Turning your Web site clicks into customers

Last week, I wrote about how blogging – regularly creating unique and interesting content for your Web site –  helps your site’s SEO, increases site traffic and educates your clients and prospects.

But you can spend thousands of dollars and countless hours on SEO, blogging and other traffic-focussed online marketing without a dime of return on that investment if you don’t also think about and invest in what comes next. How do those site visitors become leads for your business?

A Strong Call to Action is Key for Online Lead Generation

The first thing you need in order to convert your visitors into customers is a strong call to action. What’s a strong call to action? It takes 3 things:

Visibility:  People need to see your call to action. It needs to stand out from the rest of your site, and it needs to stand out from the messaging surrounding the call itself.

Clarity: People need to understand what you’re asking them to do and why it benefits them. “Download our eBook now to learn XYZ” has more clarity than “New eBook” or even “Download our new eBook”.

Urgency: Testing shows time and time again that adding an element of urgency to your calls to action improves results.  “Download our eBook now” works better than just “Download our eBook”.

Then you need a great offer

Even if your calls to action are visible, clear and urgent, they may fall flat if the offers they’re driving people to aren’t relevant or timely.

Many sites now will have a “Contact Us” call to action leading to a page with a contact form. This is basic table stakes for companies looking to win at online marketing right now.

But research shows that most people are only really interested in making contact around a sale during the last 1/3 of the sales process. So your “Contact Us” call to action may not be all that relevant or timely for the majority of your visitors who aren’t in the later stages on making a buying decision.

Offers that educate your prospects and help them get smarter about what they need will speak to the needs of people who are earlier in the buying process. And by providing them with this advice, they will come to understand how your goods or services could potentially fill that need.

eBooks, whitepapers, Webinars and seminars, are all great tools to use in offers. And it’s good, too, to have different offers tied to different stages of your sales process – researching, considering,  buying and post-sales.

If all this feels overwhelming, a digital marketing agency that understands on-demand or inbound marketing can help you create your offers and your calls to action. That can be a worthwhile investment as content-driven, on-demand marketing costs 62% less per lead (according to Hubspot) than traditional advertising or other interruption-based tactics.

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