5 tips for creating an effective ‘call to action’

Any best practice website should have an effective call to action (often referred to as a 'CTA'). For those unfamiliar with the term, a call to action is the path you'd like the prospects who visit your site to go down. For example, you might want someone to enrol in a webinar you're hosting, or submit a quote request to your sales team. The ultimate goal of a call to action is to ensure you're getting the most out of the visitors to your website (or websites) and turning traffic into leads. Calls to action are also a very measurable way of determining whether your website is truly performing in the sense that it's driving new business. 

So this begs the question - what makes an effective call to action? 

1. Use a bold color that contrasts with your overall website color palette

As the goal of a call to action is to encourage a prospect to take a specific action, one of the best ways to do this is to make your CTA stand out using color. For a CTA, it's more about contrast and less about consistency with your overall design. For example, if your website colour palette consists of light blues and whites, consider using a bright orange or bright green colored button. 

The best thing about color is that it can very easily be changed, so don't be shy about experimenting. A/B testing of your CTAs will help you determine which color drives the best conversion rates. As a marketer trying to optimize your website and drive leads, you may come up against a situation where a design team feels that bright, highly contrasted CTAs detract from your overall design. But remember that with good analytics you'll be able to show that the color is driveng more leads, which is the goal of your website after all.

2. Make it high, make it large 

When it comes to websites, always place your CTA in a position where prospects are most likely to see it. There's very little point burying a CTA in a place on your website that is unlikely to be viewed. Remember that many prospects may quickly scan over your website; you often have just seconds to capture their attention. They might also be viewing your website on a tablet or other mobile device. The goal of a CTA is to quickly capture attention; so if the CTA is placed high on your website there's an inherently better chance of this happening. 

Additionally, the size of the CTA is important for similar reasons. While it may feel a little out of place at first, like with the color change, you have to keep in mind your overall goal. If this is the one action your want prospects to take, let them know it by making it big enough that they can't overlook it. 

3. Use pressing, direct language on your CTA

It's very important to be direct in telling prospects the action your want them to take. Language such as "Join", "Buy now", "Get an instant quote" all directly encourage a prospect to complete the call to action and increase your chance of a conversion. You can also go one step further and make your CTA more effective by framing your language in more urgent terms (or with a caption), such as "Get a quote (Free before May 29)". 

4. Supplement your CTA with clear reasons why the prospect should complete it

There's only so much text you can squeeze onto a CTA, and ultimately it's ideal to keep your message on the CTA itself simple (as discussed above). But it's also important to remember that it's likely that a prospect may need some background to your product or service before being compelled to click. Your goal is to help them to understand why clicking on the CTA will benefit them; in other words, what problem are you going to solve? Make your message as clear and concise as possible. 

5. Make it an offer they can't refuse

It's always beneficial to include an additional reason for prospects to complete your CTA. If they're hesitating, this might just be the thing that gets them over the line and converts them into a lead. For example, you might offer a discount or a bonus on top of what an ordinary customer would receive. It's human nature to be attracted to an offer structured in this way. Obviously not all products and services will lend themselves as easily to this kind of offer, so try to be creative when you're thinking of your offer.

Are you ready?

Ensuring your website contains effective call to actions can be the difference between a successful website and an unsuccessful website. By focusing on both the visual aspects of a CTA, the content they contain, as well as the manner in which they're framed, you are more likely to turn visitors into leads.

In my next post I'll be giving some real life examples of the above techniques, so stay tuned.

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What web marketing intelligence is, and 4 ways you can create it

In the past, the most recommended technique for growing the number of leads your business received online was to review the logs of your website. These logs contain information which your web server keeps about who visited your website, where they came from, which pages they visited, which keywords they used to find you, and other interesting information. 

By analysing these logs, you could get a feel for how people were finding your site, and get ideas for how to increase the number by adding similar content, or convert the people who were visiting your site by adding targeted landing pages based on what you found in the logs.

Nowadays, services like Google Analytics and Bislr do all of this analysis for you and make the information much more visual and easy to digest. You can see analysis of the keywords that people used to find your website, top referrers, in-depth keyword research, demographics, browser information, and a whole host of other forms of analysis.

The principle remains the same though: if we want to grow our business, we need to look at the data that is coming to our website and turn this into a form of intelligence which can help us take steps to generate more leads for our business. 

