What Really Gets Read
People have limited time and even more limited attention. The key in marketing is to capture some of this limited attention and get people to read more. So it pays to understand what things people first read because these are the areas you need to grab attention.
People tend to read the following first (in no particular order):
1 - Headlines
2 - Sub titles and sub headlines
3 - photo captions
4 - short bolded or highlighted text
5 - small insert boxes
6 - hand written notes
Of course this does not mean you can overwhelm your audience with too many "things that get read" or none of them will get read.
And each of these have different uses in different contexts. For example, a hand written note in an ad on the internet does nothing where a post-it note that is hand written on a mailing gets attention.
So what sorts of things grab attention?
1 - Curiosity. if you can arouse curiosity, people will read more.
2 - Humour. If people feel they will be entertained, they will read more.
3 - Powerful benefit for the specific audience. This one is more complex because it involves find the intersection between people who have the need and value the benefit and the readership/viewership of the audience.
4 - Emotion - shock, awe, fear, sex can all grab attention. People buy first with their emotions which is why most large agency ads play to emotions.
Without attention, you do not get read. So it is worth spending time on "what people first pay attention to".
