The success of any marketing strategy depends on its Call-To-Action (CTA). This is especially true for B2B organizations that depend on inbound marketing techniques like blogs and videos to draw prospective customers into their pipeline. Given the lengthy sales cycles, an effective CTA helps B2B businesses maximize lead generation which in turn ensures a steady stream of new customers.
How To Get CTAs Right
The success of a CTA is measured by the conversion rate delivered. This is impacted by a number of different factors. Superficially, the positioning of your CTA button, the color, the message all play a part in triggering higher click-throughs. But this is not all. CTAs alone do not impact conversions. This is also impacted by what lies at the other side of the message. The lead magnet (the ebook or perks that a visitor enjoys upon signing up) is also highly critical in ensuring high conversion rates.
In effect, a marketer must have a clear idea of what the customer is looking for and their intent to purchase before deciding what CTAs work best.
What Customers Want
Understanding what your customers want is the first step in getting your CTA strategy right. There are a number of different ways to do it. Google Analytics, for instance, can give you a fair idea of the kind of pages your visitors are going to. But this information alone may not be enough. For instance, if a lot of your visitors are hitting the Pricing page, it may not always mean they are interested in purchasing your product – only that they want to know how you are priced vis-a-vis competition.
Visitor tracking services like LeadFeeder can help businesses go a step ahead and derive greater insights about their customers. Such a tool can, for instance, tell a B2B marketer which companies are visiting their site, how they found you, and also what they are interested in. Knowing such detailed insights about your customer can help you devise the right lead magnet and CTA to maximize conversion.
For instance, let us assume that you are an email marketing service provider and are visited by an eCommerce store owner. A visitor tracking service will help you understand that they are an online store who found you via Google and that they are interested in your transactional email service. Knowing such detailed insights, you could devise a lead generation program that offers free transactional email credits to users who offer their email address.
Maximizing CTA Performance
The next step in maximizing B2B lead generation is improving your CTA. As noted earlier in this article, there are a number of superficial elements that you could play with in order to improve conversion rate. This includes the shape of your CTA button, the foreground and background colors, fonts, and the conveyed text.
Studies show that rectangular CTAs work best since they resemble the button the most and hence communicate their function most effectively. The color contrast between the background and the text color is important too. Colors that are easy on the eyes work better than those that are unconventional and are difficult to read. The same holds true for fonts. Easy to read fonts perform better than unconventional ones.
Test, Analyze, Repeat
Maximizing your CTA performance is not possible overnight and requires a lot of persistence and experimentation. It is important for a B2B marketer to deploy multivariate testing methods to assess the impact of each of the different components that make up a lead generation system. Every industry is unique and what works for one audience may not work for another. It is thus important to try out different alternatives to see what performs best for your audience.