Tag Archives: Online Marketing

Why Online Marketing Is Like Serial Dating

You’ve heard of that poser who manages to get all the girls by lying, cheating, and hitting on everything with a skirt. You may even laugh at his antics, when you see them portrayed by the character named Barnie on “How I Met Your Mother.” Other times he makes you cringe at his calculating and impersonal techniques to improve his conquest numbers. Whether you love him or hate him, he has some valuable lessons to offer online marketers. Today’s social marketing world depends on authenticity and personal branding, but it also can make use of some techniques that players have used for centuries to reel in the goods.

It’s all about the Numbers

Players, like Barnie, know that rejection is inevitable in dating as well as in business. You may have to struggle a while to get your first “yes.” But, you definitely increase your chances if you market as many people as possible while trying to make each contact as personal as possible. It’s considered uncouth to solicit every woman in a bar to see who will bite, but the same approach in business is exactly what you need to get results. Persistence in your online marketing venture is bound to reap success even if it can get monotonous or repetitive. The wider you cast your net, the more likely you’ll bring in a big haul.

Create an Attractive Hook

Some days Barnie is a pilot and other days he is a doctor. He has no qualms about making up a story to gain the confidence or sympathy of his intended target. This type of antic can be successful in dating and in business, with the exception that creating enticing stories better be based on some modicum of truth in business or you could end up sued. The technique is still valid, however, in that you want to find the hook that appeals toWhy Online Marketing Is Like Serial Dating your target audience and then use that to get them to connect with you on a personal level. This can encompass something as simple as indicating that you love pets and donate money to shelters from every purchase made or that your business was founded to solve some personal problem in your life. The key is to have a story that you can go to when someone wants to know who you are and why they should buy from you.

Get Contact Information

Internet marketers spend a lot of time creating social profiles, tweeting, posting images, and writing blog articles. All of that is great for exposure, but if you don’t focus on the final goal like Barnie, you’ll just end up with a lot of goodnight kisses and little else to show for it. Like Barnie, you got to start with the phone number – in this case, the email address. Email marketing is the first step to close the deal and without it, you’re wasting your time. If you don’t have an email program set up to market all your contacts and you aren’t automating it to be able to service multiple clients at a time, you’re only sabotaging yourself.

Close the Deal

Decide how many contacts it takes to close the deal. A real player might hang around for three dates and if nothing happens, moves on. Likewise, if you’re not getting responses from your email list after a set number of contacts, you need to review your entire game plan. You should be reaping results. You want to build an audience, but the audience needs to be a paying audience otherwise your business will inevitably fold.

If you’re not getting people to buy your services then you need to look at where there might be a mismatch in who you’ve targeted and what you are selling. You might find you need to create a couple of different deals – one for low-income people and another for more high-end customers. It could be that no one is interested in your product or service and it needs to be tweaked. Maybe you are not asking for the sale outright and that is also a factor. If you have a full-blown email responder system in place, you can view which emails get the most attention and click-through rates and that can help you customize your message so that people buy more often. In the end, you will find that you can maintain your authenticity and sell a good product even as you use some of the techniques that have made players like Barnie successful with less noble intentions.

Redirecting Incoming Traffic to Immediate Action

Getting Acquainted with Call to Action (CTA) Buttons/Text

The term “Call-to-Action” has become more common in the field of web designing and online experience of internet users. It is used to refer to those aspects of a web page that request the visitor to take immediate action. In fact, you may have seen some CTA buttons yourself while browsing over the web. Remember the biggest and inarguably the most prominent buttons on the webpage with ostentatiously catchy fonts that are just too hard to miss? Yes, they are called CTAs; prominent clickable buttons or text that, when clicked, perform a custom predefined action. Clickable buttons are the most common demonstration of CTAs.

Are CTA Buttons And Text Two Sides Of The Same Coin?

There isn’t enough difference between a CTA button and a CTA text and the two terms have often been used interchangeably. The only difference between the two is in their appearance with CTA text being in the form of prominent, colorful, and very legible text while buttons are simple text wrapped in eye-candy. Both of them are strategically positioned on the page and their words are carefully chosen so that they literally drive visitors to action. As far as usage and marketing benefits are concerned, both have the same scale of marketing capabilities.

