THE LUMIERE BLOG
Compelling Call-to-Actions That Actually Get Clicked
A call-to-action, or CTA, is just what it sounds like. It literally calls the consumer to take action. What encourages your audience to act on your content. Whether that’s gaining a subscription, following an account, or promoting an interaction, a call to action helps complete a marketing objective. CTA’s are typically brief 2-3 worded sentences at the end of content, such as “Get Started” “Learn More” or “Sign Up”.
CTA’s are important because they guide your users through the marketing funnel, clearly outlining what their next step should engage with your content. Some call-to-action best practices are:
1. Be brief
An effective call to action is short and sweet, quickly letting your audience know what to do next. Use a strong verb and end with an exclamation point. Register Now! Lengthier CTA’s should be avoided, but using a call to value can hammer in the benefits of your audience. For example, Register now and get 15% off your first order!
2. Be urgent
Creating a sense of urgency in your call to action is an effective way to get conversions. Adding words and phrases such as “limited” “last chance” “back in stock” “just for you” and “ends soon” encourages individuals to act faster.
3. Get personal
Call-to-actions tailored to the individual receiving them, have been proven much more effective than generic “Sign up Now!” phrases. By accessing the data of the visitor, you can target CTA’s with their name, location, browser language, whether the customer is already registered/subscribed, etc. Personalized CTAs are proven to convert 202% better than the default.
4. Visual Appeal
Use a contrasting, bright color to get your site visitor’s attention and draw them to the CTA button. You want the CTA to be the first thing the user notices on the page: it’s the most important piece of information anyways. A button is much easier for the visitor to click rather than a hyperlink, graphic, or photo, and humans are wired to click buttons on the page.
Using these tips to build your call-to-action will help your visitors filter through the marketing funnel and give them a specific step to engage with your content.
9 Ways to Dominate Marketing in Less Time
John Rampton, founder of the calendar productivity tool Calendar offers 9 tips on succeeding in marketing without cutting corners. Not surprisingly, outsourcing is towards the top of the list! The remainder of the suggestions are spot on as well.
"A growing business may feel like it doesn't have the bandwidth to accommodate marketing, but without marketing, it will stop growing. By taking a few steps to make marketing an incremental effort, you can ensure you get your company's name out without taking time away from the business itself."
10 Essential Social Media Guidelines
Susan Gunelius, CEO of KeySplash Creative Inc., has authored a dozen books about marketing, branding, social media, copywriting and technology and is the founder and editor in chief of WomenOnBusiness.com, a blog for business women offers 10 essential social media guidelines companies should follow when trying to build engagement.
It’s vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and—perhaps most importantly— your bottom line.
How to Find Photos for Your Blog Posts
Mitt Ray, Founder of the site Social Media Writing provides the reasoning behind, suggestions and a number of resources to use to find quality photos to use in your blog post.
"Adding images can also help your content get more backlinks as found by Moz. This can boost traffic from SEO as backlinks play a key role in your posts’ search engine performance."
5 Crucial Ingredients of a Successful B2B Digital Marketing Strategy
Vikas Chawla, Co-Founder of the offshore agency Social Beat offers 5 great recommendations for companies looking to build a strong reputation online. Delivering effective content that demonstrates thought leadership is obvious but some of the other recommendations are refreshingly simple and fresh compared to most available information.
"Digital marketing represents huge potential for the B2B space to expand their client base and grow their business. With these strategies, your brand can develop a strong and credible online presence to drive greater results"
8 Inbound Marketing Hacks Your B2B Company Should Be Using
Kristen Deyo of Business 2 Community, a business resource site where professionals can establish thought leadership, increase exposure for their business/organization, and network with others.
"The B2B marketing landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years. Digitalization has taken the B2B journey online and empowered buyers to self-educate and collaborate with their peers before ever speaking to a sales or marketing person. This shift has put increased pressure on B2B marketers to execute a strategy focused on demand generation and growing the lead pool."
5 LinkedIn Features You Need to Take Advantage of Today
Jackelyn Ho, Founder, Arrival Gym offers five easy updates you can make to your LinkedIn profile a more effective tool for generating interest in business or services.
"If you're like me, you set up your LinkedIn profile over five years ago, update it whenever you get a new job or gig, and use it mostly to connect with people you've met at conferences. There's nothing wrong with this - except that the things you wrote about yourself five years ago may be a bit outdated."
What You're Probably Missing In Your Marketing Plan (And It's Costing You Thousands)
Carrie McKeegan, CEO and co-founder of Greenback Expat Tax Services recommends adding internal staff as you grow for most of your business' needs with one exception, your marketing staff.
