Ancient Greeks developed the concept of pharmakon: a drug that can both heal you and hurt you. If you take just a little dose, it’s beneficial, but if you overdose, it will amplify your pain. The point behind the term is that there is too much of a good thing. And today we experience that with information. In reasonable amounts, it helps you make decisions and empowers you, but when you intoxicate yourself with too much data, you end up paralyzed and exhausted.
We all suffer from infobesity: too much emails, stimuli, listicles, fleeting Snapchat photos, life hacks, ironic yet hilarious animal movies, inspirational guides, and so attractive time-limited offers. We can never get enough, consuming way more than we can swallow. Connected to endless information stream, we get addicted to notifications, new posts, new stats and knowledge.
And it affects both marketers and consumers.
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How marketers can manage information overload and make the experience easier for their customers?
Information Overload in Numbers
- You lose up to 75% of information you learn immediately if you don’t use it. Ergo, vast amount of data we take in falls into oblivion
- Interruptions alone (just one small aspect of information overload) costs the workforce over $1 Billion annually.
- „In 1976, there were 9,000 products in the average grocery store, and now it’s ballooned to 40,000 products. And yet most of us can get almost all our shopping done in just 150 items, so you’re having to ignore tens of thousands of times every time you go shopping. (…) Considering that Americans took in five times as much information every day in 2011 as they did in 1986, we have to make a conscious effort to beat back the flood”.
Symptoms: do you experience information overload?
- Lowering productivity: you don’t get things done.
- Illusion of productivity: you feel busy and tired, but at the end of the day you have no tangible result to show.
- Lack of focus: you multitask and switch between many tabs, files, and issues. Responding to an email here, writing a proposal there, chatting with a colleague who came by to ask about something she could’ve easily find on her own but preferred to have a little conversation… And time flies by.
- Researchitis: although you keep on researching, you don’t act on knowledge you obtained. Actually, you don’t act at all.
- Frustration: so you are exhausted and still fall behind. It can lead to one thing and one thing only – anger, frustration, insecurity, and stress. And the more frustrated and scared you are, the less productive you get. A viscous cycle!
Have you diagnosed yourself with infobesity? Don’t worry – it’s fairly common and can be treated.
Tips for marketers: save yourselves form data overload to be more productive!
- Eat that frog first thing in the morning. We often escape into researching because we don’t want to do THE thing, THE task, the Task-That-Cannot-Be-Named. So we delay, only to experience more stress the next day. Don’t do it. Be an adult and face the challenge you don’t like. Productivity gurus coined the term “frogs” for such uncomfortable tasks we tend to avoid. Attack them as fast as possible – it’ll help you organize the day.
- Restrict experts you follow. Too much blogs, portals, and magazines won’t make you smarter. You can’t be an expert on everything and you can’t read everything. Accept that and decide who you follow and trust (and know that they might disappoint you, but it’s still better than constant chase for more data).
- Declutter. Identify things, tasks, habits, activities that eat up your time and attention without giving much in return, and reduce them. It’s not about becoming a Getting-Things-Done-Goddess or about elimination of all the pleasures. Just be picky about how you rest.
- Schedule (realistically) and take breaks. Plan and make sure you include pauses – your energy naturally ebbs and flows during the day, you cannot be uber-effective 24/7. Know when to stop for a moment.
- Manage your customer data. Do you gather such information? Do these mountains of data overwhelm you? Can you use it? Make sure you have a good software: Marketing Automation platform that can handle Big Data marketing. Then prioritize: find the key metrics to follow and see what kind of personalized actions will be the most important for you right now. Just use all the information users provide you with!
How to improve the experience for your customers?
Unless you market yoga mats or meditation cushions for professional Zen monks, you probably talk to people who feel as information overwhelmed as you do (just joking, monks, yogis and hermits are data overloaded too). Too much offers and notifications impair their ability to complete tasks, focus, learn and rest. So be an ethical marketer and don’t make them more confused than they already are.
- Don’t add up to the noise. Less is more. Respect the time of your audience. Create remarkable things and deliver it to the people that might be interested in them.
- Personalize. There is no such thing as “objective value” of your content or offer – it depends on recipient’s needs at the moment. So make sure you apply marketing technologies and monitor contact behavior on the website, gather the data, use dynamic emails and customize website for each user.
- Produce value. Ask yourself: Is that useful? Is that original? Would I like to receive such message myself? There is so much noise on the web right now: posts full of things discussed zillion times before, boring, unoriginal, thoughtless. All these unnecessary pieces of content add up to the noise we all experience. Refuse to take part in it. Curate the content and repurpose it instead of producing more mediocre posts and videos.
- Educate. Help your audience navigate through the sea of offers and messages – deliver useful knowledge. Instead of shouting “buy now!”, send a guide on choosing the best solution or ideas for using the product.
- Don’t raise a false alarm. Your audience’s attention is scarce and if you overuse expressions such us “Only for you”, “Only today”, they will stop reacting to these.
- Make sure your message fits into the context. The same message feels different depending on where recipient finds herself at the moment. Timing is crucial! Push notification with a discount sent when customer passes by your brick and mortar store (not at some random point of the day), emails with the discount for the product user already viewed, or a special birthday offer are just some examples of messages that fit in the context.
- Observe users’ responses to your actions. That’s the best way to see what is working and what’s not.
Such attitude will also benefit your business – because respecting your audience and caring about quality always does. It will help you avoid communication fatigue and increase the responses.
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