Specifically, it is the action steps you take based on the analytics that lead to a growth in your business, not just the analytics themselves. Yes you have Google Analytics or another system in place, but do you take any action based on that information to grow your business?

Intelligence is defined as the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new situations and also the ability to apply knowledge. Web analytics are not web marketing intelligence on their own. Web marketing intelligence is applied web analytics.

With that in mind, here is a series of ways you can turn your web analytics into web marketing intelligence, in order to grow your business: 

1) Keyphrases used to find your site should be your future landing pages

The most effective use of your analytics is to take key-phrases used to find your website and use them to create new landing pages. For example, people might find the Bislr.com features page by searching Google for "lead generation". Of course, the person searching for "lead generation" didn't necessarily want to know about the features of Bislr, they wanted to know about how to generate leads for their business. 

While the visitor might realise that Bislr has this feature by browsing the feature page they landed on, people browse the web quickly and if they can't instantly see a strong match for what they searched for, they will "bounce" back to where they came from before they give the page they landed on a chance.

For this reason, the correct technique is to create a new landing page which is specifically targeted for the keyphrase "lead generation" and then write the page with the person who searched for "lead generation" in mind.

For example, you might include a definition of what lead generation is, a few tips on how to generate leads for your business and then finally an explanation of how Bislr is able to generate leads for your business. By carefully and systematically including the keywords that the user searched for, the content will come to life for them, and you have a far greater change of engaging them, and converting them into a lead for your business.

2) Use A/B testing to improve your content

A/B testing is a way of providing two alternative pieces of content to your website visitors. Randomly, 50% of the visitors see one form of the content, and the other 50% see another. You then measure which 50% convert better: they might fill in a form, purchase a product, or just contact you. Once you have enough information on which content converts better, you declare it the winner and show it to everyone. Or even better, start a new A/B test with the winner and a new version of the content, to gradually refine and improve the conversion rate of your content over time.

Your analytics system should allow you to perform such tests, and you should be constantly testing your content. For paid advertising, this can show you your best return on investment, and for search engine content it can show you which types of content are most effective for you to produce.

3) Use conversion tracking analysis to improve your advertising channels

Advertising your business online is expensive, in terms of both time and money. It is therefore crucially important to not just focus on the fixed cost, but to always remember the opportunity cost of your time and money. For the money and time you spend advertising your business, could it have been more effectively spent on something else? The only real way to know is to test and measure.

Conversion tracking is a way of assigning a specific URL to a given online advertising campaign you are running. By using this special URL, you ensure that any and all traffic and leads generated by that campaign can be measured. You can assign a conversion action to your campaign (e.g. client fills in form, client downloads eBook, etc.) and a monetary value of that conversion.

Very quickly, this technique can show you the relative effectiveness of different forms of advertising. For example, a social media campaign focusing on getting users to share content on Facebook and Twitter might generate a lot of traffic, but relatively little conversions. Advertising on Facebook might yield low results for a particular campaign, but advertising on LinkedIn might be surprisingly effective.

The point is, by using conversion tracking, you are able to specifically measure the relative effectiveness of your campaigns, and hence, where your dollars and time should be spent to most effectively grow your business in terms of time and money spent.

4) Track visitor flow to optimize your website

When someone first visits your website, you know a lot about their activities and not much about them personally. You know which website they came from, which keywords they used to find you and which page they landed on. You also know which pages they visit on your website.

They might look at the homepage, then the features page, then the pricing page and then disappear off the site. A few days later they might come back and look at the features page again, or perhaps a blog post or other content on your site.

This information on its own could be helpful: are people leaving your site on a common page? Are people hitting the pricing page and then bailing? Useful, but the real insight comes when you are able to convert a visitor your website into a lead. Let's say they fill in a contact form, or provide their email number or phone number in order to download an eBook. Or maybe sign up for a demo of your product.

Now we can look back at the information we gathered about this visitor and know who it was taking those actions. We give our salespeople the the ability to apply this to form web intelligence. They know a lot about their potential client: what keywords they used to search, which pages they have seen, which pages they left the website on, which call to action led to them becoming a lead. This is applied web analytics, and what we call web marketing intelligence.

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B2B Marketing: How to Make LinkedIn PPC Ads Convert

Until recently I had never seen results from LinkedIn PPC Ads that were worth writing about. In my past experiences with LinkedIn PPC I had been disappointed with the results. I rarely experimented because I saw few positive metrics to even bother. But recently I cracked the LinkedIn PPC code and achieved a conversion rate of, wait for it.... 16% from visits to conversions! Proud of this achievement, I wanted to share my process in the hope it will help others succeed on LinkedIn PPC.

