Quickly, easily create sequences sparking positive behaviors at scale

The Action Map is a tool and a method for omnichannel communications.

It’s become a globally featured best practice for quickly and repeatably aligning business goals, customer needs, media targeting, omnichannel tagging / optimization, and specificity of behavior with creative messaging and tactic / channel choices — that results in exponential growth in every case.

The Action Map is absolutely free to anyone who’d like to use it. You’ll find it very quickly and easily removes a lot of wasted effort from communications strategy.

Action Mapping fits right into the ways you think about marketing.

Small businesses and organizations can use it as well as the complex brands who were the foundation for its success.
Ping me now, and I’ll help you make use of it right away.

The Action Map is your singular canvas to sync business goals with a chain of specific behaviors, customer needs, creative execution, measurement, and media.

  • Of course, the Action Map didn’t happen overnight. At first, while our teams were hard at work creating integrated campaigns in CPG and QSR, we started to see a relationship emerge between content that advocated for the audience at-large creating scale across the network, and its relationship to the next content shown. The way for a brand to continue scaled engagement was with content that then advocated for the individual to their close friends.

    But we continued to push on this connection, making a bit of a mix tape between parts of theBehavior Chain published by BJ Fogg, the participation inequality law, coined by Jakob Nielsen, Syd Field’s screenwriting paradigm, Stanford design thinking process, interaction design best practices, and psychology principles of mirroring/modeling.

    Not only did it skyrocket all of our most valued actions, and drop our media costs, the ARF surveyed customers to discover that people who could only remember these campaigns spent 7x in store. Then we employed it again on behalf of a fast food brand you know, and structured a complex dual brand-and-new-prdoduct launch that sold more of that single menu item in its first ten weeks than McDonalds sold burgers in their first 18 years.

    Moving into healthcare, what we called the 3-act campaign method started to mature, translating the patient or HCP journey to the marketing funnel and brand strategy into dynamic executions. Not only did this method build the world’s two largest, most engaged therapeutic area communities for psoriasis and multiple sclerosis, it also gave a rare CF community of 25,000 a voice that reached over 20 generations of sharing. The CRM sign-up rate outpaced traditional digital ads by 76:1. Script lift was measured at an increased rate of 6:1 over traditional feature/benefit branded pharma ads.

    The team dug in to every piece of content we ran live, tagged each asset with what part of the behavior chain it would apply, which part of the content mix it was in, along with the ad unit type, pronoun use, call to action, tonality and design elements. Then ran painstaking statistical regression analyses including hundreds of thousands of engagement signals, and we codified what is called the Action Map today.

    This evaluation gave us a very clear picture that depending on the objective, there were specific content attributes that lead to better performance. Not only did this sharpen our strategic decisions, but also helped our brand partners make business cases easier for investment. 

    Creative teams got very valuable feedback from this tagging exercise, as they can focus on designing more expansive concepts only against what is driving engagement at each pillar in the chain. One executive creative leader called it “Weaving gold,” because the feedback provided the threads they needed to quickly shape the next highest performing work.

Each step in the Action Map sequence

  • Broad concept content that people can use to represent their interest in a condition or therapeutic area. Think about sharing a post with a ribbon on it to support all the people living with a particular illness and those who are closest to them.  

  • Content that helps people living with the illness describe what it’s like to be them, to gain empathy from the people in their network

  • Clearly demonstrate the situations that are critical to better care. Often, people don’t know what to do in a doctor’s visit or in talking with family about medical decisions. In content, we have the time and space to show what success looks like in these important moments.

  • Having shown what a successful moment looks like, we can distribute content that prompts the specific action that must be taken.

    This could be taking medicine with lunch, or remembering to pack your medicine the night before.

    In omnichannel content we have the ability to add time to the design palate, which makes specific actions available as a design challenge.

  • Create celebratory content for all the people who are succeeding. Systematic feedback is now an institutionalized part of Website design, and it’s just as important in distributed experiences.

    Brands need to provide content that congratulates people, so they can feel rewarded for the behaviors they have performed successfully.

    This content is highly sharable and brings more people into the brand audience, primed to show their support by sharing an Inspire post.

The Action Map adds "behaviors performed" to your analytics reports.

The Action Map adds "behaviors performed" to your analytics reports.

Once you design the behaviors that you need to prompt at each point in the funnel, your metrics now tell you more than just how the media or creative performed, but what behaviors the audience can perform through that asset.

When you use sequential media and the Action Map together, people in the target sort themselves into smaller audience segments based on engagement.

The concept of “Creative Burnout” is a myth, designed to save media company overhead from making creative asset changes. When you use the Action Map, you gain the ability to dial up the engagement of segments based on what they are able to do – and to dial down content that an audience wasn’t taking action on.

Turn the funnel into a vase

What we always took for granted as the Marketing Funnel began taking repeatable shape as a marketing vase: using media dollars to put useful, representative content into a media target, and then enabling the audience to operate as a network, altering the algorithm in ways only they could.

As a network sharing to their friends and family, they’re expanding the audience at each step of engagement and re-targeting messages to a broader, much more qualified and interested group of people.

Align Media Optimization

This ability to specifically measure content against an audience via Action Map is especially helpful for paid media value, methods and calibration.

Having installed a mechanism that enables audiences to sort themselves based on engagement is incredibly valuable to media investment. Because the chain is designed to specify the key behaviors at each major part of the customer journey, media can optimize spend more effectively.

When a group engages in an inspire asset, we have gotten a true size of the addressable audience from our initial media buy.

By the same token, those who engage in the empathize content must be customers or people heavily involved in the decision, like a caregiver, spouse, or close friend — because we’re designing specifically for them to gain empathy from the people they care about, only customers and people very close to them would take action.

People who engage in model are preparing for a visit, and those who engage in trigger are downfunnel and primed for a product message – because they have signaled through their model engagement that’s the place where they are in the purchase journey.

Having captured these engagement signals allows us to provide direct links to branded assets, CRM signups, and other depth-of-brand actions at the time they are ready to perform those more specific behaviors. We can also sequence content between pillars to understand who is capable of taking a next step as a retargeting exercise – but instead of retargeting anyone who has engaged, we can be deliberate in retargeting specific groups with specific next steps.

And similar to what creative teams can do when they have behavioral feedback, media teams can also optimize to behaviors happening in market.

Results You Wouldn’t Believe, If They Weren’t Data-driven

We are so proud of the integrated teams that have used the Action Map and helped solve for the shared problem space in healthcare with this approach since.

The top brand in immuno-oncology has used the behavior chain to scale across all of its indications in ways that focus teams on action-driven campaigns. The world’s largest retailer used it for 300% more people to get their flu vaccine, and to help millions of people living with diabetes choose the right insulin, among other efforts that continue to make healthcare a reality for a significant portion of the US.

Today, teams are using the behavior chain for trackable omnichannel content modules for global pharma brands, as the data analysis can now identify what behavior was being asked for and performed, with which clinical evidence, by channel, by media buy.