Stop Losing Leads: Call-to-Action Strategies That Guarantee Results

Whether you’re in a growing or declining industry, it’s crucial that your messaging is very clear so that you have the best chance of winning prospective clients.

Your call to action is a few simple words that can make or break your sales process.

Each marketing asset that a prospective client might engage with should have a clear call to action that aligns with your business goal, aligns with their stage of awareness, and guides them towards the next step.

Here's one way we can model Customer Awareness:

• Unaware of Problem
• Problem Aware
• Solution Aware
• Consideration (sub-stages: Interest, Respect, Trust)
• Agreement in Principle
• Purchase

If they are in the TOP part of the customer journey - Unaware, Problem Aware, or Solution Aware - then a good call to action is to ask them to subscribe or follow you in some way, because they're not ready for more than that.

If they are in the BOTTOM part of the customer journey – Consideration – then a good call to action is to ask them to contact you. The most obvious option is simply to ask them to call you, but there are some other more nuanced options that can make your life easier.

The real power of content marketing is that it can also move them into Respect and Trust, and even into the Agreement in Principle stage, even if you’ve never spoken to them! That’s why some marketers, like me, view inbound lead generation to be vastly superior to cold outreach methods like telesales.

The Goal

The ultimate goal for most of us is a sale – money in the bank.

For ecommerce retailers like Amazon, the call to action can simply state “Buy now”:

Unfortunately, sales aren’t quite as simple in the world of consulting services. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum from a simple transactional sale for Amazon.

Most consulting engagements take time – you’re solving important, complex business problems for your clients, often risky and sometimes transforming their business. The engagements can be months or even years in duration.

And the sales process takes quite some time also.

So what should the call to action be for a consulting firm website? Let’s look at the engagement lifecycle for a moment.

Typical Engagement Lifecycle

For many consultants, a typical engagement might look like this:

1. Initial enquiry from prospective client
2. First contact to qualify/check it’s a good fit for both parties
3. Sales meeting to discuss project more in-depth and agreement in principle
4. Proposal presented to client (meeting or video call)
5. First payment or contract signed
6. Project starts
7. Project delivered
8. Final payment
9. Possible re-engagement

Our initial end goal here is the payment or signed contract, but the start of the engagement from our perspective is the initial enquiry. Generating those enquiries is the goal of our marketing – lead generation.

What is the most appropriate Call to Action?

“It depends” – the age-old answer of experts everywhere. But in this case, I believe that the choices are easy to pare down:

Subscribe

Email Subscription: Download your free resources

Podcast Subscription: Subscribe to my podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts

Social Subscription: Follow or Connect with me on LinkedIn

Contact

The most obvious option is simply to ask them to call you, but there are some other more nuanced options that can make your life easier.

Qualify – Check for Fit

Here are several ways to qualify a prospective client:

• Qualification call: setting up a quick (10-15 minute) initial call is good practice. If it seems to be a good match, at the end of that call you arrange the more in-depth sales meeting.
• Manual pre-qualification with an application form: they fill in a form on your website and you get the answers by email. You can review and make a decision based on the information they provided.
• Automatic pre-qualification with a mini-survey: you can have them complete a short survey on your website – if they answer the questions in a certain way, the form will take them to the next step, otherwise, you can have it automatically suggest some alternative options to them based on their answer choices.

If you are getting a lot of leads, then I suggest you pre-qualify them. If you are not getting so many, then a qualification call is worthwhile as you can learn a lot from speaking with prospective clients.

3X Your Leads by Using a Button

You have decided on which call to action is appropriate for you – now you need to add it to your website.

There has been a huge amount of research about how your call to action should appear, because it can make or break the sale.

What’s usually most effective is a button that looks clickable, stands out from the rest of the page design, and has text that clearly describes what clicking it will accomplish for the visitor.

This example from Amazon shows a well-tested call to action:

The orange colour stands out against the rest of the page design. The call to action text is perfectly clear as to what happens.

All of these details matter online, where website visitors scan read long web pages very quickly and look for visual cues for how to take action.

Conversion Rate

In marketing terminology, we use the word “conversion” when we talk about having the visitor take a positive action of some kind. Conversion rate is the number of actions taken over the number of times the CTA was viewed. If you have 100 visitors to a webpage and 2 of them contacted you through a form on the page, then the conversion rate was 2%. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a subset of online marketing where we focus on optimization of web page design and copy to increase the number of conversions.

Take Some Action!

My suggestion: plan out two calls to action:

The first priority is for those who are in the bottom of the customer journey and ready to enquire.

Create a “Contact Us” or “Schedule a Call” call to action, possibly doing pre-qualification if you can.

After that, focus on the people who are in the top half of the customer journey.

They’re not ready to contact you, so offer them a compelling reason to subscribe to your email list – maybe a free whitepaper or report.

It could also be a webinar or even an email course like I use here .

What call to action are you using for your website?

Do you have one for the top half of the customer journey?

Let me know in the comments!

#CallToAction #CTA #InboundMarketing #ContentMarketing #B2B