If you’re new to LinkedIn Ads (and after reading this post) want a guide to get started, I recommended reading “Guide to LinkedIn PPC Ads: How to Succeed in 2013”. 

Here is how I did it:

It’s not Google Adwords, understand why people are on LinkedIn

I must admit whenever I had approached LinkedIn PPC in the past I took a similar approach to advertising on Google Adwords. I would create a product related call-to-action, setup a landing page and test different calls-to-action. This approach simply didn’t have any consideration for why people are on LinkedIn in the first place: to network, to connect and to job hunt. Ultimately my Google Adwords approach failed.. over and over.

The turning point was discovering that when I offered a webinar as my call-to-action I would see the best conversion rate. What I ultimately learnt from my experiment was that the persona on LinkedIn is seeking to enhance their skills, learn new things, stay connected and stay informed. It’s simply a place where people aren't ready to take direct action to try a new product, or have a custom demo. LinkedIn users are looking for value: How can I generate more leads? How can I make the right purchasing decisions? How can I enhance my professional skills? Framing your call-to-action in terms of the LinkedIn audience is critical to your success. 

Create a compelling call-to-action

Now that you have an understanding of your audience it’s best to think through a compelling call-to-action that will play into LinkedIn’s strengths: learning new things, staying in touch, keeping connected etc. After experimenting by creating multiple ads and landing pages, I learnt that the most compelling call-to-action for Bislr was a B2B marketing educational webinar series. By offering LinkedIn users a free webinar series that wasn’t directly related to the product I was trying to sell, the response was overwhelming. In order to succeed on LinkedIn Ads you need to find your compelling call-to-action. From my experience the best call-to-actions for B2B marketers to consider are: 

• a whitepaper on a topic related to your business;
  

• a free, useful tool;
  

• a video tutorial;
  

• webinar training.
  

Here is the ad that had the highest click through rate and conversions:

Here is an ad that had the lowest click through rate and poor conversions:

Create a landing page that is solely directed at the advertized call-to-action

Once you have your compelling call-to-action, create a landing page with a conversion form that matches your LinkedIn Ad. I spent a long time crafting and A/B testing my landing page to make sure it would achieve the highest possible rate of conversion. I added social sharing buttons to allow those interested to share the page with others and made sure the landing page worked on tablets and mobile devices so I wouldn’t miss conversions. 

The main discoveries that affected conversion rates were: 

• my landing page had a higher conversion rate when I used the same keywords from the ad in the landing page header; and
  

• when I added a photo of myself (the presenter) to the landing page.
  

Here is the final, tested landing page I used:

Bid excessively high so your ads are shown and clicked on

If you bid at the low end of the suggested range on LinkedIn, your ads will barely be shown and you simply won’t get the click through rate (CTR) needed to convert visitors to leads. My advice is to overbid, in the example below I would bid at $4-$5 for pay per click. CPM (Cost per thousand impressions) is a waste of time in my opinion - I just don’t see the point, I want people to click on my ads, not be impressed by them!

Targeting is great, but keep the target size over 200,000

LinkedIn allows you to target certain groups based on occupation, company, job title, gender, age and skills to name a few. This can be a trap for first time LinkedIn advertisers as you naturally get excited and over segment. Try and aim for a segmentation higher than 200, 000 people or your click through rate will be too low and conversions won’t happen. Keep in mind it's all about making sure your click through rate is high, so your ads are shown more. In my campaign I segmented based on marketing, sales and management roles, this gave me a total target size of over 560, 000.

Track ad performance like a hawk: a low click through rate means you’re doomed to failure.

I constantly tracked my click through rate and conversion rates for each test campaign. What I noticed (which this blog points out also) is that without a high click through rate early, you’re ads are doomed to failure: that is, LinkedIn will stop showing them. In every case I found my best bet was to shut down failing campaigns and start new ones using different ad images or copy. So keep an eye on click through rate and track it like a hawk! This is why having a large target size (see above) is critical.

The secret to my success

The secret to my success with LinkedIn Ads was that I was able to easily test landing pages, make changes to copy, setup campaign tracking URLs all by myself without the need for technical help. I could iterate quickly by tracking and visualizing my impact in real time -- right down to the an individual lead. By watching the actions each prospect took, I was able to craft an experience that yielded the highest conversion rate. 

