October 2022 - Stevens & Tate Marketing

The 5 W’s Of A Thank You Page

October 28, 2022/in Articles, Directors, Inbound Marketing /by Nicole Wagner

Thank you pages are an important part of the inbound methodology. To better understand a thank you page, it is best to look at the 5 W’s: Who, what, when, where, and why.

Who sees a thank you page:

Anyone who chooses to follow a link on your website to obtain an eBook or a white paper of some sort, is going to see a thank you page. These people can be prospects, leads or customers.

What the page should look like:

A thank you page should look similar to your companies website. The thank you page should include the main headers which can be seen on your website as well as the name of the company. Most importantly, the message that states “thank you for ___”. You fill in the blank with signing up or downloading the eBook, etc. Additionally, the time frame in which the person will receive the information they have requested. To the right side of the thank you page, it is good to include information related to the topic. Additionally, including a CTA to increase lead conversion, is a good addition as well. When designing your thank you page, it is important to remember that it should NOT be a blank white screen that says thank you.

When a thank you is important:

Thank you’s are always important. Especially because in today’s time, people are always looking for information. By providing a thank you page, there is a good chance the person could return to the website. These pages are something very positive.

Read more on how a thank you page is not the end but a continuation.

Where to go after this step:

Once someone has seen the thank you page, they will be waiting for the information requested to be sent to them. It is important to get back to that person within 2-3 business days. Something else that can be done is to start sending emails to that person with information similar to what they requested. This way, by keeping your company as a part of their attention, they won’t forget about you.

Why these pages are important:

These pages are important because it shows people that you care. It also shows that you will get back to them with the information they are looking for. Thank you pages are important when converting people in the inbound methodology.

Overall, thank you pages are a great addition to have as a part of your website. Don’t forget that these pages appear after someone has requested information. That means that your website will need to include call to actions.

Powerful Call-to-Action Phrases to Increase Clicks

October 21, 2022/in Articles, Brand Development, Directors, Marketing Strategy /by Nicole Wagner

Are you looking to increase your conversion rate? Call to action phrases are an essential part of the conversion process, but what kinds of call-to-actions should you put on your website? CTAs should be simple yet effective, and catch the attention of your visitors.

The formula for a successful CTA page title consists of combining such sales buzzwords as “free,” “discount,” “offer,” “gift,” “guarantee,” with action-oriented words like “click,” “download,” “request,” and “send.” Putting together a strand of words to entice clicks sometimes doesn’t get the job done, though. As a marketer, think of what strikes you as a buyer: emotion.

Humans are oddly emotional creatures and are the only ones that tie those emotions to money hence making many of their purchases subject to the emotions invoked by marketing which is exactly why call to action phrases are so important. This isn’t a secret to marketers either, but leveraging that knowledge and coupling it with your brand’s content can be a little tricky.

Call to Action Phrase Building Tips

CTAs can be as simple as “click here” and “download now,” but can have an infinitely more powerful meaning by adding a few simple words and giving the reader the benefit of what they are getting from the offer.

Include a possessive determiner such as “your.” The possessive aspect of the CTA makes the reader feel as though that piece of content or your offer is already theirs to be had and in their back pocket.
Briefly outline the benefit of the content. Add what your website visitor gets from clicking your CTA. This almost acts as a miniature landing page. For example, instead of saying “click here” use a phrase like “click here for your free white paper.”
Use action words and urgency to encourage clicks. “Limited downloads,” “limited time,” and words such as “now” and “quickly” will enhance the sense of urgency for your users to click on your brand’s CTAs.

Actionable Call to Action Phrases

Actionable CTAs leverage words like “now,” “here,” “click,” etc. Actionable CTAs use an action word to draw the reader into the CTA which gives them that emotional sense of action and satisfies that human demand for immediate satisfaction. Getting content “now” versus “get it in a week” will certainly drive more clicks onto your CTAs.

Keeping in mind some of the tips above, let’s take a look at how using actionable words can make a simple CTA far more powerful. We’ve bolded some of those key terms, but have a little fun. Remove some of the bolded items and see what that does to the phrase. Keep in mind that you can insert any content type or offer in the brackets to fit your brand. Here are a few examples of actionable CTAs:

Download Your [Content] Now
Click Here for Your Free [Content]
Join Now and [Get 30 Days Free]
Download Your Free [Content] Here
Start Getting Your Free [Content] by Clicking Here Now
Click Here for Details About the Best [Service/Product] for Your Company

5 Types of Landing Pages To Increase Your Lead Conversion Rate

Urgent Call to Action Phrases

For most of us, the essence of time can very well be the thing that either helps us make a decision or turns our “eventually” into never. Your buyers are the same way, and giving them a little nudge into a sense of urgency can be just what they need to click your CTA, capitalize on your content, and ultimately buy what you’ve got up for offer. Adding some personal touches (in the right context) can further drive that sense of urgency for your buyer.

