In the USA, there are 30.7 million small businesses which account for 99.9 % of all U.S businesses. In addition, 543,000 businesses are started each month.Evidently, there are countless competitors out there. In order to stand out from the crowd, having a good marketing strategy plan is essential in a business – that’s why we are going to talk about RACE model for you !
What is RACE Model?
RACE Model is a marketing planning framework for marketer to target their target audience into 4 stages : Reach , Act , Convert , Engage. The model is proposed by Dave Chaffey from Smart Insight a digital marketing agency from United Kingdom
How to stand out from the crowd?
By utilizing effective marketing strategies, you can boost sales and grow your business. Dave Chaffey from Smart insight has proposed a RACE framework to guide you in planning out the activities in a structured format and ultimately develop an effective digital marketing plan.
In the following, we are going to dissect the RACE framework into sections.
Step 1: Reach
Reach targets audiences on blogs, social media, search engines, or publishers. This step aims to build awareness of a brand, its products, and services.
It is also known as inbound marketing that engages customers with useful content through organic means.
Example:
Social media marketing, Paid ad campaigns (Facebook, Linked in, Google AdWords), SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Step 2: Act
Act is short for interaction.
This step aims to persuade users to interact with the website, interactive tools, or community.
It is important to think about how the customer will take the next step into your marketing process instead of clicking the back button.
Example:
Contact Forms, Email Marketing, Newsletters
Step 3: Convert
This is arguably the key step in this process and that is converting leads into sales with an effective e-commerce process, promotions, or sales pitch.
Example:
Website audit, Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Step 4: Engage
Through content marketing, engage with new customers and turn them into loyal customers, with a higher lifetime value.
Example:
Blog marketing, video marketing, Newsletter
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Want to get a Race Model template?
[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]A simple step and get your own copy! Get a better understanding of your marketing strategy with the race model.
[/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/6″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/6″][vc_empty_space][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″]The application of the RACE model in reality
Now, we should have a brief understanding of the RACE model, but how to effectively apply the RACE model in your business?
Planning is a crucial step for every business activity, as the step of planning provides scope and objectives for the following marketing activities.
The following, we will take an example as an e-commerce store to adopt the RACE model in business reality,
Given that the store’s niche is a Korean cosmetics store, let’s move on to the first step of the RACE model.
Reaching your audience
We can start with a brief competitor analysis to understand the current market, which will definitely help you to shape your customer persona.
Getting insight from your competitors’ social media channels to identify their target market and yours.
The most generic way to approach your target audience for a new e-commerce business would be – Paid advertising.
As you will be able to target your audience by demographic, interests, or behaviors, which will help you to find and locate your target market.
However, there are also free and organic ways to attract your target audience to your website by SEO (Search engine optimization).
By providing valuable content and solutions to your audience when they are searching for specific keywords. That is also called pull marketing to draw attention from your audience, instead of pushing ads to their view.
In our case, the target audience might be at age 18-35, women who are interested in Korean culture (KPop), and we can also write a blog for common skincare problems with solutions, for example: “How to remove blackheads naturally?”.
Interact with your audience
After you identify your target market and target audience, you want the users to interact with your products/ services.
Therefore, you need to take action to generate useful and relevant content for them.
To engage with your audience, you could share information through social media or blog posts.
In our case, we would share the skincare hacks or hot sales beauty Korean products on Instagram.
If the audience finds the posts valuable, they may like, comment or even share the posts with their friends.
In other words, your content should encourage the users to interact with your post, for example, asking a question for a common skin care problem and asking the user to tag their friends.
The reason why we need to encourage the users to interact with the post is to create retargeting campaigns on Facebook or Instagram (or other social media channels).
As you can retarget the people who have engaged (saved/commented/liked your post) with your Instagram content but haven’t taken further action to visit your website(so-called IG engager 365 days).
In this respect, this custom audience group has a higher interest in your business and a higher possibility to guide them further through the customer journey. Do not miss the chance to extend your reach to them.
Convert with your audience
This is the vital step of the process, it drives the audience to buy or take an action to your business (In the B2B aspect, initial inquiry with customer representatives).
In this step, a website audit can enhance the performance of the website and ultimately, turn the audience into paying customers.
In an e-commerce business, a website is the most important platform to promote and sell your products.
A website with a good UX/UI website allows users to find their desired products with ease and reduce the bounce rate by increasing the loading speed.
Therefore, it is not a bad idea to revamp your website and set a regular website audit annually to improve the performance of the website and avoid major issues.
Engage with your audience
Having your first customer is not easy, as we all know. So, don’t let your customer leave your marketing plan after their first-time purchase.
According to research, the new customer will only have a 13 % chance to buy your product, while repeat customers will have a 60-70% chance of repurchasing.
Keeping your repeated customer in a warm audience list will help you engage and interact with them by free channel (e.g Email, WhatsApp, Facebook Inbox).
By sending relevant content and updates to your warm audience, you will keep them in touch with you. Some of the seasonal emails or messages like birthday and Christmas emails will help your brand recall in your customer’s mind.
Ultimately, you want to turn repeated customers into loyal customers.
A loyal customer is not only buying from you, they will also refer your brand to their friends and family, actually acting like your brand ambassadors.
To encourage the referral activities, you might also create a referral link or code for your local customs to share the product and get a commission from your brand.
Conclusion
The model covers the full customer life cycle and how a business could interact with its audience through different phrases with different tactics. If you do not have any solid plan for your business, start planning one with our RACE model template.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][/vc_row][vc_column width=”1/6″][vc_empty_space][vc_empty_space][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″][/vc_column][vc_empty_space][vc_column_text][/vc_column_text][vc_row][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]
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