November 2016 - Leverage Marketing

The Best and Worst of Call to Action Marketing

November 30, 2016/1 Comment/in SEO, Web Design /by Bob Kehoe

Writing call to action phrases for your website can be a tricky task. It seems like it should be simple to throw together a few quick words for a call to action to engage customers on your site, but call to action marketing is more of a science than most people think.

If you’re not sure what an example of a call to action (otherwise known as a CTA) would be, chances are you’ve clicked on one at some point before. A call to action phrase is a lure that turns site visitors into leads that your company may eventually nurture into customers. Whether it’s the button asking a reader to commit to that newsletter signup or the red letters asking an online shopper to act now for the lowest price, the best call to action will invite a lot of value with only a few words.

On the other hand, a bad CTA can act as a barrier in front of your leads. Having poorly written or badly designed CTAs hanging out on your site is sometimes the only thing preventing success, and you may not even know it.

We’ve put together a list of a few great and terrible CTAs that are sprinkled across the internet. Beware – this may convince you to step up your website’s game. Read on!

Worst: “Submit”

Using almost any call to action phrase is better than using this word. Short of including no CTA at all, using the word “Submit” is the lowest you can go. No one gets particularly excited about submitting something – it makes most of us think about paying bills or filling out long forms, and no one wants to do that more than they absolutely must. There are better ways to compel a customer to follow through. Essentially, you need to come up with a better way to say “Please hit this button.” Such as…

Best: “Sign Up Now” or “Get Your Free Estimate”

Instead of using formal, tedious language that simply states what the button is for, use purposeful language. Good call to action phrases tend to accomplish at least one of these goals:

Tell the customer exactly what to do.
Tell the customer what they’ll be getting when they commit.

A command such as “Sign Up Now,” “Take a Virtual Tour,” or “View Our Top Models” explicitly tells the customer to take action. And “Get Your Free Estimate,” “View Our Free Whitepaper,” and “Claim Your Tickets Today” are CTAs that offer both a command and a promise of value to the clicker.

Worst: “Buy Now” or “Join Now”

This command is not ALWAYS a CTA no-no. If placed strategically on your site, a “Buy Now” as a call to action phrase can be surprisingly powerful. However, placement is everything. You can’t ask too much of your customers too soon. You should consider the buyer’s journey as they browse your site or look through the search results. Commanding users to “Buy Now” on your homepage or a search engine result page can sometimes be overkill, as customers may not be ready to make a commitment at an early stage of product or service exploration. This is especially true if what you are offering is expensive or if the purchase commitment is otherwise high. In other words, if you sell $0.99 kazoos, asking them to “Buy Now” is asking a lot less of the customer – and is likely to be slightly more effective– than asking someone to buy your $60K car immediately.

The type of customer that usually comes to your site is also a factor to consider before adding the words “Buy Now” as your call to action. Do your shoppers tend to browse a lot, do a lot of research, or consume large amounts of information before converting? Or do they tend to navigate straight to what they need and buy it right then? Check Google Analytics to get a better idea about what customers do and search for on your site.

Best: “Get Started” or “Learn More”

If your customer requires a little more convincing than a colorful button, there are still lots of good ways to incorporate call to action marketing that is more appropriate to their stage of the shopping process. Use informational commands, such as “Learn More,” to draw your customer further into your site without implying any serious commitment. If you offer a free service or benefit, such as a rewards program or consultation, draw customers towards a profitable conversion with call to action phrases such as “Get Started,” and follow up with a simple option such as a free sign-up. You’ll still be able to glean some vital customer information without asking for as much of a commitment from the shopper.

Worst: Mobile Unfriendliness

What’s worse than trying to do something quickly on your mobile device, only to find that the web page to which you’ve navigated requires messy zooming? Or that the site has confusing navigation options that are difficult to click on a touchscreen? It’s annoying, it’s a hassle, and research shows that mobile unfriendliness will cause around 60% of browsers to bounce off your site. These kinds of statistics have been out for a while, and if you’re familiar with Google’s search algorithm, you’ll know that sites that haven’t been optimized to fit mobile devices have seen heavy organic search ranking penalties as well as high mobile bounces.

