stop reading or viewing before the ninth second comes around

Videos can be an effective way to drive engagement and create memorable experiences, especially for younger audiences. In fact, viewers retain 95 percent of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10 percent when reading the same thing in text. Part of the reason is that they are more likely to make it through to the end of a video and explore other content. Completing a written piece is typically less likely to happen.,

Also, make it a point to avoid financial jargon. People won’t stick with material they don’t understand.

Develop Snackable Materials

Investing and financial planning materials are often long and ponderous. Many related topics are complex and challenging to explain. Still, with today’s lack-of-attention reality, it’s critical to serve up content in digestible bites

Once you produce engaging content, ensure it’s short and gets to the point quickly. It needs to be snackable so viewers and readers can quickly understand it without having to skip forward in a video or scroll through endless text. 

To achieve this type of user-friendly content, split your messages into smaller videos or chapters. Use brief paragraphs, lists, bullets, snippets, quotes, statistics, and callouts in text. This helps ensure that viewers and readers can easily and quickly engage with and understand messages and then choose to move on and enjoy another snackable content bite.

Another way to earn greater engagement is through shorter social stories. Of course, long-form content is needed to establish thought leadership around investing, retirement, planning, or any other finance discipline. Still, breaking down the long-form content into shorter messages delivered through social media is critical to draw readers in and encourage them to explore the longer piece.

Reducing the length of your content and serving it in snackable bites will encourage people to devour more of your financial insights.

Add Interesting Visuals

Add eye-catching graphics to complement your text and support your videos. Images with color increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80 percent.  They also make videos more engaging, especially when used to help explain complicated concepts.

If your marketing relies heavily on the written word or talking heads, adding meaningful graphics could increase engagement.

Personalize Your Marketing

As already covered, people today have unlimited media choices. They will not engage with anything that does not speak directly to them and their needs. Personalizing your marketing experiences to individual investors is critical to attracting and keeping their attention. For instance, you could promote short articles about accredited real estate investments to wealthy individuals and college planning videos to young families.

Review the data you have available for prospects and clients. Of course, you know much more about clients, including age, income, investible assets, and financial goals, making it easy to serve content that helps guide them toward their next financial moves. When it comes to prospects, look to the social media posts they clicked on and the content they viewed on your blog to learn about their possible financial needs and interests so you can serve appropriate financial content.

Go Beyond Capturing Attention, Retain It

Getting someone to check out your financial content is challenging. Keeping the attention of prospects and clients is even more difficult, especially if they are like many people who want to achieve financial security but may not care about learning about investing, saving for college, retirement planning, reducing taxes, or other financial planning topics. Don’t throw in the towel.

There is hope for asset and wealth managers. Take advantage of nonlinear storytelling, allowing people to explore snackable content at their own pace to learn about retirement planning, growing wealth, estate planning, and other financial topics. Use compelling visuals to break up content, help people move through it, and explain it clearly. Develop personalized marketing experiences that current and prospective clients feel are right for them.

Attention spans will continue shrinking as the need for instant media gratification rises. The sooner you acknowledge and address this, the more likely you will attract additional business and assets, especially among the emerging generation of investors. This will help provide a solid foundation for your firm in the years ahead.

Need help updating your content marketing efforts to align with the expectations of today’s investors? Schedule time with Dan Sondhelm to discuss your options.