3 Reasons Advisors Need Calls to Action on Their Website
Having “calls-to-action” on a website is a way to increase the effectiveness of what your website can do for your business. Surprisingly, 70% of small business B2B websites lack a call to action (smallbiztrends.com, August 2013). A call to action (CTA) is an instruction to your visitors to perform an immediate action. Some examples of a call to action could be:
- Subscribing to an email newsletter or regular email communication
- Scheduling an appointment or consultation
- Downloading a whitepaper or some kind of content offer
- Requesting a quote
Many beginner or novice marketers or sales people over look the importance of having a CTA and are thus achieve limited results with their digital properties. Not having a CTA on your website is analogous to ending a phone or face to face meeting with a prospect or client with no next step or follow on activity. Needless to say, it’s a critical component for every advisor’s website. Here are three key reasons on the “why”:
It helps to remove the “dead ends” from your website
When prospects visit your website for the very first time, there’s a high likelihood that they came to your website by entering a search term, such as your company name or perhaps some keywords that match an article or blog post that you wrote. If the content you’ve authored is useful and relevant, the visitor will take the time to read the content and learn from you. So far so good. Once the visitor has finished reading your content, they may have a desire to continue to engage with you, because, after all, the content was useful! Not having a call to action or a way for them to continue their journey with you will most likely cause them to leave. Pages on your site with a high number of hits and a high bounce rate is a good indicator of a dead end on your website. Avoid this trap by placing a call to action at the end of every one of your blog posts. If you’re not blogging yet, not only should you consider starting, simply place a call to action on each page of your website. It could be as easy as placing a small form to subscribe for updates.
Enhance your website’s user experience by using calls to action and remove those dead ends!
Provides visitors with a way to increase their level of engagement with you
If you’re an advisor who has built your practice from scratch or is in the process of growing your practice you’ll be familiar with the concept of a marketing and sales funnel. The marketing and sales funnel is a way to visualize what is effectively a qualification process that you follow to manage, strategize and execute against in order to generate new or repeat business. There are higher volumes of prospects at the top of the funnel than there are at the bottom of the funnel (hence the word “funnel”) and at each stage, different activities are used to manage a prospect from the top to the bottom and eventually a paying customer.
In a digital sense, your website, is one vehicle that can be used to qualify create separation between individuals who are just shopping around and individuals who have problems that need to be solved now. A technique commonly used amongst marketing professionals is the use of calls to action. A CTA can be used as a gateway to further qualify a lead. For example, when a new visitor comes to your website and signs up for updates they are starting a somewhat passive relationship with you. They want to learn more about what you have to say but they aren’t ready to speak with you directly. In this example, the visitor has separated themselves from those who are simply browsing your website. They aren’t a fully qualified lead just yet, but they have taken their level of engagement with you to another level by providing you with their email address (and possibly their first and last name).
Allows you to test the effectiveness of your content
We often hear advisors ask about whether their content is working or not. A big part of a successful digital marketing engine is, in fact, the data but this can be a time consuming task and many advisors are too busy to even write the content for their website and other digital properties. One way to test the effectiveness of one’s content is, you guessed it, the use of CTAs. We’ve all heard the term “Content is King”. Content is not only a way for advisors to connect with their prospects and clients, but it is also a way to establish trust and to demonstrate value. If your visitors find your content useful and educational, then it is logical to assume that they will want to continue to stay in touch with you and engage with you. As mentioned earlier in this post, using CTAs is a great way to provide that next step of engagement.
Just remember, useful content incentivizes higher levels of engagement which leads to increased trust and eventually revenue. Use CTAs to escalate engagement and measure the effectiveness of your content!
Do you have a question about content marketing? Still wondering how content can be used to generate leads for your business? I want to help. Get in touch with us using our contact form!