As far as call to action marketing goes, it doesn’t matter if you have the best call to action on earth is if your site isn’t responsive – the game is over before the user even sees the CTA. Not sure if your site is mobile friendly? Google has a handy mobile friendliness tool that you can use to check and see if your site is good to go. Even if your site is mobile friendly, it is all too easy to stuff your CTAs in sidebars, headers, and footers, which users may not always be able to see or access on mobile devices.

Best: Responsive Formatting

In an age in which Google incorporates your site’s mobile friendliness into search rankings and users refuse to browse on mobile unfriendly sites, it is truly imperative that you convert to a responsive format. This may require you to switch to a new theme, template, content management system, or ecommerce platform, but the time and investment will pay off in better organic rankings and conversions.

Confident that your mobile-friendly site has no problems? Don’t get too passive– your site may be mobile-friendly, but it is still critical to make your call to action marketing efforts work for mobile formats. Make your CTA large, central, and colorful enough for every shopper to see. Try incorporating them strategically at the ends of content blocks to provide users with a seamless transition from information to conversion.

Have more questions about how to incorporate call to action marketing into your digital marketing strategy? Stressed about implementing a user-friendly site design? The Leverage team is here to help. Sign up for our newsletter or contact us directly, and we’ll be in touch with the latest and greatest for your site.

5 Awesome Holiday Landing Pages (and What They Teach Us)

November 9, 2016/0 Comments/in Web Design /by Leverage Marketing

The holidays are a time for home-cooked meals, family gatherings, and seasonally-appropriate landing pages.

All right, maybe the only people who are thinking about holiday landing pages are the marketers and business owners who are preparing their websites for the busy shopping season. But if you’re in that category, you know that landing pages, which visitors are directed to after clicking a link or ad, are a big deal. For businesses that rely on lead generation, landing pages capture lead information (such as a name and email) that can be used later. For ecommerce businesses, landing pages encourage visitors to click-through to an offer that will take them farther down the sales funnel.

I’m going to share some of the best Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas landing pages of the year so that we can all get some web design inspiration for our holiday-centric offers. Consider using some of these examples to create your own Christmas landing page template.

The North Face: Minimalist Design Makes the Message Clear

While some may grumble about winter weather, the team at the North Face—an activewear company known for their jackets—clearly loves it. This is the perfect season to show off their cold weather gear, and that’s exactly what they’re doing with their Holiday Adventure Gift Guide landing page.

This image is what you see above the fold. The North Face has chosen a winter landscape for their background, which fits their brand style (and the season) without appearing too busy or distracting. Because the sky in the image is a deep gray, the white text and CTA buttons almost seem to jump off the page. With three buttons that clearly segment the gift guide (into Women’s, Men’s, and Kids’ products), this holiday landing page makes it easy for viewers to click through to the section that best fits the person for whom they’re shopping.

Mulberry: Capture the Holiday Spirit with Bright Colors

Where the North Face uses muted background colors to draw the viewer’s eyes to their CTA buttons, Mulberry takes the opposite approach.

The luxury British fashion company chose a bold red background and four bright, monochromatic purses that instantly grab the viewer’s attention and put them in a festive frame of mind. The minimal copy in a white font creates a nice contrast with the red background, and the single Explore CTA button makes it obvious what the viewer should do next.

One nice thing about this bright and simple page is that it’s straightforward and inviting for people who might not know the Mulberry brand well but who are shopping for a fashion-conscious friend or family member. The purses featured on the page are a sample of what the brand has to offer, and the viewer knows that when they click Explore, they’ll be taken to a carefully curated gift section.

AO.com: Highlight a Strong Incentive

This AO.com holiday landing page is from last Black Friday, but it still serves as a great example for this upcoming shopping season.

What I like about this page is that it offers up two strong incentives to get viewers to submit their name and email. First, it creates a sense of exclusivity by letting the user know that when they enter their email, they’ll get access to Black Friday deals before anyone else. If that’s not enough of an incentive, the copy below the sign-up form lets readers know that when they submit their email, they’ll automatically be entered into a contest to win a 50” TV. Filling out a short contact form seems like a small task when there’s a big-ticket item on the line.

Hubspot: Know Your Audience

Hubspot might not be the most obvious candidate to run a holiday campaign: they’re a B2B business that provides CRM, sales, and marketing software. However, they recognized that marketing agencies would be prepping for Cyber Monday and decided to draw those potential customers in by creating a #HolidayHub microsite.