Limited time offers, limited time discounts, first time buyer discounts, and limited supply all tend to push buyers a little closer to the buy button in their shopping cart and can be great ways to improve your CTAs. In the case of content and CTAs where the downloads themselves are free, your prospective buyer has virtually nothing to lose. Here are a few urgent call to action phrases that are sure to light the proverbial fire under your buyer and increase clicks:

Download Your [Content] While Supplies Last
Act Quickly Limited Downloads Available
Hurry, This Free [Content] Offer Expires Soon
Secure Your Spot Today! Limited Spots Available
Only X Days Remaining to [Sign Up, Download, Attend]
Take Advantage of this Limited [Content] Today Only
I Urge You to Download this Limited Time Offer

Want to learn more about how to attract more leads? Click here to learn about Attraction Marketing!

Exclusive Call to Action Phrases

Adding urgency to a call to action phrase can sometimes seem a little pushy, especially to some C-level managers and business owners, but there is another equally crafty way to make your CTAs appealing to your target audience: exclusivity. Exclusive offers give readers the feeling that they are a part of or at least offered a deal that no one else is in on.

We see these sort of lead generation tactics across multiple retail platforms where deals are both confined to time and exclusive to members only. Whether or not your particular brand is a retailer or not we, as consumers, have been trained to jump on those exclusive offers available only to the elite. This can work with your CTAs as well. Here are some useful exclusive CTA phrases:

Join Our Mailing List and Get Exclusive Content
This Offer is Only For Our Subscribers
Sign Up for Exclusive Offers only Available to Subscribers
Request an Invitation to [Join, Sign Up, Get Content]
This [Content, Offer] is Only Available to [Subscribers, Members]
Download Now for Exclusive Access

Responsive Call to Action Phrases

Naturally, every call to action you create should have an overall goal of generating a response from your target buyer and while practically any of these CTA phrases we’ve outlined could be categorized as either “actionable” or “responsive” we think that it’s best to separate the two factions. Actionable CTAs lead users towards a specific action such as clicking, downloading, subscribing, etc. whereas responsive CTAs invoke a sense of two-way conversation.

With that said, the CTA phrases below will elicit a response from your potential lead: think feedback, a reply, or a point of contact. These types of CTA phrases should hopefully open up a dialogue between you and your potential buyer and give them an opportunity to start the conversation. Here are a few examples of responsive CTAs:

Talk to One of Our Experts About…
Get a Free Consultation and Talk About Your Business Goals
We’d Like to Hear from You: Talk to a Specialist Today
Let Us Know What You Think
Contact Us Today
Contact Me
Don’t Hesitate to Get in Touch With Us

For more attraction marketing resources, click here.

Craft Your Own CTA Phrases

As we’ve mentioned, the sky really is the limit to crafting attractive content-focused CTA phrases and experimenting with them is one of the great ways inbound marketing can help marketers learn more about their tactics. What’s important to keep in mind is that your buyer is the focus of any CTA or piece of content you craft, and without a doubt, targeting those CTAs is crucial for the success of your content initiatives.

How To Tell Your Brand Story Using Personas

October 17, 2022/in Articles, Brand Development, Brand Story Telling, Directors, Inbound Marketing, Storybranding /by Dan Gartlan

When considering how to tell your brand story, you must think of the role of the audience as well as that of the storyteller. Stories create wonder, excitement, and engagement in the world they create. Through storytelling, your business can engage with its audience on a much more emotional level. Connecting with your key audience is vital, and can be achieved through the creation of buyer personas.

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents the behaviors, goals, and needs of your current and potential customers. Once you know who they are, the problems they are facing, and what they want from life, you can begin to see how to tell your brand story in a way that reaches them and provides the answers they are looking for. The more thoroughly the buyer persona is fleshed out, the more focused your brand storytelling can be, and, consequently, the more effective.

Where to Start with Your Buyer Persona

As with any storytelling element, you start with what you know. Who are your current customers? What age group do they fall into? What gender are they? This information can be gleaned from login details, email lists, and customer feedback. If you make use of social media platforms, the data your customers share publicly provides a wealth of knowledge. You will find that specific characteristics are more common than others, providing you with the basis for your persona. It is essential, however, to create more than one persona, or you could have too narrow a view of your potential audience.

Using Your Brand Story To Reach Millennials In Business

Putting the Flesh on the Bones

Once you have these details, you can begin to ask further questions that allow you to fill in the gaps and create fleshed out individuals. Give your buyer persona a name, age, and gender. Determine their marital status and flesh out the details of their immediate family. Don’t forget to consider their level and type of education, as well as how long they have been out of school. All of this is important because how you approach a single millennial will differ significantly from how you tell your story to a married member of generation X with a mortgage and a family.

