There’s a common misconception about attention that most marketers love to reference nowadays: the average human has a shorter attention span than the average goldfish. But if you really think about this claim, it can’t possibly be true. People watch two and half hour long movies and binge entire seasons of TV shows every day. If the human attention span is shorter than eight seconds, the Marvel Cinematic Universe wouldn’t exist and Netflix would be out of business.
When I first started in marketing, the term “lead generation” felt like this big, vague thing everyone was obsessed with, but no one could explain clearly. I’d hear phrases like “capture demand” and “fill your funnel,” and I’d nod along pretending to understand while secretly Googling things like “what is a lead magnet?” during team meetings.
Many of us can recall a time in high school when we were sitting in math class and thinking, “When am I ever going to use this stuff in the real world?”
And then we suddenly find ourselves in the real world, only to realize that numbers actually do play a pivotal role in what we do — especially in digital marketing.