The landing page for the hub features a countdown to Cyber Monday, which creates a sense of urgency and reminds marketers that it’s time to take action.

Below the fold, Hubspot offers a selection of valuable holiday marketing resources that are available to download. The content on this page is clearly targeted to ecommerce businesses (and the marketing agencies that work with them). By using their landing page to hone in on this niche audience, Hubspot can deliver appealing resources that will entice qualified leads to submit their email addresses.

Club W: Address and Solve a Common Holiday Problem

Copywriters know that one good way to appeal to an audience is to address a problem they have and offer a solution. Club W, a wine delivery service, does this in just two lines on their corporate gift landing page.

By saying “This year, give a gift everyone will love,” Club W implies that it can be challenging to pick out a gift that will appeal to a large audience—especially when you need to get a gift for a corporate client or partner. Their clever second line “(Hint, it’s Wine)” provides the solution. Below this copy, Club W offers a couple of options for viewers to click on: curated wine gift packs or gift cards for a monthly wine club. Holiday problem solved!

So What Should You Do for Your Holiday Landing Page?

As the examples above reveal, there isn’t a single formula for creating holiday landing pages. Different approaches can be equally effective, depending on the brand on the audience. As you create your Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Christmas landing page template, keep the following points in mind:

As you develop a festive design, keep your brand aesthetic (and voice) in focus.
Keep it minimal. Your landing page is meant to direct visitors to take a specific action, whether that’s filling out a form or purchasing a product. Don’t include too many CTAs or distracting elements.
Give visitors a good reason to click through or fill out your form. There are plenty of other businesses offering holiday incentives like free shipping, so think about how you can make your offer stand out.
Know who you’re targeting. As a B2C, you may be creating landing pages to appeal to consumers who are shopping for their loved ones. As a B2B, you may be creating landing pages that offer resources for businesses as they prepare for the holidays.
Use your landing page copy to quickly explain to your visitors how you’re going to solve a problem for them, whether that means helping them find a present for that hard-to-shop-for person or giving them early access to Black Friday deals.

Keep these points in mind to create powerful holiday landing pages that drive your visitors to sign up or buy.

Want help generating leads, increasing click-through rates, and more beyond this holiday season? Contact our team of digital marketing experts for advice.

Why Google Analytics is Not Tracking Correctly: Your Troubleshooting Guide

November 3, 2016/24 Comments/in SEO /by Bob Kehoe

Google Analytics’ tracking capabilities make it a great asset for any website to have. However, when Google Analytics is not tracking correctly, or its data is inaccurate, the usefulness of the tool essentially disappears. Anyone who has ever used Google Analytics can tell you that there are a lot of intricacies involved that may not seem all that important until you’re sorting through a lot of useless reports, thinking, “How exactly did I get here?”

Luckily, when Google Analytics is not tracking or is having other issues, it usually isn’t a death sentence. Many fixes are even straightforward enough to tackle in a DIY fashion. If your Google Analytics data is not showing up or you’re just struggling to get things off the ground, this list is a good way to uncover any problems. If you haven’t set up Google Analytics on your site yet, even better – read through and save yourself the extra work later.

Ok, so you carefully followed all the instructions for adding and publishing the tracking code on your site, and you’ve been waiting for data to start pouring in, but Google Analytics apparently isn’t tracking. Or maybe your site had been tracking perfectly, but now something has changed, and you’re not sure why. What’s going on?

Before you panic:

Test it out by checking your Real-Time stats. Hop over to the Reports section in the property of concern and select Real-Time. If Google Analytics is tracking correctly, the Overview tab should give you an idea of how many people are on your site at that very moment. Test it out yourself – open your site in another tab, then refresh the Overview If your Google Analytics code is working, you should be able to see data on this page. You should be able to see your page view sitting on your site in the Real-Time report, and you should even be able to discern that it’s you by the location of the dot on the map.

“Hey, that’s me on the Real-Time report!”

You can also visit the Tracking Info section under your property name in the Admin section of Google Analytics, and click Tracking Code to verify if Google Analytics recognizes that your property has been recording traffic.