"If you're a typical B2C business, your marketing activities will likely cover at least a few of the following areas: partnerships, SEO, Google AdWords, content marketing, advertising, PR, email marketing, sales, and social media. However, if you break down the skill sets needed for the various different marketing activities, you will quickly find that there's little to no overlap in the type of personality and experience you need for each of these functions."
Lumiere’s Guide to Editorial Calendars
Editorial calendars are used by bloggers, publishers, and small businesses to schedule content across different media, such as newspaper, blogs, social media, and email or print newsletters. An effective editorial calendar is much more than just a platform for publishing dates. An effective editorial calendar maps content and schedules resources, offers, and channels.
Editorial Calendar Basics
Now that you have decided to create an editorial calendar, these tips will ensure you are the most successful.
1) Create a list of Content
List all the content you intend to publish. If you are unsure of blog titles but know you want to post 4 blogs per month, you can simply write “Original Blog 1” or “Curated Blog 2” to serve as placeholders. Utilize a blend of both original and curated content (HootSuite recommends a 60/40 split), both of which are very different and require disparate efforts to complete:
Original Content
Original content is content you have created from scratch and publish for potential leads, subscribers, and customers. You can hire a professional writer or marketing team to create this content for you, or perhaps you or someone in your company has a knack for writing and wants to give it a shot. Just make sure that the content you create is true to your brand and showcases your business properly.
Curated Content
Curating content is the process of sorting through existing online content such as articles, publications, blogs, or social media posts and choosing the pieces relevant to your industry or company and sharing them with your subscribers.
2) Establish Creation and Publishing Dates
Gather the team, get the whiteboard out and strategize. What is feasible for your team? How many pieces can you write per month? How up to date and in demand is your content? Are you outsourcing the creation of your content? If so, what does your budget allow? 2, 4, 8 pieces per month? Great, schedule it! Having creation and publication dates allows for a common goal and transparency across your team and outsourced providers.
Each piece of content will need to be broken out into several steps and assigned to the appropriate party. Here are some editorial steps to help you get started:
3) Identify Resources
Make sure to assign or list responsible parties associated with the creation of each piece. For example “Original Blog 1” may not only require a writer, but also an editor, designer, or publisher. Editorial calendars make it easy to divide work but also can illustrate gaps in your resources. If your existing capacity (or skills) are not sufficient to meet the schedule you establish, consider using freelance or outside help. Although they do come with the extra layer of managing, services like Scripted or inbound marketing agencies can provide the writing expertise or bandwidth you lack.
4) Don’t Forget these Important Editorial Steps
It is not as simple as just writing and publishing. An effective editorial calendar should include all of the steps required from inception through measuring the effectiveness.
Additional key steps for each piece of content are:
Outline - Start with an outline of the content piece with the important points, steps, and keywords.
Write - Assign a date and resource for creating the piece.
Edit - Review the content for tone and adherence to your style guide and provide feedback to the writer of any changes.
Publish - Schedule the content to be published See Social Report’s Best Practices for Scheduling Content.
Promote - Most Blogging platforms will automatically promote to your awareness channel. Consider adding content to a newsletter or customer communications as well.
Measure - It is important to know how your content is performing. Track views, shares, time on page, leads and customers for a true ROI calculation.
Update - Content can become stale very quickly. Schedule a task for reviewing and updating the content in the future to keep it fresh.
5) Determine the Best Awareness Channels
An effective calendar will not only display the title of a piece, the parties responsible, and the due dates but will also list which vehicle you would like to use to share your content with your subscribers. Some pieces may be suitable as blog posts, some as direct emails, while others may be more effective as a simple social media post. Use your calendar to decide and share with your team.
6) Publishing Schedule
Now that you are familiar with the basics of what to publish, let’s discuss when to publish. As the old saying goes, “Timing is everything!”
When it comes to creating your publishing schedule, you will want to consider your audience and any upcoming events that may affect or influence their actions, your business, or your content choices.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
Are there any upcoming events to focus your content on?
Do seasons or holidays impact your product offering?
Is there an industry-specific season coming up? For example, if you are a sporting goods store, you will want to tailor your content to each sport’s particular season.
7) Utilize Productivity Tools
Now that you have learned what an Editorial Calendar is and what to put on it, you might be asking yourself what is the best tool to use to display your calendar. The answer is whatever works best for you and your team. If you want to start with something fairly simple a Google Calendar or Shared Google Document may suffice. If you want to create something a little more robust, you may want to try a tool designed specifically for project management such as Asana which allows you to assign collaborators, create dependent tasks, calendar, and more. Whatever tool you choose, the goal is to get creative, get organized, and get going on your fabulous new Editorial Calendar.
