Digital fatigue. A combination of words that has served many uses: a fear, an excuse, a rationale or a sign of an uncertain future where audiences simply tune out, to everything.
Is any of this true? Was all of it true? Or is digital fatigue just another reactionary emotion to what was a profound disruption in how we communicate?
I believe that digital fatigue was a real thing … for a minute.
Where Digital Fatigue Got Its Start
When the pandemic started and we were all suddenly staring into our laptop screens to communicate with our families, friends, co-workers, partners and customers via a variety of video conferencing tools, it was a jarring new reality to get used to. That was real.
But, what started as a communications band-aid, has become our daily reality, and it’s no longer new, or weird, or fatiguing to be on a video call. We adjusted. It’s not even the “new normal” anymore; it’s just normal.
But something else happened.
How Marketers Made Digital Fatigue Worse
During the past few years, our marketing was forced to exist only through digital channels. And that created a new problem.
For too long, many companies took these channels for granted, delivering the same content experiences, webinars and events in the same way, year after year. Heck, many companies had never even delivered a virtual conference or event before 2020.
But suddenly we were all doing it, and our audiences had a LOT of options to choose from.
The best analogy I can make is that it was like the difference between our TV options today (just think about how many streaming services there are) and when we only had three broadcast networks to choose from (does anyone even remember that.)
According to the 2022 State of Digital Experiences Report, there was a 135.57% increase in digital experiences delivered between 2019 and 2021. Marketers now face serious competition for the time and attention of their audiences. And those audiences expect better experiences, not just blatant, lifeless “marketing.”
The Myth of Digital Fatigue
And this is where the mythological part of digital fatigue comes in. As audiences started voting with their attendance, preferences and purchase decisions, the brands that had not evolved their digital channels were getting left behind.
“It’s digital fatigue” they claimed with great exasperation. But no, they were just delivering bad experiences.
You hear it again and again: Buyers are changing. They are increasingly self-educating and often don’t want to talk to a salesperson until they have already made a purchase decision.
In 2019, Forrester reported that buyers took, on average, 17 interactions to make a purchase decision. Two years later, in 2021, they updated the average number of interactions to 27. But you don’t hear as much about their expectations for the type of interactions they want is also changing dramatically.
What People Want (Really, Really Want) From Their Digital Experiences
Today, audiences want more. They want personalized digital experiences that are approachable, interactive, engaging, personalized, genuinely helpful and authentically human.
Maybe even entertaining. Is that a lot to ask? Not really. It sounds more like the marketing many of us got into this business to create.
Four Ways To Keep Digital Events Interesting and Engaging
In 2021 and 2022, there have been some obvious trends that have led the way to create better audience experiences. Here are some key lessons to keep in mind as you create engaging digital experiences:
1. Start thinking like a producer of great programming, not marketing.
One major change we have seen in webinars is that many brands are creating serialized programs that feel more like TV shows than a marketing webinar.
There are many webinar programming formats that we have seen, including news shows, talk shows, interview shows, game shows, awards shows and many more.
2. Conversations can be great marketing.
Whether in a video, virtual event session, or webinar, conversing with other interesting people around topics that matter to your audience can be a compelling way to keep people engaged.
Especially if you enable your audience to be a part of that conversation.
In fact, in the past year, we have also seen a rise in discussion-based experiences where the audience has the camera on and actively participates in the experience. Companies have now figured out how to re-create smaller, more personalized forums and birds-of-a-feather sessions in the digital world.
3. Segment and personalize.
So much of our marketing tend to be high-level thought leadership experiences promoted to our entire database to attract the biggest possible audiences (read leads).
But today, people seek content that speaks to their unique needs.
In the past year, we have seen modern marketers begin to create more personalized content experiences (often by use case, persona, industry, etc.), using customer engagement software to engage people in more specific ways.
From industry-focused webinars to personalized content experiences spread across web pages to highly targeted landing pages that are customized and delivered to a prospect’s digital doorstep, the more personalized the experience is, the more they tend to engage.
