Brand and Capture

Call to Action, the Key to Lead Capture and Conversion

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Call to action buttons are graphics are essential elements in an effective business website. A call to action is the graphic or copy that persuades website visitors to take a desired action, whether it's leaving their email address, subscribing to a newsletter or RSS feed or purchasing a product. It doesn't matter how great your offer is or how well-designed your landing page is if you don't convince people to click through. An effective call to action is goal driven and should measurably increase conversion of site traffic to leads and customers.

Steps to Create a Successful Call to Action

1. Clearly define your goal. Is your primary purpose to generate leads or increase product sales or improve brand recognition? Each call to action should have a single goal.
2. Determine what specific action website visitors must take to meet your goal. Your call-to-action should clearly indicate the precise action desired. Do you want visitors to click a link, download an ebook, input their email address? Design your landing page to further entice
3. To measure its success, your call-to-action must be quantifiable. Specifically, you need to know how many click throughs you get from each call to action and how many of those converted (signed up) on the target landing page. From there, you want to quantify how many of those leads ultimately converted into customers.

There are tricks to creating an effective call-to-action that will catch site visitors' attention and compel them to take the desired action. Try these best practices to create powerful calls to action to maximize results:

• Use easily understood graphics in combination with short, simple commands to tell the site visitor what to do. For example, a large button that says "download."
• Use images to capture and direct attention. For example, a bold arrow pointing to what you want the site visitor to do. Photos of people can also be used to direct attention. Make certain the person in the photograph is looking at what you want site visitors to do. Photos in which a person is looking directly at the visitor are less likely to encourage site visitors to act. 
• Use numbers; they're quickly understood and elicit specific actions. If there is a date for a specific event, make sure you include that. If an offer is free, make sure you highlight FREE. This is often the difference maker between a click and no-click.
• Make your call to action clickable to a landing page that is consistent with the call to action offer. For more tips on landing pages, you can review this blog.
• Reinforce your call to action by separating the call from the click. Tell site visitors what you want them to do, then provide a clickable button or link.
• Use bold, contrasting colors to draw the site visitor's eye to the action you want him to take.
• Position call to actions on the first viewable screen and above the fold for best performance. The sooner a visitor's eye encounters your call to action, the more likely they will click through.
• Test a variety of offers, calls to action, page positions and landing pages. Use a scientific approach, like A/B testing, where you try one variation versus another. Measure lead conversions and optimize your calls to action on the based on the most successful combination.

How well do your call to actions perform? Can you measure leads captured by them? We can help with HubSpot software and our call to action design service.

Top Strategies for Landing Page Optimization

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Landing pages are the turnstiles of your Internet presence. They don't necessarily collect money from your visitors, but they do something even more important. They collect commitments. When people sign up for your stuff, they commit themselves to your care, and they trust that you won't abuse the relationship. Like it or not, visitors now become leads, and it's up to you to nurture the relationship and help it grow into something more meaningful. Ideally, your visitors become loyal customers or at least loyal subscribers to your ideas and updates. That's a lot to ask from a single page. Here are my top tips for landing page optimization.

1. Offer your visitors something they want. Seems simple enough, but do you really know what they want? Try asking them. Best approach - get some of them together and buy them lunch. Ask them what you can do for them and what they would like to see offered on your website.
2. Keep it Simple and Social. Don't put Chapter 1 on the page, just tell them what your offer's about, why they will want it and how to get it. That's all.
3. No distractions. No menu items. No external links. Put one good graphic on the page that helps to explain the "what, why and how" of the offer.
4. Keep the form short. Name and e-mail is all you really need. You'll get the rest later. The more stuff you require, the faster they will bail out.
5. Keep it visible, i.e. above the fold in a typical web browser.
6. Don't assume it's perfect. Try different approaches, layouts, text and titles. Try different colors and graphics. Try publishing them in different places and at different times. Try different offers. Don't assume that people really want any of them. You'll find out. Make sure you track each landing page separately and analyze the results. Go with the approaches that work the best.
7. Build in some way to nurture leads when you get them. It could be as simple as responding via e-mail and asking to set up a call or an online chat. HubSpot has some nice built-in tools for lead nurturing. Here are some more lead nurturing tools available foir small businesses.
8. Celebrate your success! When you contact your leads thank them and let them know you appreciate their interest. Even if no business ever materializes, you now have a resource that can prove invaluable as you work your inbound marketing magic. 

Is Direct Mail Marketing Dead? Not If You Do It Right

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Though direct mail pieces are historically considered relatively low-conversion marketing initiatives, powerful direct mail design can make all the difference between an effective campaign and a dud.

Develop Your Message

Direct mail design allows for creativity.  In fact, it depends upon innovation to be effective.  However, your audience should still recognize that the direct mail is coming from you or, more importantly, that your brand or message is not being diluted or obscured for the sake of a one-time mailer.

