Internet usage continues to grow, especially on mobile. Today, daily hours spent with digital media reached 6.3 hours. Notice that this figure is the average for all users. Regarding heavy users, 39% of young people say they are online almost constantly.
These figures are mostly driven by mobile. Mobile usage was 0.8 hours in 2011 and increased to 3.6 hours in 2018.
US adults spend an average of 3 hours and 35 minutes per day on mobile devices. By 2019, mobile will surpass TV as the medium attracting the most minutes in the US.12 The share of mobile devices in total website visits exceeds 60%.
These numbers are exciting. However, you need to understand that these people are not eager to read your marketing message. They are distracted, they have short attention spans.
A person checks his/her mobile phone an average of 47 times a day
A person checks his/her mobile phone an average of 47 times a day. This number increases to 86 times for young people. 9 out of 10 people check their mobile phones within an hour after they wake up in the morning.
In these micro-moments, they are usually glancing over the content. They are not interested in messages that do not match their perspective.
In a study conducted by Microsoft with 2,000 participants, it is stated that the attention span declined to only 8 seconds.
Facebook says they have seen that people spend on average 1.7 seconds with any given piece of content on mobile.
Research, based on 2 billion visits found that 55% of web users spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page.
Note that I am talking about getting the attention of overwhelmed and distracted users. Once you get their attention, naturally you will have more time to communicate with them. Tailored and to-the-point communication is the key to grabbing the attention of these people.
You need to be fast…
You also need to be fast. These people are impatient and demanding. 90% of consumers wait for an immediate response (within 30 minutes) regarding a support question. This figure is 82% for sales and marketing questions. 53% of mobile website visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. As the page load time goes from 1 second to 5 seconds, the probability of bounce increases to 90% which significantly deteriorates the conversion in your digital marketing campaigns.
In the previous section I told you that these people see hundreds of marketing messages every day, they are glancing over content, and you have to match their perspective. Now I am telling you that you have to communicate with them in a short period of time, using tailored messages. Although these people are using the internet heavily, they are distracted, and you have only a few seconds to charm them.
You can’t achieve this by communicating general messages with large audiences. It will not be enough to get their attention. You have to segment your target audience and provide tailored messages to each segment.
