Is Your Marketing Actionable?

12 Actionable Marketing Elements

What is actionable marketing? Contrary to what some may think, actionable marketing has nothing to do with the law where actionable means to bring a legal suit. Rather, actionable refers to marketing’s ability to persuade prospects, customers and the public to engage with your firm.

12 Actionable marketing elements

Here are the twelve elements that define actionable marketing.

1. Is goal-oriented. Your marketing objectives should be aligned with those of your business. They can be sub-goals that lead to a higher-level purpose.
2. Targets a specific audience. Understand your audience’s demographics, psychographics and past actions to tailor your marketing to that segment. Use a set of marketing personas so that your team feels like its talking to a real person, not an amorphous group.
3. Meets customer needs. To entice prospects to take the next step in the purchase process, it’s critical that your offering provides solutions to their perceived problems.
4. Expands firm’s reach through stories. Since the sense of a company is ingrained in its history and experience, stories are critical to extend a firm’s brand and sense of approachability.
5. Builds brand through integration of brand attributes. Actionable marketing like other forms of marketing aims to enhance brand. Therefore, it’s critical to incorporate the brand into marketing.
6. Communicates and distributes messages in a variety of formats across an array of devices. Actionable marketing is format and device agnostic. Since the objective is to get customers to take action, it uses media and devices the audience favors.
7. Builds trust. For many businesses, customers feel that the trust is gone. Therefore, when taking an actionable approach, it’s important to have high ethical standards and a level of transparency in interacting with your customers.
8. Entices prospects to proceed to the next phase of your purchase process. Include a call-to-action to guide prospects to act. Tailor your call-to-action to the next step in the process. To aid tracking, use targeted landing pages and promotional codes.
9. Requires prospects to proactively connect with your firm. To this end, it’s critical to include a response channel, most frequently a direct one.
10. Provides value to prospects and customers. Actionable marketing aims to create a partnership and build relationships. Therefore, it doesn’t interrupt and shout at prospects. It works best when it supplies content, information and service of worth to customers.
11. Isn’t limited to the marketing department. Unlike other forms of marketing, actionable marketing is integrated across the organization to improve the customer experience.
12. Produces measurable results. Outcomes can be analyzed and fed back into your process to improve your efforts going forward. Through the use of a call-to-action, targeted promotional codes and tailored landing pages, actionable marketing generates trackable results that builds your brand and increases sales,

Actionable marketing focuses on getting prospects to engage with your brand and buy from your company in a transparent way that builds trust and relationships. It’s a hybrid of branding and direct marketing that works across different platforms and devices creating value for both the company and the customer.

Do you have any other factors that you’d add to this list?

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen

Heidi Cohen is the President of Riverside Marketing Strategies.
You can find Heidi on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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photo credit: James Cridland via Flickr