This means that the basics of your brand, such as logo, tagline or other core messaging, should be present even if they’re not at the forefront.  A direct mail piece should be unique, but you’re making too much of an investment on any major direct mail initiative to be wholly experimental.  Determine your message and goals first, rather than winging it.  

Working Within a Budget

Direct mail design is largely dependent on your available campaign budget, but even a small budget need not constrain your messaging.  Postcards and fliers, for example, are both low-budget options, but they might not speak to the presence or prestige of your brand.

So, when using these or similar forms of inexpensive, direct mail pieces, it’s all the more important to have a talented designer on hand since you don’t want the mailings to look cheap or unprofessional.  That might cause more harm to your brand than good.

Track Your Interactions

A well-designed direct mail campaign should yield some immediate feedback from your audience.  Direct mail pieces should be designed with feedback in mind.  In other words, does the design facilitate comments, reactions, questions, discussions or otherwise call the reader to action?  Plus, no matter how basic or complex your design, are these actions easily trackable?

With a direct email campaign, many online interactions can be traced.  Offline direct mailers can refer potential clients to your website, thereby also yielding a trackable response.

What are your experiences with direct mail marketing? Do you think it's old-school and irrelevant?

Lead Nurturing as Part of an Integrated Marketing Campaign

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There's an interesting debate going on in LinkedIn Answers about the positioning of various lead nurturing software solutions. The marketing automation market leaders face off with each other in an unusual display of bravado. Let's try to boil this down to the primary issues and see how the players compare.

First let's define lead nurturing in the context of a marketing campaign. Lead generation is the process of attracting people to your venue (in the case of internet marketing, we're talking about your website) and convincing them to sign up for something, i.e. capture their contact information. Lead nurturing is what happens after that, the steps you go through to improve your lead's interest in your products and services and ultimately commit to a sale. More loosely defined, lead nurturing is an early form of customer relationship management (CRM), where you work on relationship-building and maintain constant contact with your customers to enhance retention and inside sales.

So the debate is about marketing automation, using software to make the process of lead generation, lead nurturing and CRM as easy and productive as possible. Here's a breakdown of the players and their solutions (this is not an exhaustive list, just the players in the LinkedIn debate):

1. Eloqua - an integrated marketing automation platform featuring lead generation, contact management, e-mail marketing, website forms and landing pages, event management, lead nurturing, crm integration and marketing analytics.
2. Marketo - a b2b marketing platform featuring lead generation, e-mail marketing, contact management, lead nurturing, lead scoring, crm integration and marketing analytics.
3. HubSpot - an inbound marketing platform featuring a website cms, blogging, landing page creation, keyword analysis, on-page seo, social media promotion, inbound link analysis, competitive seo analysis, lead tracking, lead nurturing, marketing analytics and crm integration.

As you can see, Eloqua and Marketo offer similar solutions, focusing primarily on e-mail marketing for lead generation and lead nurturing. HubSpot, on the other hand, offers a complete solution for content marketing, social media marketing, seo, lead tracking and nurturing and marketing analytics. The Eloqua CTO and Marketo VP argue that their solutions offer more in-depth lead nurturing, scoring and deeper analysis of leads than does HubSpot. HubSpot's lead nurturing is new and has not been market-tested as long as either Eloqua and Marketo. Clearly Eloqua and Marketo offer more tools for lead nurturing, but my concern is their lead generation strategy. While e-mail marketing has a place in any internet marketing campaign, I believe that inbound marketing is a better strategy for getting found online and capturing leads.

In the interest of fairness and transparency, we have already chosen HubSpot as our inbound marketing solution, and we are a Certified HubSpot Partner. We have no experience with either Eloqua or Marketo, so it's up to you to investigate the benefits of these HubSpot competitors. We chose HubSpot because it is as close to a complete Internet marketing solution as you can find on the market.

The tip of the HubSpot spear is inbound marketing - creating great content, social media marketing and lead capture using calls-to-action and landing pages. Lead nurturing, closed-loop marketing (crm integration) and marketing analytics then allow you to take your lead generation success and optimize conversions to sales. For us and for our clients, there's a tremendous benefit to combining all of these disciplines in one coherent and easy-to-use platform. With such a platform, sales and marketing people can actually use the software to achieve maximum results without intensive training or technical support. If anyone else does all this, please let me know.

Tune Up Your Lead Capture Engine

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So you had 1000 new visitors to the website last night... How many of them are now fresh, promising leads? None? Not sure? It's time for a lead-capture tune-up.

