Is your marketing failing in the first 5 seconds?

Improve its effectiveness with the 5+10+15 Seconds Rule

Let me ask you some questions. How often do you skip an ad when you watch a YouTube video the second the skip advertising button shows. How often do you flick past an ad on your social media feed without looking at it. We live in a media saturated world, with a lot of things competing for our attention. For a business trying to market itself, this means you have even less time to grab someone’s attention before they move on to the next thing. Five seconds in fact. Why is it only five seconds? You’ll need to read on to find out.

Back in 2013 I wrote the original version of this concept as the 5+15+30 Second Rule. The idea being that you had less than a minute (50 seconds) to grab someone’s attention before they moved on to the next thing. I wrote this back when flyers shoved into mail boxes were still the most common form of advertising small to medium sized businesses would use. A lot has changed since then. In 2021 the most common form of advertising is popup ads in google searches and embedded inside other people’s content. Everything is digital, everything is instant, everything skippable (or blockable using ad blockers). Where before you were guaranteed to have someone’s attention for quite a few seconds it took to speed read your flyer before it ended up in the recycling bin, now it can be skipped with a single click. So how do you grab people’s attention, and be able to give them your message? With the 5+10+15 Second Rule. This is how the rule works.

The Rule

5 Seconds

These first five seconds are the most important. This is the time you have to grab their attention before they click the skip button on a YouTube ad. If it is a static ad inside someone else’s content, or a post in their social media feed, you may have even less than that. You need to hook them in to wanting to find out more. But how?

You ask them a question or pose a problem. Simple as that. People are used to being told something in advertisements, be how much they will save on x, why product y is so amazing. All of this is passive, requires no action on their part, it just washes over them and they ignore it. Asking a question makes them think for a few seconds which is enough time for your marketing to start selling the answer to that question that only you provide. The title of this article is an example of the question method. It is asking you the reader if you know if your marketing is failing in the first five seconds. It got you thinking, which then leads on to the next part.

10 Seconds

Give them the answers to your question that has been asked. This is the selling part of the process. Ten seconds might not seem like much, but it’s more than enough to give three or four good reasons why your business is the solution to the problem. Keep the answers short, clear, and all related to the question you asked. Those first five seconds only hooked them into learning more, these ten seconds is where you seal the deal.

Now remember, all marketing won’t make a potential customer contact you right away unless you’re offering the solution to the problem they are having right now. This is as much building an association of your business as the solution to the problem, or related ones. By doing that, when they, or someone they know, has the problem they think of your business first instead of just googling it. Which brings us to the last part.

15 Seconds

This is the sealing the deal part of the process. Bring out your business’s point of difference, add extra solutions to the question asked, offer information about other services or products you offer. This is the place where you make yourself stand out and be the one that people think of as the business that will solve that problem.

How do we apply it

The way you apply the 5+10+15 Second Rule changes depending on the medium. A google search ad is composed of a short headline and five short written examples of what is being promoted. A Facebook post is generally a photo and a very short block of text. A letterbox flyer has a big headline then a few lines of short text and contact information. A landing page on a website has a big example image and a short paragraph explaining what makes the offering unique. What doesn’t change is the basic structure of the message. A very short attention grabbing item, then following it with information that reinforces the message you are marketing.

Here is a practical example:

Green Touch is a garden maintenance company that has long quiet periods during the winter months as most gardens don’t require a lot of maintenance. To get new work during this quiet time they are going to promote the concept of preventative maintenance of trees. They need a hook and four or five reasons why it should be done. They decide that their hook and answers will be about winter storms that could damage a property’s trees and their or another person’s home. The sealing the deal reasons will also cover better regrowth in the spring, safer for the trees, liability for repair costs if other homes get damaged by one of their trees.

Their hook text is ‘Don’t let winter end up damaging yours or your neighbor’s home.’ The image is a picture of a tree that has fallen into a house. No one wants their home damaged so that gets the potential customers attention. They explain with ‘Dead or dying trees can be brought down even in mild winter storms leading to expensive property repairs. Avoid broken windows from too long branches bent by high winds. Prevent overflowing gutters by fallen leaves. Don’t let power lines get tangled up in branches that could disconnect your power.’ Their sealing the deal message covers ‘Getting them maintained now ensures your and your neighbors homes are protected. Proper tree maintenance will promote regrowth in spring a more attractive looking property. Get maximum sunlight during winter and proper shade in summer with the right pruning. We’ll even cut up the wood so you can have it for your fire next winter.’ Then they finish with blurbs about their special services and so on.

As you can see, you can present quite a compelling argument in less than 30 seconds. An argument that can be applied to any medium you care to use without having too much of the way of editing.

Where to from here?

This is only an introduction to the concept of the 5+10+15 Second Rule. We have explored the concept in more detail in many other articles on this blog. Why not have a look and see how it all works together to make an impact on marketing with simple processes. If you don’t feel like reading all of the blog, then why not book a meeting with us here at Copy Express. We can show you how to apply the many marketing techniques we have found are ideal for businesses like yours.