Laptop call to action

Top tips for calls to action

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Calls-to-action (CTA) help drive people to your offers. If your CTAs aren’t effective at capturing people’s attention and persuading them to click, then it makes the offer useless.  

CTAs can be used on product pages (non-landing pages), in display ads, email, social media and anywhere you can market your offer. But not all CTAs are created equal. In a world where every brand is fighting for attention, it’s critical that prospects choose your offer over your competitors.  

CTA’s are a key part of your content marketing strategy and overall marketing plan. Here are some tips to creating effective marketing CTAs that get the clicks.  

Call to action where the eye can see 

Calls-to-action do best “above the fold” – the space where your web page is viewable to the user without having to scroll down. According to heat map analysis, anything “below the fold” will only be viewed by 50% of people – your potential customers – who visit your page. Doubling impressions on your CTAs can significantly increase your lead count. 

Be clear  

Be clear and specific in your call to actions about what you want a visitor to do. Don’t be clever. If you’re giving away a free guide, say “Download our FREE guide to…” and explain the title of the guide. If you’re hosting a free webinar, say “Register for our FREE webinar on…” so that people registering will be your target market and therefore quality leads.  

Your topics should clearly convey a compelling benefit of downloading or registering to join the webinar. This elevates your call to action from the standard â€œDownload Now” or “Get a Free Article” as the full description helps to make your CTA’s much more specific. 

Use contrast to make CTA stand out 

A call-to-action is meant to stand out, so if your CTA blends in too much with your website design, no one will notice it. You want as many visitors to land on that call-to-action as possible, so use contrasting colours to make the CTA stand out, and more importantly, use design to make it clear it is a clickable call-to-action. 

Link your CTA to a dedicated landing page 

This tip might seem minor, but it’s incredible how often businesses miss this opportunity. For a successful marketing campaign, calls-to-action are meant to send visitors to a dedicated landing page where they receive a specific offer such as the download of a guide or a template.  

Do not use CTAs to drive people to your homepage. Even if your CTA is about your brand or product (and perhaps not an offer like a download), still send them to a targeted landing page that is relevant to what they are looking for. If you have the opportunity to use a CTA, send them to a page that will convert them into a lead. 

Promote offers on product pages 

CTAs shouldn’t be one size fits all. If your company offers various products or services, you may want to consider creating a different offer for each of them. Then you can place CTAs linking to each offer on the website pages that are most relevant to that offer. 

Thank-you pages 

Even if someone completes a form on your website (thus they’ve converted as a lead), don’t stop there. Increasing engagement is a top priority for marketers so that prospects turn into loyal fans therefore targeted and personalises marketing communication is essential to maintain engagement. Once someone reaches a “thank you page,” the page that a visitor arrives on after completing a form, use that space as an opportunity to promote more offers and helpful content for your target audience.  

These tips are taken from our detailed ebook â€“ 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips.

Find out more about marketing your business.  

Magnet symbolising inbound marketing

What is lead generation marketing?

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A lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. As a lead, you’d hear from a business or organisation with which you’ve already opened communication from, instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased your contact information.

The lead generation process starts with a visitor discovering your business through one of your marketing channels, such as your website, blog, Ad or social media page.

That visitor then clicks on your call-to-action (CTA) taking them through to a landing page on your website that’s designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer.

What’s key to your lead generation marketing is the different channels that you can utilise to help start the lead generation process. Remember the information you provide is about providing your target audience – your ideal customers – with helpful tips, insight, a course or a template that will help with their business.  Here’s an overview of what inbound marketing includes to help with lead generation.

Content Marketing

Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to offer visitors useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content. At the bottom of a post, in the hero image, or even on the side panel. The more interested a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your CTA and move onto your landing page with specific instructions to ‘download an ebook’; ‘book a course’; ‘sign up to a newsletter’.

Blog

The great thing about using your blog posts to promote an offer is that you can tailor the entire piece to the end goal. So, if your offer is an instructional video on setting up Zoom video conferencing, then you can write a blog post to accompany that with background as to the benefits and step by step points.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action, from the swipe up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links. You can also promote your offerings on your social posts and include a call to-action in your caption.

Email marketing

Email is a great place to reach the people who already know your brand and product or service. It’s much easier to ask them to take an action since they’ve previously subscribed to your list. Emails tend to be a bit cluttered, so use CTAs that have compelling copy.

Ads and Remarketing

The sole purpose of a Pay Per Click (PPC) ad such as Google Adwords is to get people to take action. Otherwise, why spend the money? If you want people to convert, be sure that your landing page and offer match exactly what is promised in the ad, and that the action you want users to take is clear. Read more about the benefits of PPC.

Creating a marketing plan can help you run a coordinated campaign. Our Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing has loads more details for effective lead generation, download our free ebook.

Read more about inbound marketing strategy for your business.

Ebooks

Download The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing.

question marks to create marketing persona

Tips to create an online persona for your business

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With many firms currently remote working due to the coronavirus, we thought we’d revisit how to create an online persona for your business.

As you adjust to the current situation you may find you are reevaluating business strategy which includes your marketing strategy and inbound marketing campaigns. At the core of this plan should be an online persona for your business. This provides you or your business development and marketing team with a representation of who your target audience is. This is based on either data you have acquired or through creating a fictitious character of your ideal client.

