Understanding Audience Attention Span

In the last blog entry I talked about grabbing the audience’s attention when starting your sales presentation. Dragging your audience’s attention away from the variety of thoughts milling around in their mind is crucial to a successful sales presentation. Engaging your audience in the presentation helps build retention of the ideas you present.

So, how long do you think you have your audience’s attention once you have captured it? 10 minutes? 30 minutes? 60 minutes? As long as you have something interesting to say?

It is generally acknowledged that an average adult attention spans last 15-20 minutes (see video discussion from M62 Visual Communications). Others suggest that attention starts to wander after 7 minutes. Based on my experience, marketers design their sales presentations based on what they want to say, not on how long they are likely to maintain their audience’s attention. We would all be hard-pressed to fit everything we wanted to tell our prospects into 20 minutes. This means that some portion of what we are trying to say will be lost on the audience as their attention wanes.

So, what happens when we can’t condense what we want to say into a 20 minute presentation? Is all hope lost? The good news is that attention spans can be concatenated together (see video discussion from M62 Visual Communications). Two things are important to understand when concatenating attention spans.

1. You must give your audience an opportunity to break their attention before you regain their attention in a new span.
2. The attention in secondary and tertiary attention spans will be less than the initial attention span.

Rule #1: Design your presentation so that each segment is no longer than 20 minutes. Incorporate an attention break between segments when concatenating segments together.

It should also be understood that the audience’s attention within the average 20 minute attention span isn’t constant. Until you have grabbed the audience’s attention, their attentiveness is very low. Once you have grabbed the audience’s attention, their attentiveness decreases. This means that you don’t want to save your most interesting information for a big bang at the end.

Rule #2: Design your presentation so that your high impact content is arranged just after you grab their attention at the beginning of the presentation.

Of course, the way you present your content as well as the subject and applicability of the content for the individual all play a factor in how long you actually maintain your audience’s attention. This only strengthens the case for rule #2.

Though I have focusing on attention span as it relates to sales presentations, these same principles can be applied to other marketing collateral such as general presentations, white papers, eBooks, etc. Tune in to my next blog entry when I focus on presentation design.