B2B Marketers! Add Calls To Action (CTAs) to drive lead conversion

Calls To Action (CTAs) are relatively simple devices that are so often overlooked by b2b marketers in their inbound marketing campaigns. Getting quality traffic to your site can be hard work so you should spend some effort to keep them there, nurturing the lead, engaging with them further and pulling them down the funnel towards making a purchasing decision.

Is it really good enough to end your blog article with a generic "what do you think?" and hope for a flood of comments? How much better to end the blog with a well designed, clear CTA button with an offer of value to the reader.

Here are some ideas for generating compelling CTAs.

• Apply the rules of content marketing. Be context sensitive, if your content is aimed lower funnel buyer issues, (typically aimed at mitigating their purchasing risk,) ensure your call to action is relevant, for example, offer them access to a video testimonial, a case study or invite them to an intimate breakfast roundtable with your senior execs.
   
• Match your CTA with your headline, it has been proven that keeping these consistent drives up conversion, not surprising if you think about it, it's bound to be more relevant on average.
   
• Make the language of your offer clear, avoid being too "cute" or clever. Don't make the reader "stretch" for what you are really giving away. Make it action oriented, use words such as "Register" and "Download" so people know exactly what's coming next.   
   
• From a design point of view, pick a colour scheme that makes it stand out from the rest of your content, you don't want it to get lost, you want to draw your reader's eye, similarly try and keep the CTA above the fold, in other words your readers don't have to scroll to see it. Consider placing the CTA in the main body of the text not always at the bottom.
   
• Don't limit your CTAs to your home page. Analyse which pages generate the most eyeballs, but remember try and keep it context sensitive.
   
• Lastly and most importantly of all, keep testing, try different locations, different wording, different colours. See what works best there is no "right" and "wrong", see what generates the most traffic and most of all what CTAs converts visitors the best, because that is quality traffic and in the end quality trumps quantity every time.

CTAs are just one of a number of techniques that attract and nurture visitors to your site. Inbound marketing is the discipline that applies a powerful methodology to generating leads for your business. If you would like to know more about this powerful new force sweeping marketing departments around the world download this free whitepaper on the Inbound Marketing Revolution.