Actionable marketing is one of the key secrets to growing your business online.
By actionable marketing, I don’t mean the kind of creepy online marketing that gets you busted. I mean marketing that persuades visitors to your website to take a specific action.
Great copyrighting and design strategy should, as an example, result in visitors to your landing pages taking the action you want them to such as signing-up for a newsletter or trading their email address for a free ebook.
1. Target Your Audience
For your marketing to hit home you have to understand your audience inside and out. You need to know the demographics, their likes and dislikes, where they hang out online and where they don’t. In this way you can ensure that you or your team develop tailor-made content marketing for your audience. Giving visitors to your site exactly what they want or need will give you the very best chance of them completing the desired action whether it’s signing up to your newsletter or purchasing a product.
2. Target Customer Needs
If you’re going to get customers to complete a desired action, such as purchasing an ebook, for example, it’s vital that your proposition or offering addresses a specific need that your audience has.
If I’m targeting prospective business podcasters to sell an ebook on business podcasting, the copy (text or video) on the sales page should entice them to purchase by showing that the book provides the know-how to answer their needs.
3) Market Cross-platform
Your target audience will not consume just text on the web. Nowadays we also watch video or listen to audio or purchase apps for our tablet PCs. Because you’re looking to entice your audience to take action, make sure your marketing is cross-platform. Actionable marketing is cross-platform, multi-format but remains highly focused targeting the audience’s needs.
4) Build Trust
To get your audience to complete the actions you desire, whether it’s purchasing, giving you their email address or contacting you about your services or products, actionable marketing is built on a solid foundation of trust.
A cheesy sales page won’t cut it; I think one of the best examples of building trust with web-shops, for example, is how Amazon integrated user reviews early on. Recommendations from readers helps build trust that a book is worth purchasing – the desired action of Amazon’s product pages.
Similarly, bloggers who demonstrate they’ve got 50,000 people signed up to their email newsletter don’t have to work so hard to persuade people to sign up than those who have only 50.
When setting out to build trust, it’s important that the trust is related to the action you are trying to elicit: large numbers of subscribers have plenty of weight if you’re looking to get people to sign up to an email list but wouldn’t necessarily have the same kudos if you’re trying to get someone to contact you about your consulting services. Here, customer testimonials using photos, names and links would arguably be more valuable.
5) Make it Easy for People to Reach You
Actionable marketing requires you to ensure that potential customers can take action and get in contact with you as easily as possible. For example, if you’re using an ebook as lead generation it’s important you include hyperlinks in the PDF so readers can get in touch. Put a contact email address in the footer of every page instead of just at the beginning and end of the ebook.
Or include your contact details in every video you put on your YouTube channel.
On your Facebook Page make sure there’s a clearly visible link to your contact details, and so on.
6) Make it easy-peasy for customers to move on to the next stage of the sales funnel
It’s imperative that your content marketing includes a clear chain of actionable steps, encouraging potential customers to move on to the next stage of the sales funnel. One tip is to plan this out before you even create the content so you understand each step of the process yourself. I personally like to draw this out by hand so I can actually see it.
Whatever you do, don’t try and tag this on after you’ve created the content. Content should be developed to facilitate leads and sales, not just for the sake of it.
A good example of moving prospects down the sales funnel is bloggers who do a lot of affiliate marketing. Most of them use actionable marketing because they provide valuable help and tips in their blog posts and then include a promotion box at the end of each blog post, encouraging the visitor to take action and purchase a product.
Another example could be the business that places a discount offer in a QR code that you use to share your contact details, encouraging potential customers to move on from the QR code to purchase.
8.) Give Good Value – Always !
Actionable marketing always gives good value, encouraging customers to either proceed down to the next stage of the sales funnel or purchase again. For example, successful bloggers typically send out discount offers to new products to those that have already purchased a product or those that subscribe to their auto-responder tutorials.
If you’re, say, teaching and encouraging someone to develop the perfect “six pack”, washboard stomach through your 10 weekly email course, which provides valuable tips and advice, you could give one free ebook away that you usually charge for but include a special offer for a set of training DVDs you’ve put together.
What’s Your Marketing Mindset?
Try to think of a successful online marketing strategy as actionable marketing: marketing that gets prospects to connect with your business online through meaningful, valuable content that addresses potential customers’ needs.
Then try to make sure that at each stage prospects encounter your content there are tactics to encourage them to take action.
What About You?
What do you think makes for great actionable marketing? What tips do you have to share?
About Jon