Give your personas a career, responsibilities, and challenges. How do you think they approach these elements in their life? How do these aspects affect their levels of trust, loyalty, and their approach to taking risks? These are again all crucial elements in how you tell your brand story and what image of your company you create.

Don’t forget to consider their social life as well. Your buyer personas need to be as human as possible. As well as helping you to create a connection between the audience and the story, this helps you understand where they spend their disposable income, and what you can do to redirect more of that spending towards your brand.

If you are ever unsure of the next step to take with how to tell your brand story through a buyer persona, just imagine a conversation between them and your brand persona. If it is a long pleasant conversation that finds solutions and answers questions, then you are on the right track. If it ends in an argument or, even worse, still silence, you probably have to revisit your brand storytelling strategy from the top.

How To Tell A Better Business Story

October 10, 2022/in Articles, Directors /by Dan Gartlan

A critical key in modern marketing is storytelling. Now, anyone can generate and tell a story. For it to be effective, however, it needs to convey a meaningful message to your audience. Simply put, you need to tell a better business story.

The Meaning Behind the Story

There is some question as to why you need to tell your story in the first place. Who is interested in the history of your company? Your target audience, that’s who.

Connecting with your target audience requires making an emotional connection. That connection builds excitement and encourages loyalty. Storytelling is one way to do this. Humans have connected to their culture and history through storytelling for millennia. It stimulates the mind and it invokes deep emotions. It provokes empathy, engagement and perspective. And all of that promotes an emotional connection.

Visual Storytelling Techniques That Will Take You To The Next Level

Crafting a Better Business Story

How can you make your business story more engaging and exciting?

Tell your audience how your company is changing the world. When you opened the doors, you had a vision on what you wanted to accomplish. That vision may have changed a bit since you started, but you still have a vision. That is part of what you need to convey to your audience through your business story. You want that audience to see that vision and to embrace it as part of your brand.
Show your audience why your company matters. Part of what you need to convey is what makes your company different from your competitors. Telling your story gives you the opportunity to highlight what makes you different and why your customers choose your brand. This differentiation needs to be an integral part of your story.
Be authentic. Today’s consumers have the ability to check the facts. When you are telling your business story, you need to stick to the facts and avoid embellishing the truth. If your story sounds a bit boring, try a different angle. Even the most boring story can sound interesting with the right storytelling.
Focus on your audience. Your story needs to create an emotional connection with your audience. You don’t want to throw details into the story that clutter your message. When crafting your story, be sure each highlight you include invokes or enhances that critical emotional connection.
Be courageous and audacious. Brainstorm and explore all avenues of how to convey your business story. You may have a few bad ideas, but if you explore the inspiration behind those bad ideas, you may find the perfect angle for telling your story. Or you may find the right details to set your story apart from the competition. The bolder and more audacious you are, the better your story will be in the end.
Tell, refine, retell. The first time you tell your story, it will sound hesitant and awkward. You may not have the delivery smooth and the details are rough. But, that is only the first time. Refine your story, smooth out your presentation. Tell the story again. And again, and again. The more you tell it, the more you refine it, the better it will end up.

Each of these tips will help you craft a better business story. Remember, you are not going to get it perfect at first. But, the more you tell it, the more you refine it, the more authentic it becomes. And that is how you make that emotional connection with your target audience.

6 Effective Call To Action Examples

October 7, 2022/in Articles, Directors, Inbound Marketing /by Dan Gartlan

Great content is essential to building brand authority, attracting leads, engaging with leads, building trust, and more. However, good content will only take you so far. If you want your leads to take action once they’ve read or viewed your content, you’ll need to end with a convincing call to action. Without calls to action, your leads won’t know what you want them to do, which will make it more difficult for you to capture them. The following call to action examples will give you an idea of how to create a call to action that is effective:

1. Be Clear And Concise

Your call to action should only be a sentence or two long. If your call to action is too long, your intention may get lost. The last thing you want is for a lead to read your call to action and forget what it was that you were attempting to get them to do by the time they get to the end.

2. Highlight Benefits

You can’t tell a lead what to do unless you offer them something of value in return. For example, you can’t just say “sign up to our newsletter,” if you don’t provide a reason for them to do so. Otherwise, what’s the point in them taking action? Take the call to action examples of Ikea, one of which asks leads to sign up to their newsletter:

Sign up here to get IKEA promotions, news and exciting design ideas for your house and workplace delivered right to your inbox!

This call to action is very clear about what the benefits are to signing up to their newsletter, all while keeping it short and sweet.

3. Emphasize A Lack Of Risk

One of the reasons why it’s so important to build your brand authority is so that you can build trust with your leads quicker. The more people trust you, the more willing they will be to follow your calls to action. However, even if you have managed to establish your brand, people tend to be hesitant about providing their personal information. Because of this, you should emphasize the low risk of following your call to action. Netlifx has a great example of this:

See what’s next. Watch anywhere. Cancel anytime.