4. BE HUMAN.
Our audiences don’t want to be marketed to, they don’t want to be pitched, and they dislike anything that feels inauthentic. If marketing has become a bad word, it’s because our marketing can often be painful to consume.
There has been a lot of talk about empathy in marketing circles these days, but where is empathy for the people who have to endure our marketing? Our goal is to engage, and we need to get creative to connect with our audiences in real human ways.
The tonality of the experiences we deliver, in our content, and in our events and webinars needs to shift. Even if you are in a “serious” industry like financial services or life sciences, it doesn’t mean that your digital experiences can’t be more authentically human.
Even stockbrokers and scientists are people. We need to find the personalities, stories and digital formats that will enable us to engage our audiences in compelling ways.
3 Best Practices for Overcoming Audiences’ Digital Fatigue
This article was originally published on Modern Marketing Today. Shared here with the author’s permission.
Research from Stanford University says there are psychological consequences of spending hours using popular video chat applications and offers four reasons why these tools are driving fatigue – excessive amounts of close-up eye gaze, cognitive load, increased self-evaluation from staring at a video of oneself and constraints on physical mobility.
In other words, poor user experiences are driving fatigue.
Audiences are too often feeling lost or bored during digital experiences, leaving them no choice but to exit the browser. They are being conditioned to dislike marketing because they expect it to be bad and impersonal.
Compile that with already high levels of burnout among marketing professionals, and we begin to realize that if we want to engage these audiences, we will have to step up our game. Audiences now have a new standard of expectations from their digital events that marketers must deliver upon.
The good news is overcoming users’ digital fatigue is entirely within marketing’s control. Audiences no longer just sit passively and watch a screen or presentation. Marketers can design interactive, content-rich, fully branded experiences that transport audiences into another world that feels lightyears away from their last conference call.
1. Customize for the user, not just the brand
Digital experiences are typically built around presentations. But having someone read from a slide deck during a digital event will no longer cut it with audiences’ post-COVID expectations for digital events.
To succeed, digital events have to offer multiple options for interacting with personalized digital experiences that capture people’s attention.
Digital experiences should also feel cohesive and give users a way to orchestrate their own experiences. By allowing users to choose their own adventure, they can more efficiently find the information they want, learn at their own pace, and ultimately get more from the experience.
For example, if users are looking for educational content, they should have a clearly defined path that allows them to learn about new products. Others might want to be entertained, so let them play games and win prizes within the experience.
 Discover how to make your digital experiences exceptional with our tips for driving engagement. Click here to read.
Giving users a little bit of something they’re interested in not only delivers an experience customized for the user but also gives organizations more ways to capture insights about their audiences the more they engage.
The ON24 Experience included a host of customized experiences for conference attendees, including custom Wordles, a digital photo booth, an awards section and more. We also set up “fun lounges” with puppies, mindfulness, and meditation room options to keep the experience interactive ahead of the life after party.
The resulting engagement metrics exceeded our goals – event attendees’ average viewing time was 98.8 minutes in 2022, meaning that the average attendee was engaged for well over an hour and a half.
2. Build content to last and be reused
Marketers should plan and execute digital events as campaigns rather than one-time events. The key is to create event tracks with content mapped to your annual campaigns so it aligns with your larger goals and can be reused down the road.
Don’t let your digital event become a one-off. Every session should map customer pain points and use cases for your campaign. That way, presentations become a funnel that maps to your campaign pillars and allows you to drive engagement year-round.
When the content is oriented towards user needs and overarching campaign strategies, you’ll gain engagement insights that allow you to then map to specific segments and sales plays.
With this approach, marketers can leverage content long after the event ends, and audiences can continue interacting with your brand. And the more audiences engage, the more data marketers can capture, including who’s accessing your content, if those individuals had questions and their current pain points.
These insights improve the follow-up process post-event and drive those prospects down the sales funnel.
3. Engagement drives excitement – not fatigue
When digital experiences are orchestrated correctly, they can not only reduce digital fatigue but also drive better customer relationships. At The ON24 Experience, we saw the average number of locations per attendee increase 58% year-over-year by leveraging a custom-built platform – showing that multiple touchpoints for users produce more engagement, and better data too.
