People often think too hard, wait too long, procrastinate, or simply don’t respond when presented with a call to action. As a result, many of these potential leads or customers don’t end up converting at all. By creating a sense of urgency, you can persuade your users to react more quickly, reducing some of the mental friction created by offering too much time to make a decision. Experiment with incorporating techniques such as scarcity, countdowns or loss-aversion into your sales copy to improve conversion rates.
Ask people to share, like or rate your content
If you want more people to like your posts, share your content, or rate your product, just ask. Direct calls to action for social engagement can often be the nudge your audience needs to react the way you want them to. It’s not uncommon for studies to show triple digit percentage increases in engagement when users are simply asked to like, share or follow a page. A call to action is one of the most important pieces to your marketing campaign and including one in your social strategy should be no exception.
Personalize your content
Nurture your users by personalizing the content they see. If you have it, pull information such as name, location, referral source, etc. from your database or link appends, and dynamically insert it into your page or email copy. For example, let’s imagine we have a job board with a headline that reads, “Companies are hiring people like you:”. If we know where they’re searching, we can personalize the headline with dynamic fields. It then becomes, “Companies in Cleveland are hiring people like you”. This adds to the user experience by speaking more specifically to each user’s needs. Of course, you might not always have the information to dynamically insert for every user, so always be sure to set a default entry, such as “in your area”, or word the content in a way so that the dynamic fields can simply be left out, as we did in the example above.
Focus on a single call to action
Multiple offers confuse the user and confused users means lower conversions. Determine which single call to action is most important and make it the focus of your page. Make all other options clearly secondary. Create an obvious hierarchy. All links are not equally important. Attempts to be all-inclusive can create leaks in your sales funnel by distracting users ready to commit with unnecessary information.
Write a strong value proposition
One of the most important pieces of content you should write is a value proposition. A value proposition is part of your business strategy. It answers the question of, why should anyone choose you over your competition? Value propositions can apply to your business or organization as a whole, or be specific to a product or product line. How will customers benefit from choosing you or your product over a competitor’s? Is it cheaper? More reliable? What is it that makes it unique? And it always helps to support your claims by providing some kind of proof. An example of proof could be customer testimonials or some other kind of evidence that can support your claims. Your value proposition should be one of the first things, if not the first thing a user sees when they visit your website or landing page. It should answer questions like, what is it, who is it for and how is it useful? You’ll only have a matter of seconds to prove a point, so it should be short and easy to understand. Make sure users can immediately identify what results they can expect and how your offer differs from the competitors’. It’s often the determining factor as to whether a user will continue reading or go straight for the “back” button.
What are the four P’s?
One of the most basic combinations of approaches often seen in marketing plans is referred to as “The 4 P’s”.
- Product/service: Is the product/service right for your target customer/audience?
- Price: Is it at the right price point?
- Place: Is it in the right place to be purchased or found.
- Promotion: How will you let customers know the product or service is available, how much it is, and where they can find it?
It’s the right product, in the right place, and at the right price.
Imagine you’re selling gallons of 2% milk…
Do you try to sell a gallon to people searching for new cars on Google?
Do you sell them for $50 a gallon?
If a customer shows interest in your milk, do you try to sell them a garden hose instead?
No, no, and no!
It’s not always so obvious, but I’m sure you get the point. The same goes in online marketing. The more accurate you can be in your targeting, the more efficient your campaign will be and the less money you’ll be leaving on the table. Instead of wasting time, energy and bandwidth trying to cram every possible bit of information on to your web page, figure out which elements are most important to your audience. What 20% of your content is contributing to 80% of your sales?