Not only does Netflix highlight the benefit of signing up (watching anywhere), they also emphasize the lack of risk (cancel anytime).

4. Use A Sense Of Urgency

Create a sense of urgency with the words you use. This has a psychological effect on leads, helping to encourage them to take action sooner rather than later. If they decide to wait until later, they may forget about your offer, after all. Words that incite urgency include “now,” “today,” “instantly,” and “hurry,” to name a few.

50 Most Powerful Call-to-Action Phrases

5. Consider Two Calls-to-Action

Because you should keep it simple, it’s usually better to stick to one call to action at a time. However, in some cases, two may be appropriate. For example, if you offer two versions of your service, such as free and premium, or if you have a trial available, in which case you may want to have sign up buttons for the service itself and for a trial to that service. Spotify does this with their call to action, which includes two buttons:

Get Spotify Free

Get Spotify Premium

This can be effective since people who try free versions or trial versions are often more likely to sign up for the paid service as a result.

6. Make It Stand Out

Make sure that your calls to action are easy for leads to spot. Instead of just using regular text that blends into the text of your content, consider using buttons that are of different colors than your background. Many successful call to action examples also use visual images. Lyft, for example, uses an image of a driver and his passenger, who is enjoying the ride, as an image that provides an immediately positive impression of their service.

The stronger your calls to actions are, the more leads you’ll convert. These call to action examples should give you a good idea of how to make calls to action that will help improve your conversion rate.

How Data Driven Creative Is Shifting The Advertising Industry

October 3, 2022/in Advertising Agency, Articles, Blog, Directors /by Mark Beebe

It wasn’t that long ago that businesses had limited data to use for their creative. Marketing campaigns were often built using subjective creative instinct and little else. However, now that advertisers have access to significant amounts of data, including personal customer information as well as audience behaviors, creative decisions are being informed by their data. The use of data allows businesses to make much better use of their resources, thereby making your data driven creative efforts more successful as well as more cost-efficient. The following are just a few ways that advertising agencies use data driven creative tactics to influence your marketing campaign for the better.

1. Develop More Accurate Buyer Personas

Arguably the most important facet of any marketing strategy that you implement is the audience you’re targeting. If you’re targeting the wrong audience, your efforts will fail. This is why developing buyer personas is so important — and the most effective way to do this is through the use of customer data. You can use the data you have from previous customers as well as data from the leads you’ve captured in order to identify exactly who your audience is, which will help inform the creation of your buyer personas.

For example, you can track the behavior of your customers by viewing what pages they visited and what actions they took before making a purchase. Information like what they’ve purchased and when they purchased it will be very helpful in being able to reach your audience as well. Many businesses will also create post-sale surveys for customers to fill out that provides valuable information as well. Additionally, you can gather information from your email opt-in forms as well as from your social media followers.

2. Locate Where Your Audience Is

Knowing who your audience is won’t help much if you don’t know where they are. There are countless social media platforms on which you can target your marketing campaigns. If you choose a social channel on which your target audience isn’t present, your campaign will fall on deaf ears. Figuring out what platforms your audience uses is the first step towards reaching them, and your data can help you pinpoint where they are. For example, you can look at the social media data of similar companies to determine where they have the biggest reach, or you can add social share buttons to your content and then identify which platforms your content is being shared on most.

You can also set up business pages on several social platforms and link to them in your email campaigns and on your website. You can then track which pages receive the most follows, which will tell you which social channels you should focus your marketing efforts on.

3. Personalize Your Ads

The amount of data that you have at your fingertips should allow you to personalize the experiences of your customers, especially once you’ve created your buyer personas. For example, retargeting customers using PPC (pay per click) ads highlighting items that they added to their cart but didn’t end up purchasing can be a very effective way to close a missed sale opportunity. Personalized experiences in general, whether it’s personalized CTAs (calls-to-action) or personalized emails, have a big impact. A recent study even revealed that consumers are twice as likely to click through ads for brands they were unfamiliar with if it was tailored to their preference.

4. Create More Relevant Content

By using your buyer personas and by collecting and analyzing how your visitors engage with the content you produce, you can fine tune your content strategy to better target your audience. By tracking several metrics, including time spent on a page, engagement with the content (comments, social shares, likes, etc.), click-throughs, bounce rate, lead captures, and more, you can identify what content performs at the highest rate. You can then craft new content that’s aligned with what type of content performs well. For example, if you noticed that short-form content in list form performs well but long-form content without bullets or numbers does not, then you should have a pretty good idea of what future content should look like.

These are just a few ways that data driven creative can work and why it’s changing the way the advertising agency operates. Using the significant amount of data that you have access to in order to drive your creative marketing decisions will make it easier to successfully identify who your target audience is and how to reach them in a cost-efficient manner.