Even before you think about the competition for budget, you need the win the competition for attention. That might be the even harder task.

Why? Because the competition for budget is just between you and your competitors. The competition for attention is between you, your competitors, vendors from other sectors, your prospect’s professional obligations, and the pressure on their life outside of work.

It has probably never been harder to earn and keep people’s attention, and that means you need to be much smarter, much more creative, and much more interesting than your competition.

This is your introduction to getting the attention that will grow your brand:

• What resonates with prospects and makes them want to engage with you
• How to make sure your expertise and value stand out in a crowded market
• Why is AI a useful tool for growing your brand (and what you shouldn’t use it for)

How to get leads who are engaged with your brand

It is not difficult to find out what prospects will engage with. In fact, they’re very open about it.

• 80% of customers say they are more likely to purchase from brands that provide personalised experiences (Epsilon)
• 66% of decision makers say they find vendor content ‘biased toward the vendor’ and ‘not objective or balanced’. (Forrester)

Straight away, there are two ways for your brand to stand out:

• Personalise the content or the buyer journey
• Be genuinely valuable — with marketing, ‘selling’ does not sell

61% of decision-makers say thought leadership is more effective than product marketing at demonstrating value (Edelman), so if you’re actually useful, telling them something that they don’t know but will make their job easier, then you are already a trusted partner, worthy of their time and energy.

How to cut through the noise and get your brand noticed

There are two main strands to getting noticed:

1. What you present
2. How you present it

The brand that you show to your audience has about 50 milliseconds to impress — that’s how long people take to decide whether they like to look of something (CXL).So, your brand needs instant impact — it needs to communicate authority, value and expertise in about half the amount of time it takes to blink (UCL).

However, to even get to the stage at which prospects are seeing you, you need:

• Targeted campaigns that put your brand in front of the right people
• Integrated strategies across social, email, and web to drive visibility

It is not simply a matter of placing your content in front of your targets.It takes 5-7 interactions for a prospect to remember your brand (B2BMarketing.net), so you must

Make sure they see it again and again, and that it is consistent every time they encounter it.

The role of AI in marketing

AI could either enhance your marketing dramatically, or make it absolutely useless, depending how you approach it.

It is an incredibly powerful tool for:

• Personalisation: it can curate experiences and content based on the audience, and as we saw earlier, those personalised experiences mean 80% of customers are more likely to buy
• Automation: it can handle aspects of marketing like email timing and sequences, optimising elements based on performance and target audience
• Analysis: AI can offer much richer insights into the successes, failures, strengths and weaknesses of your strategy and collateral

However, misusing AI can make your marketing weak, generic, and useless.

For example, if you were to rely on generative AI like ChatGPT to produce your content for you, that content would not stand out, resonate or generate leads.

Large Language Models (LLMs) learn from patterns in their training data to produce text that is relevant to a prompt. When it is trained on published materials that means it is replicating common ideas, phrasings, and summaries. All in all, using it to write your content for you is a very quick and efficient way to look and sound like everyone else.

81% of prospects want their supplier, vendor, or partner to be an expert who challenges their assumptions (Edelman). You cannot be that when all you do it aggregate and repeat other people’s ideas.

Your guide to earning attention and securing market share

If you have big ambitions for growth, but you are struggling to get eyes on your brand and attract people to your content, then we have published a guide that will help you to:

• Attract attention
• Build engagement
• Convert leads into lasting relationships

Download your copy and take control of your growth.