CTA – Online Marketing and Promotional Tool

In the online world, the term “call-to-action” is solely an advertising, promoting and marketing concept. It is both a request as well as a directive that encourages the visitor of the webpage to take immediate action. CTAs are the doorway to the sales process because they answer the most common question that pops up in the mind of the site visitor; “I want to purchase it. So what do I do now?”

A good CTA can be a great marketing tool for businesses with online resources. They are the most prominent link that acquaints the user with the sales process. This makes them a highly effective tool for websites that need to redirect incoming traffic to landing and sales pages.

CTAs have been observed to increase sales levels exponentially by encouraging a considerably higher number of signups compared to other tools of marketing, promotion and distribution.

How Big A Punch Do CTAs Pack?

The entire purpose of a CTA button or text is to ensure that the visitor is driven to action. However, not all visitors would be so keen to click on these buttons or text regardless of how strategically planned and placed they might be. Therefore, many businesses keep monitoring the volume of traffic that is directed to their landing sales page as a means of checking the efficiency of CTAs. Also, it is in the best interests of a business to check the effectiveness of CTAs on a regular basis. Current statistics on the volume of traffic should be compared with past trends to identify fluctuations in volume.

Finding The Perfect Spot For CTAs

Simply making button and text colorful, prominent and fancy is not always enough to make them visible. The placement and positioning of a CTA property also plays an equally important role in how effective it is at driving traffic and generating a higher sales turnover. This is because most visitors do not even consider skimming or scrolling down the page to view all its content probably because they are short on time. Therefore, CTAs should be placed such that they are the first and possibly the most prominent feature of the page upon loading.

Most common and strategic positions for CTAs are at the right hand of the page or in the center. Traditionally, a CTA is placed in a strategic position where it is isolated and prominent. Along with contrasting colors and catchy, visually appealing buttons, using the right color contrast also helps the button in standing out from the other text on the website.

(a) In an isolated but strategic area so that it dominates other web elements
(b) Right in the middle of your layout
(c) At the top of the page for shorter pages
(d) Throughout the length of the page if the page is long. Also, it is best to place CTAs in multiple positions for long pages.

LANGUAGE SPEAKS VOLUMES – Simple, lucid and laconic is the inarguably the best approach to make CTAs powerful and comprehensive. Using big, bold fonts for CTA property works really well. Care should be taken to ensure that text does not represent double meaning as it would confuse the user to act.

BUTTON ICONS ADD VISIBILITY – It also helps the site in boosting its prospects if an element of visual stimulus is added to the button. The most common types of visual stimulants are button icons or images.

Adding Dynamism to CTA Buttons

Smart marketers and webmasters make effective use of dynamic text as a tool to boost the prospects of a CTA button. Dynamic text is helpful in that it allows the user a lot of customization options for the text to use in the CTA button. Using dynamic text tools also creates more relevancy drives stronger and quicker conversions.

Text-free CTA Buttons

During your time browsing the internet, you may have stumbled across a CTA button that in fact does not look remotely similar to the conventional CTA buttons on other website. These buttons use no text and rather take help of signs and symbols to deliver a message. A good example is an online media resource that has a “play” button with a corresponding “play” sign embedded into it. These are effective and innovative variations of the CTA button as they are more laconic in conveying their purpose. However, the use of text-free CTA buttons is limited as not all text can be translated and represented by a symbol. Also, in most cases, symbols fail to induce people to action as they represent neither a request nor urgency.

Uses and Abuses of CTAs

Owing to the popularity of CTAs as the leading marketing and conversion tool on the internet, there are countless positive as well as negative practices that they can be used for. Some of them are listed below:

USES

  1. Add to Cart – Sites and pages use these buttons as a means to coerce the visitor to consider buying the specific product or service that he has been reviewing. These buttons affect direct sales.
  2. Download Buttons – These buttons direct visitors to take possession of a specific item on the page.
  3. Trial Buttons – It is common for marketers to entice the visitor into trying out their service before they can decide on buying it. This is especially true on gaming sites where visitors can try out a free- trial version of the game in order to understand it better.
  4. Sign Up Buttons – These are perhaps the most common type of CTAs and they entice visitors to subscribe to an online service. Social networking and international news sites use Sign Up buttons in highest frequency.

ABUSES

Compared to the positive aspects of CTAs, their negativities are not many. The only possible way they can be used negatively is that, marketers who usually have the tendency to run a strict promotional campaign may use CTAs as a means to deceive customers or to lure them. In such cases, customer may not find what they had been promised by the CTA property.