Verify that you’re tracking the correct property and view. If you’ve been using Google Analytics to track multiple websites or have already set up several views on this property, you might be using the snippet from another location. Sure, this may sound obvious to you – but why frantically disassemble the device before checking to see if you plugged it in?
Check out your filters. If you’ve been tracking your site for a while and have added some filters in this view, you should re-visit what filters you have set and if they could be unintentionally cutting off tracking. One important detail to note is that the order in which you apply filters in Google Analytics matters, and it can be easy to accidentally block your tracking by adding filters in the wrong order. For example, if you decide you only want to track traffic from Arkansas but you’ve already set the view to only track Alabama visitors, setting an Arkansas-only filter now won’t do you much good, because you already left all the Arkansas visitors out with the Alabama filter. This kind of mistake will quickly bring your traffic down to zero.

Unfortunately, if you’ve set some filters that seem to be excluding traffic you want to be recording, you can’t take filters back on that particular view. That’s why it is critical to always preserve an unfiltered view, such as the default view All Web Site Data. If you suspect you’ve overdone it with filters, you can try reordering the filters for better results or start over with a new unfiltered view.

If you’ve confirmed that your Google Analytics code is not working for a view that it should be tracking, it’s time to dig deeper. Answer these questions to get a better idea of what could be going wrong.

Have you reviewed your Google Analytics tracking code?

If you have recently set up your tracking code but Google Analytics is not tracking your traffic, this is an important step to take. When adding the snippet into a plugin or the tracking code onto the pages of the site, it is imperative that you copy and paste directly from your Google Analytics property settings to your site code. If you copy over to a word processor or similar program on your computer before putting it on your site, extra white spaces or small changes in punctuation may occur and can make or break your tracking. The tracking code is also case sensitive, so don’t neglect capitalization.

Have you added the tracking code to every page of your site?

Just adding the code to the homepage of your site won’t do – Google Analytics will not be tracking all pages of your site if you don’t add the code to each page. This includes subdomains and those less-than-obvious landing pages hiding on your site. If you’re the one installing the code onto your site and adding it to every single page sounds exhausting, you can browse the wide assortment of plugin options available on many of the more common content management systems (such as WordPress or Magento). These plugins will make adding code to every page of the site into a much simpler process. You can also enlist help from a web development specialist if the process is too daunting to take on yourself.

“Hey look, we’ve got traffic after all!”

Do you have duplicate tracking codes running on your site?

If you’re unwittingly recording Google Analytics data twice, you may notice that you’re having the opposite problem – your visits, page views, and bounce rates seem far too good to be true! However, having multiple tracking codes on your site is a bad practice and will cause your Google Analytics data to be seriously inaccurate, as well as vulnerable to malfunctions in multiple areas of data collection.

If your site has been around for a while and has had a few different developers, consultants, and managers working on it, it’s possible that things have gotten lost in the shuffle. If your Google Analytics code is not working correctly, rifle through your source code for signs of old Google Analytics tracking code. You may be surprised what you can find and purge from your pages. With the wide availability of Google Analytics-compatible features and add-ons available on WordPress and other popular platforms, it is easy to overlook a lurking plugin or buried code.

Has your site been penalized by Google?

Google continuously rolls out updates to its search ranking algorithm that help make the search experience richer, more accurate, and less dangerous for searchers. With every big change in the algorithm comes a new group of websites that see huge changes in their traffic due to big rankings promotions or demotions. In other words, a ranking penalty (or demotion) could bury your site on the 100^th page of Google without you noticing much other than a huge drop in site traffic in Google Analytics.

Why might you have received a penalty? It’s hard to say. Each algorithm change is different and may declare that a certain aspect of your site is positive or negative. By doing this, Google weeds out spam and punishes websites for using less-than-ideal methods to sit higher in search results. In short, you may think that Google Analytics is not tracking your traffic, but maybe people just aren’t finding your site due to a penalty or two.

If you’ve finished this list and suspect you have received a penalty or still think that Google Analytics is not working correctly, it might be a good time to look into hiring SEO specialists like the ones at Leverage Marketing to review your site. Our experienced Google Analytics experts can get your tracking moving, help you recover from penalties, and help bring your site to a place in the organic search rankings where users will be able to find you.

How to Create a Valuable Holiday Gift Guide

November 1, 2016/0 Comments/in Content Marketing, Email Marketing, SEO, Social Media /by Bob Kehoe

Why Create a Holiday Gift Guide?

