Your ability to grab your buyer’s attention determines your ability to sell, grow, and connect.
Your audience’s brain is on autopilot—it’s navigating algorithms, subconscious filtering, and mental fatigue. They’re bombarded with input, and they’re actively looking for the things worth ignoring.
If you can’t pull your audience out of autopilot, grab their attention, and immediately DO SOMETHING with it…you’ll struggle connecting, selling, and building a brand (which is why attention is the first lever in my Brain-Based Buying Framework©).
Since your buyer’s attention is the key to sales, here’s what you need to know about why your posts get ignored, how grabbing attention works (and doesn’t), and the sales psych behind it all:
Attention and Sales: The 1st Lever in Reveal’s Brain-Based Buying Framework©
Attention is the lever you pull to get someone’s brain to go from autopilot to alert. It’s the beginning of the decision-making process—the first step in buying (or booking). In short, it makes someone listen.
Attention is the first lever in Reveal’s Brain-Based Buying Framework©, a simple and scientific 5-step framework that will take your audience from “I’ve never heard of you” to “I’m your new favorite customer.”
If you can’t get someone’s attention, you’ll never get the chance to persuade them. Your ability to grab your buyer’s attention determines your ability to get seen.
How to Grab Your Buyer’s Attention (and Keep it)
The way you grab your buyer’s attention depends on YOU. It depends on your brand, vibe, reputation, audience, and offers. And not all attention is created equal.
For example, creating clickbait might work once, but it damages trust over time (another much-needed factor in getting your audience to buy). The same applies to using fear, shame, or guilt to get clicks—it technically works, but it doesn’t sell.
You want to trigger curiosity, contrast, and recognition—you want to say or do something different or unexpected enough that someone’s subconscious pays attention.
The best way to do this (to pull the attention lever) is to use science-backed psychological triggers proven to work. For example, you can use:
- Recognition: Mirroring a thought or experience your audience has had, so they “recognize” them and “recognize you,” making your content immediately relevant.
- Contrast: Creating what seems like a surprise and disrupting your audience’s prediction patterns, creating a small dopamine spike, and reopening the attention channel.
- Curiosity Gap: Opening a loop without immediately closing it and triggering the need to know what happens next, which they can only do if they keep reading.
- Concreteness: Using specific details and sensory language (how it felt, looked, smelled, tasted, etc.) to light up more neural pathways and make your ideas feel more relevant.
- Unexpected Simplicity: Framing your message as “this is way easier than you think” and backing it up with proof to give their brains an easier answer.
Just remember to always deliver on the attention grab. If you said you’d share something “big,” make sure you do!
Where You Can Grab Attention in Your Marketing
You can grab your buyer’s attention anywhere, but the most common places you’ll pull this lever are in things like email subject lines, reels, and short-form content, sales page headlines, and unexpected metaphors or analogies.
If the “first look” matters, you can use it to grab attention.
Just don’t try to grab attention when you’re supposed to be pulling a different lever (like clarity) and confuse your audience on what they’re buying, because confused buyers rarely buy.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “Kaili, I’m already doing that,” then you might already be pulling the lever! And you might be, but you can tell by checking if you have high email open rates, likes, views, and consistent growth.
If you’re getting the opposite of that—paired with low engagement and solid content—you might have an attention problem.
If You Only Remember ONE Thing About Grabbing Your Audience’s Attention, It Should Be This:
Attention isn’t when you SELL, but it’s your door to the sale.
Without grabbing their attention, your audience might never know your offer exists—and that it’s everything they’ve been waiting for.
Ready to put it into play and get damn good at sales and social content? Get the Sales & Copy Bestie, a custom GPT I trained on 8 years of sales psych IP and copywriting expertise—you tell her what you’re trying to do, she applies the Reveal Brain-Based Buying Framework© and tells you to ‘try this’ (you’ll be shocked how often she’s right!).
