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5 most used call to actions (CTAs) on the internet

Author's avatar By Carolanne Mangles 28 Aug, 2018
Essential Essential topic

Having a poorly optimized landing page can turn down visitors’ eagerness to find out more about your product

Landing pages are the place where an interested visitor turns into a lead and you need to design it very carefully. Many companies hold back on developing their landing pages because they assume everyone who visits a landing page are certain to become leads.

Conversion is a long process that consists of many parts: emails, banners, ads, lead magnets, blog posts, infographics -- you know all the things.

You probably have thought out your conversion funnels carefully from top to bottom, and that’s good for you. However, if you slack out on your landing page you’ll risk wasting the effort you’ve spent on building a marketing funnel. Let me explain.

Why are landing pages so important?

As mentioned earlier, landing pages are the focal point of your conversion -- and people who visit landing pages have gone through a customer journey that you’ve designed throughout the funnel. Customer journey online is much like a shopping experience offline. Let’s walk you through an analogy.

Imagine seeing a car that catches your attention. Your daily vehicle is almost 15 years old and you know you need a replacement. You come to the local dealer super psyched to find out more about that car. The receptionist has greeted you with a warm smile. The building looks clean and looked after. But when you meet the salesperson, they greet you with messy hair, wrinkly shirt, and worst of they don’t talk about the car at all.

Having a poorly optimized landing page can turn down visitors’ eagerness to find out more about your product -- much less buy it. If you’re going to plan your conversion funnel at all, go all in! Let’s talk more about the elements that you should have in your landing page for a better visitor-to-buyer conversion

What do you need for a great landing page?

A landing page should be designed to serve only one specific purpose. There should be minimal distraction from both the content and the design of the page that may take visitors’ focus away from the goal. These are the key elements that you need for a focus-oriented landing page.

  • Short blurbs for your product

Blurbs are promotion-oriented sentences that will convince landing page visitors that they do actually need your product and can gain something from it. It doesn’t have to be technical, but highlighting the selling features of your product is one of the best practices for landing page blurbs.

  • Landing page videos

There are several types of video that are suitable for landing pages: product demo, explainer video, and video tutorial.

Product demo will help you showcase the real-life use case scenario for your product. Product demo videos are best used for concrete product (not concrete in building & construction context). If you have invented a portable blender or wireless toasters -- it’s best to show people that it actually works.

Explainer videos, on the other hand, are much more versatile in its application. Most explainer videos are animated because it’s easier to manipulate animation than to create a real-life scene. Startups with innovative digital products are one of the biggest user base for explainer videos. The best thing is, you can use explainer videos for either product demo or video tutorial!

  • Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons

Call to action in the form of a button (instead of in-line text) is much more suitable for conversion-focused pages.

In blog posts, you can put an in-line CTA because they are more about link and authority building, not conversion. Landing pages need CTA buttons that stand out as a center of attention, while the other elements around it amplify its effectiveness.

That said, even the best CTA buttons will not work if they’re the only things on a landing page. You need the entire landing page to work as a unit that makes visitor want to be a paying customer even more. Keep in mind that they’re already at a landing page and interested to find out more

Breadnbeyond, an explainer video company, created an infographic that breaks down the 5 most-used CTA designs on the Internet. It doesn’t stop at web-based CTAs -- it even has an explanation for an on-screen CTA within a video! Check it out:

5-most-used-call-to-action

Author's avatar

By Carolanne Mangles

Carolanne Mangles Dig DipM is the Digital Marketing Executive for Click Travel, an award-winning corporate travel booking platform. She is a specialist in B2B SaaS and enjoys planning and optimizing the full customer journey across all digital channels to create brand awareness, great user experience and copy that really sells the benefits of the product. She was previously Digital Marketing Executive for Smart Insights where she was involved with multiple digital channels to manage fully integrated membership campaigns to boost new customer acquisition and current membership retention. She has spoken and given masterclasses at B2B Expo on Search and Content Marketing, holds an IDM award in GDPR and loves a glass of red wine. Connect with her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.

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