If this is not something you’ve looked at doing before, now could be a good time to take stock and really delve into who your target audience is. This way, when you start to ramp up activity in a few months, you will be in a good position to hit the ground running.

Who is your audience?

If you haven’t already got a defined target audience, you firstly need to remind yourself of who you are wanting to reach. Start with questions such as:

  • Who does your company identify with? Be data driven. Analyse your data to work out who is taking up your services.
  • Who are your long-standing clients?
  • Is there a pattern of industry sector that they are from?
  • Are the business you deal with mainly SME or large corporations?

Also think about location. Is your business focussed on servicing clients in a particular geographical area?

Creating your persona

These personas bring to life an individual that you are marketing to as part of your lead generation strategy to gain qualified leads. It helps to personalise campaigns and be targeted.

The beauty of this exercise in setting up a persona is that it’s something you can easily do yourself with a few simple steps. You may find that a quick brainstorm session with a colleague (via video conference!) can help you get the persona into shape. Questions to ask to build your persona include:

  • What’s the person’s age?
  • Where do they live?
  • What’s their job role and sector they work in?
  • Imagine their goals such as business growth, saving the business money or future promotion.
  • Then imagine what challenges they face and create solutions around these.

Once you start to answer these, you can quickly begin to see a personality form in front of you.

Create a visual record of your persona

We create a simple one slide PowerPoint visual once we have gathered all the facts about our persona.

Create bullet points that answer all your questions that offer a solution to their business problem or needs. This can then form key messages within your content marketing for campaigns.

Finalise the visual with a clear box out which defines:

  • How you help them
  • The overarching marketing message of how your business helps them
  • Your one-line elevator pitch

The reason we create this simple visual is that it’s then easy to share with sales and marketing colleagues; business development teams; design or digital marketing agencies. The reason being is that you want a coordinated approach to your sales and marketing so that you have consistency of messaging. This then helps to build brand trust, loyalty and position you as a thought leader.

Get a head start with your marketing persona

By taking time to understand the needs of your target audience you can begin to understand what channels would be best for a digital marketing campaign. Right now you could use your persona to help you refresh the content on your website or add a blog page and use the right tone of voice in your social media marketing.

By adding fresh content to your website you’re maintaining presence while keeping your customers informed. You’re also keeping your website optimised which assists with your search engine rankings. 

With this persona to hand you will really understand the wants and needs of your target audience.

Keep an eye on our blog over the coming weeks for further digital marketing tips and advice from Smart Cow, an inbound marketing agency in London.

Using social media for inbound marketing

Maintain presence through social media

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As we start to adjust to our new ‘normal’ working from home, having meetings via video and keeping in doors to stave off coronavirus, now is a good time to take stock of your current social channels for your business and how it fits into your overall marketing strategy and search engine results. Make the most of your channels and continue to maintain presence over the next few months.   

In this blog, we’ll give you a few tips to help you with your social media presence as well as ideas for making your content more targeted.  

Who are you marketing too?  

It’s important to be targeted. You need to know and understand your audience. Now could be a good time to take a look at who your core customer is and really understand their needs as business owners. Once you’ve defined your audience, use this insight as the basis for creating a persona for them, read more about setting this up.  

By having the details of the persona to hand when you write social media posts, or any content for that matter, this will help you provide answers to their questions and help them overcome their challenges. Ultimately you want to build trust with your audience.      

Content marketing  

Build a social media strategy and tailor your social media posts to the platform, its users and your target audience – your potential clients. A chatty tone for Facebook or Instagram will differ to the messages you want to get across on LinkedIn.  

Whichever social network, remember to be a thought leader to your audience. You can do this by providing tips, advice and comments that your target audience will be interested to hear about and would want to share themselves.  

Right now, writing blogs, email marketing, or creating ad campaigns about the government’s coronavirus advice for businesses and access to grants is a great way for accounting firms to keep in touch with their clients to help give some reassurance to large and small businesses alike at this unprecedented time.  

It’s important to get the right tone of voice for the social platform you’re using. But, that’s the beauty of taking the time to research and create a persona. Now you know the right messages for your target audience. 

Avoid sales on social  

Ironically in order to drive sales you have to refrain from using textbook sales techniques on social media platforms. This is meant to be a social environment and people are generally not there to be sold to. Especially at this time, businesses are looking for advice, tips and how to guides to help them get through the challenging times.  

Have a think about what tips you can offer your target audience and create a blog and a few image led social posts centred around your helpful tips.  

Due to these unprecedented times, it’s less about lead generation and more about being helpful and supportive with your content marketing. Think of how you can support local businesses at this difficult time.

Review your social media channels  

Social media management for your company is key, however it is important to note there’s clear answer as to what the right social media platform for your business is to reach out to your client base. It’s worth remembering that one size does not fit all. Take the time to review what platforms are right for your business, brand and the prospective clients you want to reach out to. 

By maintaining presence through social media and new blogs on your website can help in the long term with your website ranking in search results.

For support on social media communications and other marketing services please schedule a free consultation with Smart Cow Marketing which is a social media agency in Croydon

Social media marketing resources: 

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