When marketers create thoughtful, multifaceted experiences for their audience, it makes users feel heard and creates two-way engagement – which is refreshing to otherwise digitally fatigued audiences.
But in order to create this type of meaningful engagement, digital events must give people an opportunity to explore and self-discover content within the experience. Therefore, marketers should design digital experiences so users can self-discover content and be engaged instead of fatigued.
The Screenless Internet: Marketing In the Next Frontier
This post originally appeared on MarketingLand.com. Shared with the author’s permission.
I’ve caught myself a few times in recent weeks – sitting at my desk and flipping between looking at my computer screen and my phone in hand. Across the office, television news runs on mute. It’s hard to avoid screens in today’s age, and even harder to avoid their constant, almost gravitational pull for our attention.
On my commute home, though, I avoid screens. I throw my phone in my duffel bag and listen to podcasts and articles as a way to decompress while staying up to date on the latest news. Ironically, I recently listened to a story by New York Times writer Farhad Manjoo, titled “I Didn’t Write This Column. I Spoke It.” The column, which was originally dictated to a smartphone, details a trend that I was already taking part in but didn’t realize: we’re moving away from screens. It may still be unconscious for most of us, but it’s happening nonetheless — whether we’re asking Alexa about the weather, having Siri set us a reminder, or listening to an audiobook.
The State of Screens in Marketing
Screens are simply a part of everyday life. But I think we’ve all experienced the fatigue that comes with constantly being glued to a screen: having our eyes strained, constantly responding to the endless pings of notifications and messages, being unable to sleep at night because we’ve been on our phone. Interacting with a screen, clearly, is not always a positive digital experience. I know that’s why I relish my commutes home, with nothing but sound. And I’m not alone. Nielsen found that online radio listening has grown steadily, and that “[a]s of early 2018, 64% of Americans ages 12 and older had listened to online radio in the past month, while 57% had listened in the past week.”
When the digital revolution exploded, it revolutionized marketing. Suddenly we had unparalleled insights into our email content, whitepapers, webinars — everything. We knew how many people watched our videos and for how long. It fundamentally transformed how marketers operated in this new data-driven world. And it all unfolded on screens. For a long time, it was hard to imagine how digital marketing would ever happen off screen.
Our Screenless Future
But now we’re starting to see that the screenless internet is coming, and with it so will screenless marketing. What’s so intriguing about this, is that we’ve almost come full circle. Even though screenless marketing represents the next step in the evolution of digital marketing, ironically, it’s not really digital at all. Our screen fatigue has driven us offline: though we still want to consume content, we don’t always want to do that through our fingers on a keyboard or touchscreen.
As the screenless internet continues to grow, we marketers have to grow in parallel: audio can now be transcribed, translated, scaled and distributed largely in the same way content – from emails to whitepapers to case studies – can be. How will this reshape marketing? The implications are endless.
In a recent article, Harvard Business Review suggests that our loyalty will be less toward brands, and more toward AI assistants like Alexa, Google Home, and HomePod who we’ll converse with daily. “In fact, we predict that AI assistants will win consumers’ trust and loyalty better than any previous marketing technology. […] AI platforms will be able to predict what combination of features, price, and performance is most appealing to someone at a given moment.”
How Marketing Stands to Gain
As a result, marketers will look to optimize their position on AI platforms and partner relationships with brands. Just as marketers have jockeyed for SEO position on search engines in the past decade, marketers may look to do the same through these personal assistant devices.
It’s up to us marketers how we shape this new marketing landscape – to understand how we will effectively “screen the screenless.” But while we don’t know what shape this will take, rest assured that the same principles of good marketing will hold steady. No matter who the medium or channel, a winning marketing strategy will always prioritize the customer and their needs, deliver them valuable and personalized content and engage them with the right message at the right time. As marketers venture into this new frontier, the ones who win – as always – will be those who abide by these proven marketing truths.
