Progress Triggers

Your company can trigger transformational progress in just as many ways as Resistance can impede it. By no means are the following guideposts and examples exhaustive, but I hope they will start to expand the ways you think about companies helping their customers make transformational progress.

Facilitate with Knowledge

I often hear aspiring Transformer companies say they aim to educate their audiences with content marketing that delivers a ton of information about their goals and how to achieve them. My two cents is that information is just data, and there’s no shortage of that in the lives of Transformational Consumers. In fact, at this stage of the Internet, more information always threatens to overwhelm or distract this audience.

Knowledge, however, is information strategically configured and delivered to solve a specific problem or challenge people face. Many Transformer companies have built thriving product lines and brilliant marketing programs around knowledge solutions to HWW problems or challenges.

The Mint Life blog is one of the best examples of such a program, triggering Mint users’ progress toward financial goals like saving money toward a goal and getting out of debt with content that creates aha moments and powers progress. A post titled “The 50/20/30 Rule for Minimalist Budgeting,” for example, helps younger Mint users overcome the frustration with complex budget plans by offering a basic budget outline that assigns 50% of income to expenses, 20% to savings, and 30% to personal lifestyle line items such as dinners out and the like.

The Mint team credits the blog for the program’s early adoption and continued traffic momentum of over 13 million visitors per month, almost ten years after the blog’s beginnings. In an interview with Kissmetrics Blog, Mint’s former lead designer flat-out called it: “Our app didn’t have a high viral coefficient, but we had content that [did].”

This sort of knowledge facilitates customers’ transformational progress by providing clarity and direction for what to do next: the just-right knowledge, in the just-right format, in the just-right time and place in their journeys.

Activate

Products and content can also activate customers who are already very motivated to take a specific, timely action wherever they happen to be on the web or in the world, something the Stanford computer-science professor B. J. Fogg calls “putting a hot trigger in the path.”

A push notification to go for a run 30 minutes before the time a customer has logged runs in the past? That’s a hot trigger, placed in the customer’s path. Sending an April 14th email to investors who haven’t yet funded their IRAs, with a link to where they can do so and a reminder that the deadline is less than 24 hours away? That’s putting a hot trigger in the customer’s path.

You can also serve up activation via inspiration. People who are just embarking on a transformational journey (and people who have gotten stuck along the way) can often be reactivated with a spark of inspiration, small or large. On the small side, many companies publish inspirational quotes and mantras on social media channels, primarily because Transformational Consumers love that little kick-start of activation for a long week of entrepreneurial challenges or health/wealth self-discipline.

Content programs that reposition difficult parts of a transformational journey as more fun, beautiful, or enjoyable than they have seemed before can also be activating. Business and financial challenges (debt, diets, etc.), fitness challenges, and healthy recipe programs featuring gorgeously plated meal pics all fit this bill: inspiration-cum-activation.

On the large side, whole content programs, user success stories, and testimonial programs can be crafted with activation as the top-line objective. When the marketing technology vendor Marketo asked me to speak to business audiences around the world about how I’d used their software to grow a blog audience of over ten million people in less than a year, the idea was not just to explain the software’s features. The goal was to inspire people to believe that level of achievement was possible for them and their businesses, too. In delivering these talks, my goal was to help the marketers in the audience become unstuck and inspired with new ideas, beliefs, and yes, ultimately, the software as a tool they could use to execute their own marketing and business goals. (It’s worth noting here that Transformational Consumers frequently look to B2B products and software for help making progress on their wealthy and wise goals).