Bislr helped me achieve the refinement I needed to be able to make LinkedIn Ads work. I don’t write this for the sheer nature of plugging our platform, I write this because no matter what solution you’re using you need the ability to iterate quickly, track performance and visualize the impact through analytics. Without the analytical visibility I had, it would have been impossible for me to get to such a strong conversion rate and generate new, highly qualified leads.

Below is an example of the level of tracking of an individual lead:
(note I have removed the image, position, company and other scoring information for privacy)

I hope my experience helps you improve your LinkedIn PPC Ads and achieve higher conversions. Please feel free to ask questions or share your own experience below in the comments.

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4 modern SEO techniques for marketers & start Ups

It’s 2013 and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) still feels like a mysterious term to marketers (and for good reason). We’re continuously bombarded with spam from SEO firms, consultants promising to rank our sites higher or subscription based companies taking our money and achieving disappointing results. On page optimization, off page optimization, link building, white hat, black hat - it’s a scary world out there.

The truth is SEO hasn’t really changed, valuable content still ranks highly in search engines and those that are taking the time to create remarkable content are winning big. So if you’re serious about your SEO (and you should be) you’re going to have to cut through the noise and start focusing on the core factors that will help you rank higher. Here are 4 modern SEO techniques that will help drive more traffic to your website:

1. Produce content often, have a plan, think outside the box

Its easy to sit here and talk about the fact you need to produce remarkable content, but often finding the time as a marketer or business owner is difficult. The key here is frequency and "thinking outside the box". Have two categories of content: your bread and butter content for your blog and remarkable content that you will use on landing pages, SEO pages and to earn inbound links from reputable sources. 

Remember:

• Bread and butter content twice weekly; and 
  

• remarkable content one piece a month at a minimum... stir thoroughly with innovative ideas. 

Here is a content planning spreadsheet to help you get started and plan your content month by month.  

Try and think outside the box with your content. For example if you're a mortgage broker try producing a white paper on the process of selecting the best mortgage and add a comparison calculator to your website. By giving valuable tools away you'll position yourself as a trusted resource. People link to resources, not advertorials. Think outside the box of your competitors - what's your remarkable content edge?

2. Stop building links, start earning them

Google likes links. A number of factors affect your ranking, but the amount of links to your website from other popular websites is one of the primary factors in determining your rank. The old way was to pay to list your website in directories, post on forums, swap links with other webmasters and generally build links through any means possible to keyword rich content. The new way is all about links to remarkable content and useful solutions that are shared across social media and blogs. You need to truly earn these links from trusted websites, personalities and bloggers with your great content.

3. Optimize for the mobile web

Blogs (arguably the best form of SEO) are increasingly consumed on mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone. If your blog isn’t optimized for the mobile web it’s unlikely it will rank in mobile search results. If you’re blog isn’t optimized for the mobile web it’s unlikely anyone will read it in the bathroom with their smartphone -- get the idea? You need a mobile website to take advantage of mobile SEO. Responsive design (LINK THIS) is the best approach here because you won’t end up with multiple websites and landing pages to contend with.

4. Google Authorship

I’m sure you have seen something similar to the image below in your Google search results. 

Google Authorship allows you to “make your content feel personal”, but the reality is, it legitimizes your blog posts and content. Using Google Authorship you’ll notice better click through rates on your content and increases in traffic to your blog from search engine results.

If you have your own helpful SEO techniques you'd like to share, please do so in the comments below.

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How to Optimize Landing Pages for PPC & SEO Campaigns

Everyday I’m lucky enough to speak with marketers and business owners from different sized companies, industries and geographies. Time and time again I hear the same question, “How can I improve my SEO and how much money should I spend on PPC?”. It seems as though marketers (when failing generate enough leads) often think that throwing money at PPC & SEO will make the problem go away -- but is this really the right approach? SEO & PPC have a place in demand generation but what is often overlooked is where the prospect will end up -- your website.

According to the 2012 SMB Digital Scope Study, 98% of SMBs websites are not optimized for Mobile, 78% don’t have any links to social media and 44% don’t even have their phone number or contact information accessible from their home page. So before you start ploughing money into PPC & SEO it’s best to consider how well your website is optimized to take advantage of new traffic visiting from your campaigns.

