Imagine having your audience tied to your content with an 8-foot rubber hose for five minutes on a regular basis.
“We’ve got this very, very captive audience – and they’re bored – there’s really no super magic. When people pump gas they have nothing to do,” David Leader, then CEO of Gas Station TV, told NPR a few years ago.
Gas Station TV reaches millions of consumers with its content – a mix of entertainment, news, sports – and advertising. Yes, Gas Station TV is an innovative media company. But it’s a great example of how gas stations are using relevant content delivered in an unexpected way to engage their captive audiences.
People do a lot of waiting – for an appointment, for food to arrive at the restaurant, for a conference presentation to begin. Add in people who are captive while performing mundane activities like pumping gas or clicking on Wi-Fi agreements at the coffee shop, and the captive audience potential grows exponentially.
If your brand has a captive audience scenario – or access to such an audience – why not explore some nontraditional content opportunities to connect?
Why pursue a captive audience?
Marketers are challenged to balance all the variables their target audiences require. Following Scott Abel’s seven “rights” for an excellent customer relationship with your content as shared at the Intelligent Content Conference a few years ago, content creators must aim for:
- The right person (to get)
- The right content
- At the right place
- At the right time
- In the right format
- In the right language
- On the right device
A captive audience enables you to do all that. You know a lot about the audience – who they are, where they are, and why they’re there. With that understanding, you can provide relevant content to them at a known time and place in a way they can receive and understand it. Plus, in these captive situations, your content often has little competition.
To be clear, capturing this type of audience with engaging content isn’t usually a direct path to a sale or subscriber, but it is a valuable step to ultimately developing a sales or subscriber relationship with the audience member. People may not choose to buy or subscribe to your business based on the captive content experience alone, but it will affect their memory of their experience with your brand. To paraphrase Susan Spillman of PatientPop, “(It’s) part of the holistic experience that turns (people) into loyal customers.”
How to put content in front of the audience
As you reflect on where your brand can find captive audiences, let’s explore some likely and unlikely content opportunities.
Presentations
When your executives speak at conferences or salespeople present to prospective customers, think about how to engage people before the presentation begins. What will attract each audience member’s attention before the first word is uttered?
Consider these options:
- Create a multi-question quiz, rotating between question and answer. Don’t make the questions too difficult; you don’t want your audience feeling dumb when the speaker starts. (If you have strong Wi-Fi, consider doing interactive quizzes that show the collective results on-screen.)
- Play an entertaining video. Include captions on-screen in case the audio isn’t available.
- Preview the presentation with facts and figures to show…
