Target Locked: Fire When Ready
The idea of a trigger brings to mind images of water guns, or even the increasingly controversial warnings attached to potentially disturbing content. When consuming content, a person’s engagement with the content causes or triggers a reaction that produces a result, whether positive or negative.
This is what a marketer means by trigger: it is anything that begins a reaction or a series of reactions. And in the case of marketing triggers, success is defined by whether or not the trigger effectively sets off the intended reaction.
As a digital marketer the trigger is also known as lead acquisition.
The Digital Trigger
Whether the trigger will be pressed in your favor or not depends on your sales funnel. Marketing requires much more than content with great SEO, but a captivating structure of words isn’t sufficient either.
According to Oregon State University, the beginning of a marketing campaign involves using a trigger to drive awareness and favorability to a target market, which requires both of these components to work.
Can You Balance the Scales?
The battle of the trigger is one that takes constant revisions of your target market. The top priority is for a sales funnel to be direct and effective, producing results.
Stanford University explains lead acquisition as the process of creating demand, an entrance to a sales funnel meant to turn leads into paying customers. So, to produce results, this demand must be optimized by looking at the beginning of your sales funnel.
The Sales Funnel
What is the trigger of a sales funnel, and why is it the most important part? First, let’s look into the composition of a sales funnel.
A company wants to maximize profits by finding new customers, and it has the resources to pursue this through a marketing campaign. This marketing campaign can be thought of as a funnel, slowly guiding potential customers towards conversion.
The first step in the funnel is offering free and useful content or an exclusive bit of advice. This builds up the interest of leads entering the sales funnel, slowly producing repeat customers and loyal buyers.
From Lead to Prospect
The key here is to create prospect customers from the net that was thrown into the target market. And, as Yaro Starak mentions in his blog, the difference between a catch and a miss lies in the potential customer’s decision to opt-in to this free content.
This is the trigger. It is a small action that the customer takes, leading to a chain reaction of further actions that end with a product sale and praise for your marketing skill. However, this an only be accomplished by being on the active side of the trigger, which requires persuasion and influence.
Two Sides to the Trigger
Done correctly, the trigger can make the effort spent on free content into a community of happy potential buyers.
However, poor quality triggers are at risk to backfire! Without proper attention, the focus of these prospects will be lost. As a marketer you can avoid this by providing value to your customers.
Online Marketing 101: Triggers are Essential
Creating an effective trigger is the difference between a sale and a lost customer. It is crucial to the sales funnel. A great trigger is the captivating front runner that breaks past the gatekeeper of each customer and beckons for them to engage with your content.
When discovering ways to increase conversions and raise the conversions of each customers, look at the trigger. The trigger sets everything in action.