1. Start with a goal

Understanding the goal of the campaign and the actions you want prospects to take is critical to a successful campaign. Simply dumping visitors on your homepage and expecting them to browse around, read all about your company and go to the contact page (to find your number) is wishful thinking. Instead, take the time to understand what it is that the visitor will be interested in, what the process and funnel for the campaign will look like and how you will draw their interest through a call-to-action. Set a campaign goal based on budget, time frame and conversions.

2. Develop a keyword strategy

Knowing which keywords to use can be difficult but there is always a great place to start: competitors websites. Pick your top 2-3 competitors and use the Google Keyword Tool to do some research. Start small, pick 10-20 of the best keywords you can find. As you learn which keywords work (and don't work) you can expand your keyword list. 

If you're working with an agency or consultant, the same principle applies, start simple with only a handful of keywords and overtime you can add and remove keywords based on what works and doesn't work. If you start out too complex you'll never have the time to digest what's really working. 

3. Create landing pages for each call-to-action and keyword group

Generally it will make sense to have different content and calls-to-action for different keywords. Instead of sending visitors to your home page or a generic landing page, take the time to create landing pages for groups of keywords with targeted calls-to-action. For example, at Bislr, we have created landing pages for Inbound Marketing, Wordpress Alternative and Small Business CRM to target visitors from our own PPC campaigns. Each has a unique call-to-action like a free trial, demo or webinar offer.

4. Track the campaign spend & cost per acquisition (CPA)

If you don't track your spend and cost per aquisition from SEO & PPC you're wasting your time and money. It amazes me when I help marketers track their campaigns for the first time just how poorly the campaigns were performing. Take the time to setup analytics and conversion tracking so you can understand which campaigns, keywords and call-to-actions work best. If you don't track you'll never improve.

See how campaign tracking works in Bislr.

5. A/B Test

No matter how brilliant you are at creating landing pages and calls-to-action you should always test each and every landing page. A true A/B test is where you test only one varitation on your page at a time. Here at Bislr we are constantly A/B testing our landing pages. We test variations in the copy and the calls-to-action we offer each visitor. By running these tests we're able to understand what combination of factors makes a visitor to our landing page convert into a lead. This helps us maximize our SEO & PPC dollar as our landing pages are constantly improving. To the uninitiated A/B tests can seem daunting and time consuming, but several tools like Bislr allow you to do A/B testing on landing pages in a matter of minutes.



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Today, we Bislr.

With every new social network, mobile device and web technology, marketing becomes more frustrating, labor-intensive and expensive. You’ve probably asked yourself, “I need to generate a lot of demand, but can I really build an intelligent, social and mobile site without hiring a cadre of consultants and breaking the bank?”

I felt the same way a few years ago. After previous businesses and launching another startup, my brothers and I were completely frustrated with how hard it was to execute marketing on the web. We found ourselves constantly trying to follow touted best practices in an attempt to make our content available across social and mobile web channels, connect multiple solutions together and make it all run like clockwork. To be frank, it was an absolute pain: difficult, frustrating, time consuming, and costly. A lack of knowledge or skill wasn’t to blame; we knew exactly what we needed to do and have years of experience. It was simply that the tools available don’t work and are inadequate for web marketing today.

Marketing today needs to be highly integrated. It requires systems and databases working coherently to generate higher-quality leads and provide greater intelligence to sales in order to close more deals. This is the goal, but unfortunately many marketers today don’t spend enough time on the place where this all happens: their websites. 

It’s not their fault though. Today’s solutions simply can’t keep up with the rapid changes in marketing, so marketers spend most of their time trying to create the perfect solution by cobbling end point solutions together or embarking on expensive custom development projects. As marketers, we just want to focus on what we’re good at, instead of getting mired down in technical details and a mish-mash of solutions that don’t follow best practices.

From years of research and personally experiencing this problem first hand, we set out to solve the problem of executing marketing online faster, more cost effectively and completely integrated with other business solutions like CRM and marketing automation software. We set out to develop an integrated, intelligent website marketing solution that allowed us to generate new business faster, from every medium, on every channel and any device. The result is Bislr (pronounced BIZ-LER).

Today it's with great pleasure we launch Bislr. We're holding a launch webinar on the Feb 19th 2013 which we hope you can join.

Welcome to the new generation of marketing on the web. This is intelligent website marketing. We hope Bislr inspires you to take control of your web marketing, once and for all. 

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