This short video podcast takes you into the second part of the RACE marketing model: how you should interACT with your customers.

Watching this video will ensure you understand the critical Act stage in developing a digital marketing plan using RACE to improve results from your digital marketing performance.

Why not use some of these guidelines to connect with your customers today?

The RACE Marketing Model – Act.

With that, I should explain why we’ve got that stage. I think, very often, when people look at the marketing funnel, it’s simply, and with web marketing, it’s drive your visitors to the website and then encourage them to buy. And then do the look at the customer retention.

The reason we’ve got ACT is that it’s such a challenge, as someone hits a website, to encourage them to interact and even to stay on the site. If you look at the analytics, very often, a third or a half of the audience might leave after 10 seconds.

So what we really need to look at is are we offering the right sense trails in terms of the customer journeys which are going to appeal to visitors so that they know they’re in the right place, and then they can follow on to find more information. And then it’s the right content to support their decisions.

So in terms of the skills, what I would say is start with the customer, because there’s always been a problem with marketing and web marketing, digital marketing in particular.

Focus on customers

It’s often led by the company products and services, rather than based around the customer needs. So a customer-centric approach is based around the customer. And the technique, the skill I would say to develop is around customer personas, where you use research to understand the different types of audiences, and then to identify key groups that are important to you so you can communicate with them in a consistent, engaging way.

Because very often, I see in businesses, different members of a team, they won’t have a good understanding of who the audience are or how they’re going to communicate with them.

So personas are a skill that really you can apply, whether you’re working agency side or client side, and they’re important in all types of businesses.

Analytics

Then I’d say another key skill in the ACT area is around the customer journey, management and understanding that. So that’s the analytics where you can review the paths of visitors through the site, I think in terms of forward path and reverse path analysis.

So you can really see the content that’s working, both for your audience and yourself, and where it’s not. You can try and optimise it, because very often there’s not enough time put into optimization.

Companies will update a website perhaps every two to three years or even longer. They’ll do a refresh. But they’re not continuously optimising it using techniques like AB testing.

So if you can develop those skills which allow you to use a more data-driven approach to improve in content and the customer journeys, that’s a skill that’s really going to put you in a good foundation for different types of roles in the future.

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Recommended reading:

Using the RACE model improves your Digital Marketing

Do you know the most effective format and channel to REACH your target audience?