Empower Consumers

An ideal marketing strategy is one that gets audiences moving. It creates consumer reactions and actions that benefit your business—whether that may be enhanced awareness and engagement, social sharing and online support, or purchasing. Effective messaging is vital to any strategic business plan, and this is where content marketing is your power move. Action-oriented content is based on its ability to instigate your audience to interact with your brand, and carry out the calls-to-action (CTA) that promote your business–but this is only possible if you are providing the tools and queues for consumers to act on.

Using interactive tools and stating the CTA conditions an actionable audience to promote your brand. And because consumers are considered influencers of your brand due to the social media klout they generate as a whole, placing recognizable queues to prompt your audiences to share, repost, follow, and all other public displays of brand affection, is a valuable way to expand the reach and enhance engagement. These opportunities make consumers feel empowered and socially influential as it allows them to support and share the brands, and products or services they feel tied to.

Encourage Two-Way Conversation

The way a brand is communicated shapes how the audience reacts and interacts with it, and thus determines consumer behaviors and buzz about your brand. Relaying action-oriented content to your target audience can help you to leverage your marketing channels and capitalize on your web and social strategies. Encouraging two-way conversation, and highlighting user-generated content (UGC) is an easy way to diversify your content (plus less writing for you) and further strengthen consumer connections and brand loyalty.

Appealing to the compassions of your target audience is both emotionally and behaviorally motivating, so incorporating ideas like social responsibility and “giving back” into your messaging or certain marketing initiatives can produce positive results for your business. Encourage consumers to share their stories related to your brand and business. This social sharing causes peer-peer influencing, which can quickly garner brand recognition and support.

Here are a few easy ways to incorporate action-oriented content that elicits consumer CTA to your content marketing plan:

Buttons

Provide visual queues like buttons, icons, and widgets that are recognizable to audiences, and connect to other channels/platforms to further engage. These tools provide enhanced functionality so that the audience can share and promote your branded content with the click of a button–rather than whatever other roundabout way they might otherwise try, or not attempt at all. Icons are also an effective tool to signify support for your brand and use of your products or services. And as these buttons become more recognized, it builds credibility and pushes momentum behind your content marketing and messaging.

Social Shares

Asking or providing audiences with the obvious opportunities to follow your business on various web and social media platforms increases the likelihood of them post or re-posting, mentioning, and tagging your business in a public forum. This is a well-known marketing strategy that builds social traction for your brand–increasing traffic to your web and social pages.

Redirect

Incorporating links within your content that direct to web pages, both in and outside of your website, similarly directs navigation of your site which helps to inform web visitors of who you are and what you have to offer them. Linking to sources outside of your website is also beneficial to display the reliability of your brand (like links to research supporting findings of or related to your business), as well as to media sources that have mentioned your brand (like publications, articles, and influencer posts)–this build traffic to your online assets.

Subscribe

Provide obvious opportunities for audiences to subscribe, register, and create accounts on your website and connected digital platforms. These accounts retain audiences, and prompting consumers to fill out simple forms with basic information helps build your database for future targeted marketing tactics.

A few other ideas to consider incorporating into your action-oriented content include the following CTAs:

• Share with a Friend: offer discounts and incentives for sharing, and other promos for tagging/mentioning products or “checking-in” to locations.
• Surveys, comments, reviews: consumers trust their peers’ reviews, so allow space for commentary. And remember, emotionally charged audiences are more motivated and likely to leave comments/feedback.
• Donate, Support: Another way to appeal to social responsibility and organizations or causes.
• Contests, Raffles