3 Steps to More Purposeful Online Marketing: Part 3

This is a guest post by Diane Gilleland, aka Sister Diane, of CraftyPod.com. Diane makes ebooks, podcasts, and videos about what it means to make things, and what happens when you turn making things into your vocation.

In this three-part series of posts, we’re looking at three important questions to help you do more effective online marketing. You can read the first post in the series here and the second one here.

In most old-school marketing books, you’ll see some coverage of the “call to action” concept. This term simply means that after you tell people about your product, you tell them to go get it – or in other words, ask for the sale. (You may have heard these common calls to action: “Call now!” “Visit your local retailer today!” “Click here!”)

When we market with online tools like blogs, Twitter and Facebook, we’re in effect having an ongoing conversation with our readers – so we may forget, in posting and conversing day after day, to point out that we want, after all, to be doing busines with these folks.

This brings us to our last important question:

What, specifically, do you need people to do after reading your posts?

Before you can formulate a good online call to action, you need to be clear on exactly what action you want. Do you want people to click over to your online store and buy something? Which item do you want them to buy? Do you want them to email you and offer you some freelance work? Do you want them to sign up for your next knitting class?

Next, it’s time to get out that online editorial calendar we were working on in last week’s post, and schedule in some calls to action. Blend these more direct posts with the kinds of posts we discussed last week – those that communicate what skills and expertise you have that make your product high in value.

What does a call to action look like, then? Let’s go back to our pearl earring example from our previous post. You might want to market a specific hoop design you’ve come up with for your Spring line. So, you’ll spend several days posting in your online spaces about the skills and expertise you bring to the design: how you arrived at the perfect hoop size, why you chose the size and color of pearls you chose, why you decided to hammer the hoops a little so they’d have texture. And after these days of storytelling, you’d share the fact that these earrings are now available for orders – go take a look! Or you might announce that the first ten orders will get a bonus polishing cloth, so hurry!

In other words, the idea is to grow your customers’ interest in something specific, and then invite them to act on this interest. It’s a storytelling cycle you’ll repeat over and over.

Image by: Agnes L. Reynes-Williams, via Flickr Creative Commons

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