Don't Forget to Always Have a Call to Action

I am still surprised that to this day there is one aspect that is missing from many marketing tactics that could make the campaign much more successful. In particular, this one element is absolutely critical to lead generation and nuture campaigns -- it is a call-to-action. 

A call-to-action is an image or text that grabs the visitor's or prospect's attention and directs them to what you want them to do. In the case of a lead gen campaign, the call-to-action would direct the person to a landing page where you can collect their info in exchange for the offer. There are many different calls-to-action and the place where it directs them will depend on the goals of the campaign. 

While this may seem obvious to some, take a look around and see how many emails, web pages, blog posts, ads, etc. don't tell the reader what to do next. This simple element is so often missing and it will make the difference between a successful marketing campaign and a failure. Studies show that tweaking this element properly can make the difference between a good and a great campaign. 

So where do you start? For a call-to-action to be successful, you need to make sure it links to a compelling offer. That's why it's important for you to look through your most recent campaigns and see which offers did the best in terms of conversions and create more calls-to-action for them. Or, you may need to develop a new offer for a new campaign.  

You'll also want to have multiple offers that map to the different stages of the sales funnel so that you can continue to have calls-to-action through subsequent follow-up and lead nurture activities that directs those prospects to new content that will continue to move them along the sales funnel. 

Once you have these offers lined up then you need to add calls-to-action in as many places as possible, as it's difficult to have too many calls-to-action. Some obvious pllace are on your website, on your blog or in blog posts, in presentations, in emails and as part of ads, direct mail and other offline activities. You should also include calls-to action in the content itself, in videos, in your email signatures, and using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

It is this last one, social media, where you do need to limit the number of calls-to-action as many will stop following you if that's all you do is promote in your social media stream. But don't go to the other extreme either and not use it for calls-to-action either.

All of this work around creating offers and placing the calls-to-action will be for naught if your calls-to-action are not compelling enough so your prospects will click on the link or button and convert. There are a few key aspects to a compelling call-to-action including:

• Make it clear in terms of what the visitor needs to do and what the offer is if they do it.
• Make sure it stands out whereever it's placed and that people don't need to scroll on the web page or in the email to get to it. If people don't see it, then it won't be clicked on. 
• Make sure the call-to-action is relevant to the page, where they are in the sales funnel and that the offer is the right content for that call-to-action. Remember the key is to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.

If you follow this process, then you will be well on your way to some compelling calls-to-action that convert but after you've gone this far you will want to continue to optimize the call-to-action and the landing page. That's why it's equally important to measure the effectiveness of the call to action including the click-through-rate (CTR) and click-to-submission. With these results you can experiment with and keep testing different offers, landing pages and different aspects of the call-to-action including text, colors, images, etc.

The call-to-action is a pivotal part of any marketing campaign. While your objective may be different for the call-to-action, in this post we focused on using them for lead generation, the need to have them never changes. If you don't have them, then you might as well skip doing the campaign in the first place and not waste the time and resources.  

Comments

[Jasmin]

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