The Goal of Every Act of Marketing Is to Inspire an Action
Can we all agree that Marketing is about having a conversation with a specific audience, convincing or inspiring them to take your desired action? Cool, now we're on the same page! But sometimes that seems hard to do. As solopreneurs wearing many hats, how do we consistently engage our clients and inspire that action? Pick up the phone, return an email, fill out a lead form, download an e-book, book a consult – whatever our next step is. It helps to remember that marketing is all about ACTION.
I've long liked how Neil Patel and his team at QuickSprout (and of KISSMetrics, CrazyEgg, HelloBar) will dive down into the mechanics, ins, and outs of marketing. They deliver very in-depth articles. Plus they give examples and show how other businesses are putting tips into action.
Have You Tried These “Under the Radar” Marketing Tips?
QuickSprout regularly gives tips on improving conversions. Conversion means someone seeing your content and taking the desired, specified action – they were converted from reader into action taker. They signed up for your email list, they clicked to get your blog posts delivered, they hit the buy button, etc.
QuickSprout is known for their seriously long-form, in-depth blog posts – these are more like guidebooks. BUT … as their own tips say … they are attuned to the right content for the right people. And I like in-depth, well-researched content, so I'm clearly part of their ideal audience! I also like sharing snippets from those posts with you – check out one or two tips at a time, come back to the rest later.
An article that started out years ago as 10 tips for ‘taking action' has become a longer article on “37 Conversion Rate Optimization Tips” – while it seems a mouthful, it's all about inspiring action.
Tip #2 is “publish the right content” – and for QuickSprout readers, it does mean those super meaty blog posts. But for a different business and audience, it could mean podcasts, or FB Lives, or IG Stories, or daily emails.
Another tip they have given is a reminder to not give up too early on our marketing efforts …
Just because your marketing campaign didn’t work the first time doesn’t mean you should completely trash it. Sometimes it takes a couple of attempts to persuade your audience.
My researcher heart was warmed by tip #15 – show the actual evidence.
Don't just tell someone that something is so, give them the objective facts – add in data, stats, maybe a cool infographic to visually represent those numbers. When people don't know you yet, they aren't as likely to take action. They need some convincing, and some evidence to back you up won't hurt.
There's a lot of links to research, 3rd parties, examples in this post – so they clearly follow their own advice.
I'd bet most of us have not focused on all 37 things we could be doing to improve our conversions, and inspire our audiences to take action with us. And we can't do them all at once! But pick one from this blog post to read up on and take a little action on yourself over the next month.
[orig Feb 2018; updated Sept 2020]