It’s hard to believe, but the holidays are almost upon us. We’re around the corner from Thanksgiving, and the winter holidays are just a stone’s throw away in marketing time. What can you do to get your customers ready for the season? How can you make them aware of what products you or your partners have available for purchase?

With average spending reaching over $800 per consumer this holiday season, digital marketplaces are excellent places for consumers to buy gifts for everyone on their list without driving to multiple stores. 44% of US holiday shoppers bought gifts online in 2014, and for 2016, online sales are forecast to be as much as $117 billion. Making a holiday gift guide can help your company grab a chunk of this revenue.

With holiday shopping now starting as early as the day after Halloween, making a holiday gift guide early can be a great way to highlight best-selling and popular products. By creating a visual representation of your product selection, you can facilitate the holiday shopping processing and make buying easier for your customers.

Holiday gift guides are a way to take marketing and make it creative. Instead of just a boring sales email, you get to take the products you want to sell and present them in a visually enticing format that transports the reader where you want them to go.

Here are a few methods to make holiday gift guides that grab your customers’ attention:

Use a Data-Driven Approach

graph-holiday-gift-guide

Don’t just choose your favorite products to include in your holiday gift guide, use targeted products that are either currently popular or were popular last holiday season. Generate reports on the top sellers in various categories and try to find items that would make good presents. Furthermore, it’s important to get a good mix of products in your gift guide to appeal to a broad range of consumers. You probably don’t have only one type of customer, and your holiday gift guide should reflect that. Look back to your buyer personas and make sure your gift guide reflects the variety inherent in them.

It’s important to get the raw data to find what people are purchasing–use tools like Google Analytics and Hubspot. Track what people are purchasing and what their purchase path is. Use social media and online polls to ask your customers what items they’d like to see. All this data will help you create an approach to your guide that targets a wide swath of customers and reflects the diversity of your business.

Create an Immersive Experience

When creating your holiday gift guide, it is best to curate an experience that submerges the reader in your content. Try segmenting your gift guide into different gift collections by age or gender (if applicable), or by price point. The consumer is then drawn into a selection of items targeted exactly for the people on their gift list. By creating a seamless experience with colorful, high-resolution images of your products, readers are more likely to buy.

Use Pinterest and Other Social Media to Create Holiday Gift Boards

As much as you may segment your holiday gift guide, there is no way to account for every different group and taste. Creating a variety of simple holiday gift boards on Pinterest to augment your existing gift guide is a simple way to help your customers. You can create a specific board for the customer (or buyer persona) you’re trying to target, such as “dog lover” or “stay at home mom.” This strategy works better for some B2C businesses with audiences and demographics more likely to use Pinterest. Tailor your approach to your customers and you’ll have more success. Find out what platforms they use through Google Analytics and online polls and promote through those.

Marketing using Pinterest and other social media sites is incredibly useful in today’s digital age. You can target users who wouldn’t otherwise interact with your content and start new conversations about your products. Remember to continually engage the users from social media and offer them exciting special offers to pique their interest.

Continue Writing About and Promoting Your Holiday Gift Guide

Once your holiday gift guide is out there, don’t just leave it sitting in cyberspace. Write about it using blog posts to provide additional context to the products you’re recommending to your customers. Tell your customers why they should buy this particular item. Explain why your product will make the perfect gift for their friend or family member. Producing blog posts about the products in your gift guide creates additional engagement around your products and adds a framework for your buyers. Do keyword research so that you can incorporate phrases for a higher organic ranking.

Promote the gift guide and your blogs on social media. Don’t let them stagnate on your website waiting for organic hits. Include links in emails, launch a paid campaign, and perhaps even look for promotional opportunities with other blogs or websites in your industry for link sharing. These methods can further enhance the reach of your guide to additional customers.

Your holiday gift guide can be your customers’ entry point into your product offerings. Make sure it is inviting, accessible, immersive, and understandable. If you use these tips to create your gift guide, you’re more likely to succeed this holiday season.

The team at Leverage Marketing has been through many holiday seasons and knows holiday gift guides inside and out. If you have questions about marketing for the holiday season, we are here to help. We are experts in helping our clients meet their needs all year-round. Sign up for our newsletter today to get tips about SEO, social media, marketing, and lots more.