If you follow these steps, what could be a daunting task, can be managed efficiently. A well-thought-out calendar truly helps marketing departments and professionals stay organized and focused--thus increasing traffic and generating customers.
6 KEYS TO SUCCESSFUL LEAD NURTURING
6 KEYS TO SUCCESSFUL LEAD NURTURING
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with buyers throughout the buyer’s journey by providing high-quality content that is relevant and engaging at each stage of their journey. The goal, of course, is to move prospects through the funnel quickly and to convert into paying customers. Marketing and communication efforts focused on listening to the needs of prospects and providing the information and answers they are looking for is essential to this process. Workflow automation tools such as HubSpot are also a great way to assist you in this process by automatically closing stale leads or convincing your prospects that you have the right solution for them. Wondering what else your company can do to convert your leads into buyers?
Here are the 6 key steps to successful lead nurturing we have identified:
1) Identify Your Ideal Client Profile/Buyer Persona
An Ideal Client is someone that can use your service or product to solve their problems or needs. For example, let's say you have a dog walking service. Anyone with a dog could use your service of course, but over time you have found that your most regular and repeat customers are busy single professionals that are at work all day and do not have time to walk their furry friend themselves. You might then run a dog walking special from the hours of 9-5. By identifying the demographic most likely to use your service you can cater your marketing to appeal to that group.
2) Learn the 3 Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
Prospects move through three stages of the buyer’s journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. During Awareness, the buyer is determining possible solutions to their problem, issue, or product need. During Consideration, the buyer begins to investigate different options. Finally, during the Decision phase, the buyer has decided to purchase and is looking to support their decision. Sending an offer to set up a meeting to discuss your services with a prospect in the Awareness phase will most likely go unanswered, but during the Decision phase could prove fruitful. To be successful, present different content throughout these different stages to help ease your prospects to the next phase.
3) Make Awareness a Priority
Creating the perfect content for your ideal client is useless if they don’t begin the journey in the first place. This is why Awareness is a critical component. Create engaging content and optimize it around keywords the buyer is searching for when researching their need. Also, make sure your campaigns contain all of the keywords your prospects might use. Google Keywords Planner can be used to supplement this process. The goal in the Awareness phase is to provide engaging content that answers questions the buyers didn’t already know. Quality content will also help increase the organic search ranking of your website.
4) Utilize Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a system used by sales and marketing professionals to identify the worthiness of a lead by attaching a value to it. The value is based on the information provided and behavior related to interest in a product or service. The higher the ranking, the more likely the prospect will convert into a customer.
Segmenting and lead scoring is critical to great workflows and getting the right offer to the right person at the right time. Too many companies push all leads into one giant bucket and then wonder why they quickly opt out of communication.
5) Get a Workflow Tool
A 2017 study showed that 82% of companies agreed that marketing automation could make them more efficient, delivers an ROI and can increase marketing’s contribution to the pipeline. Why? Because automating workflow makes following up on leads easy! Also because it makes delivering the right offer to the right people at the right time, possible. Workflow tools such as HubSpot or Autopilot align content and offers you’ve created with your inbound strategy to nurture leads through to the decision stage.
6) Evaluate and Optimize
Lead Nurturing is one of the most critical processes for any marketing or sales department. Having a direct effect on your company’s bottom line, you need to ensure that your workflow is well-designed, transparent, and measurable. Evaluating your existing workflow will allow you to see what’s working and what’s not. Brainstorm with your marketing team and ask questions such as what happens when a lead fills out a form requesting an ebook? They receive the ebook download and then what? Are they contacted again? When? How? Mapping out these existing workflows will allow you to see the gaps in your workflow if any. It will also allow you to see additional opportunities to reach out to your prospects. Once you have thoroughly evaluated your current system, you can begin to revise it, improve it, and optimize it. Let your workflow tools do the heavy lifting for you!
The Bottom Line
Lead Nurturing is an essential marketing strategy for any growing business. Don’t wait and hope your customers find you. Lead them to your business or product by creating engaging and relevant content and providing that content at the right time. Don’t waste time marketing to the wrong demographic, identify your ideal customers, craft an appropriate message and reach out, when the time is right. Set up a system and let your workflow tools do the rest. Before you know it, you will have customers lining up, ready to get onboard with your service.