I think it must be a hangover from the 90's Internet bubble that many business owners still think that getting on Google page #1 is the end of the rainbow. Get your web traffic up and your business will grow. I'm not bashing SEO mind you. Getting on page #1 is definitely a good thing because it can drive visitors to your site, but the question is, then what? What good does it do you to have a gazillion visitors and no new business? We've been over this before, but your Website needs to be tuned to capture leads and convert them to customers.

Step 1 - Strategy

Put yourself in your potential customers' shoes. What do you have to offer them that they really want? When they sign up, who will contact them? When will you contact them? How will you contact them and what will you say? Draw up your game plan and stick to it.

Step 2 - Communicate and Make Calls to Action

Make simple and attractive buttons or graphics that communicate the value of your offer and invite them to click through. Put these calls-to-action in prominent places on your site that can't be missed by the casual visitor.

Step 3 - Ice the Deal With a Landing Page

Each call-to-action should link to an effective landing page. Design the page to be simple and appealing to the eye. State the value of your offer and give them some more detail - what's in it for the visitor. Give them only one option, to click on your sign-up link. Minimize or hide all other options, including navigation menus. Make your sign-up button and headings action-oriented, like "Sign Me Up to Save $100". Don't make them think - tell them what to do.

Step 4 - Monitor New Leads and Respond Quickly

Don't let your new fish off the line. Make sure you have a lead nurturing program set up - i.e. set up a series of e-mails that follow-up on your prospect and contact them personally by e-mail or, ideally, by phone.

Step 5 - Follow Up and Close the Deal

Get a meeting set up, whatever you do. Get some one-on-one time and explain who you are, what you're selling and why they need to buy from you. There is no time to separate sales and marketing these days - they are one and the same, so market and sell in one breath.

Step 6 - Measure and Analyze

No person or strategy is perfect, so measure the leads and conversions to customers relative to your marketing content, calls-to-action, landing pages and follow-ups. What works best? Fine-tune your strategy to increase conversion rates and sales.

Now you've gotten your website up to speed. Now you can actually gain something from all that SEO juice. Go forth and prosper.

We use HubSpot software to capture and nurture leads. Sign up today for a free demonstation of HubSpot and consultation about your business.

How to Use Twitter to Build Your Sales Funnel

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The art of using Twitter to improve PR and customer service is well documented. People are out there right now tweeting about your company, products and services. Engaging with them via Twitter makes perfect sense, but what about adding real customers to your sales funnel? Can it be done without becoming a spammer? Let's discuss using Twitter as an effective part of your sales strategy.

1. Think of Twitter as the top of your funnel. As you read blogs, add comments and tweet about them, you build your army of followers - hopefully a large army that respects your judgement and appreciates your content. You want your followers to be your target market for sales. Using my company as an example, we are looking to attract CEO's and CMO's who are interested in our inbound marketing services. We actively search for these folks using Twitter search, which searches tweets for keywords like "social media marketing", or Tweepsearch, which searches Twitter profiles for words like "CEO" or "CMO". We scan the results and follow people who tweet fairly frequently, show an active interest and seem predisposed to engage with us. Hopefully, they will follow us back. If not, we can deal with them later via FriendorFollow.
   
2. Create a Steady Stream of Helpful Content. Now you want to convince your followers and potential followers to take an interest in what you have to say. Set up your RSS feeds and social bookmarking sites to deliver daily, interesting content to your door step. Throughout the day, if possible, scan those results, read the articles that will appeal to your target group and tweet about them. Be sure to include a url-shortened link (at the end is best) and keep your tweet under 120 characters, so that your followers can easily retweet without modifying the original content. This step accomplishes two things - it establishes you as a trustworthy source for valuable advice or news and it spreads the word beyond your immediate network. This is how you can grow your audience without doing a lot more searching.
3. Tweet your own blogs periodically. A good ratio is 10 public-service tweets to 1 of your own. You don't want to overdo the self-promotion, but some of that is expected. Make sure your blogs are on-target with your network, which further solidifies your status as a trusted expert. Ideally, your blog is integrated with your website, and you have calls-to-action and landing pages associated with your blog content. When visitors have finished reading your blog, they have an easy opportunity to subscribe to your blog and pursue your valuable offers or free content. This is how you convert visitors to leads and move them down your sales funnel.
4. Study your leads and follow-up. Hopefully you have some lead-tracking software built into to your blog/website. Check your leads as they come in and respond as personally as you can. This will usually be by e-mail, but if you're lucky enough to get a phone number, don't hesitate to call. Let them know that you appreciate their contacting you (by Twitter or Facebook or Google...) and what can you do for them?
5. Close the deal. Now you're down at the spout of the funnel. Be as real and genuine as you have been online, but add your real personality to the mix and build that relationship. Let them know how you got to this point. They will appreciate your knowledge of inbound marketing and that will add to your qualifications. Get to the point. Tell them what's in it for them and don't forget to ask for their business. Good hunting!

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