By Andrea Parker
Are you struggling to see a correlation between strong website traffic and new customers? Being unable to convert leads into new customers is a more common small business concern than you might think, but there is actually a simple, but incredibly important, way to implement effective small business marketing solutions: through your call-to-action.
You’ve heard of them. You might know what they are. But how do you use them? How do you use them strategically? How do you make them convert those unresponsive leads?
In this four-part series, we will discuss all you need to know about making calls to action work for your small business.
The what and the why
You’ve brought potential customers to your website through a carefully crafted SEO strategy and a brilliant social media campaign, so why aren’t your leads converting? It might be possible that you have forgotten one of the most important things in marketing: asking your potential customer to do something after reading all of the great information on your website. This is when the call-to-action (CTA) becomes most critical. While you want to give leads a good look at what your small business has to offer, you don’t want to give away too much up front, or else you might never hear from them again—unless you’ve placed a CTA at a critical point of your content that allows you to capture your lead’s name and contact information.
The how
A CTA can take many forms; you’ve definitely seen them out there and likely clicked on a few yourself. They’re not authoritative, boastful or very specific. “Click here.” “Download now!” “Read more.” Do these simple phrases sound familiar? Despite their succinct nature, CTAs are extremely powerful in helping to remove the “potential” part from “potential customer.” Some common CTAs are:
- Download
- Add to cart
- Learn more
- Free trial
- Sign up
Often times you will see not only one CTA on a webpage, but two or three strategically placed around the page so that a potential customer never has to go searching for their next step. However, don’t think that if two or three CTAs are good, then five or six must be great. The worst thing you can do, besides miss an opportunity with a misplaced CTA, is bombard your lead with too many choices. It’s an invitation for a potential customer to leave your website without having ever clicked on any of your CTAs, or given you their contact in formation so you can follow up.
In part two of our CTA series, we’ll teach you how to craft a great CTA that will get those leads wanting nothing more than to learn about what your small business can do for them.
