B2B lead gen landing pages: the Call To Action (CTA)
This is the third article in our series on B2B lead gen landing pages.
Last time I looked at the information architecture of a high-performing B2B lead gen landing page. But I saved one crucial part – the call to action (or CTA) – for a detailed look in this article.
What is a CTA?
Remember that a lead gen landing page is just a stepping stone in a desired user journey. A marketer designs a landing page to encourage the reader to do something. The CTA is the part of the user experience that invites the reader to take that intended next step:
A CTA often takes the form of an action button.
For a B2B lead gen page, the marketer’s intention is usually to have the reader provide their contact details so that a sales conversation can take place. So the CTA is likely to be a button saying something like “Contact Us” or “Get in Touch”.
Choosing CTAs – do’s and don’ts
The appearance and wording of a CTA will have a huge impact on the performance of your landing page. So it deserves very serious consideration in your landing page design process.
A guideline: choose your CTA to suit an impatient, intelligent, sceptical prospect.
- DO focus on a single CTA. Your landing page is asking the reader to make a big commitment to taking an action. Don’t make that harder for them by giving them a lot of different choices. Pick a single CTA and stick to it. (See below for some options about secondary CTAs.)
- DO make the CTA visible and obvious. Use contrasting colours. If your CTA is a button, make sure it looks “buttony”.
- DO repeat the CTA from time to time in a tall landing page, or use a sticky bar so that the CTA remains visible as the user scrolls down.
- DO make it clear what will happen next. It’s a well-known principle of user experience that people are more comfortable to take a novel action when the consequences are clear.
- DON’T be too clever. This isn’t the place for cute puns or graphical wizardry. Make your CTA’s wording and appearance obvious and straightforward.
- DON’T underestimate your reader. Your landing page visitor isn’t on your side, yet – they will be sceptical about your offering and will be ready to make subtle judgements. If your CTA says “Speak to an expert NOW” but just links to a contact form to request an email follow-up, many readers will judge you harshly for the inconsistency and insincerity.
Finally, don’t rule out safe choices for CTAs. Buttons saying “Contact Us” and “Get in Touch” aren’t exciting, but they’re CTA clichés for a simple reason – they work. In a B2B lead gen campaign you probably won’t have the luxury of split testing lots of variant CTAs (see our article for why!) so a safe, high-performing choice might be your best bet.
Mechanisms for action
I like to think of a distinction between the CALL to action – what are we asking the reader to do? – and the MECHANISM for action – how are we asking them to do it?
On B2B lead gen pages, it’s a good idea to focus on a single CALL to action. But it’s a great idea to offer multiple MECHANISMS for action.
To understand why, put yourself in the situation of the reader. Consider these scenarios:
- A person is researching a potential purchase while sat alone in a private office. They have plenty of time before their next meeting. They are well placed to initiate a phone call to your sales team and would be happy to spend the next 30 minutes speaking to someone.
- The same person is researching the same purchase on a crowded train during their morning commute. It’s impossible for them to make a phone call but they’d be happy to engage in live chat.
- The same person is researching the same purchase while catching up on work in a few snatched moments of the evening at their family home. They don’t want to engage in a call or a chat, but they’d be happy to submit a form or send an email and receive a response to pick up the next day.
The person in all of these scenarios could be an equally valuable lead. But their willingness to engage via different mechanisms is radically different because of their immediate circumstances.
As digital marketers we don’t know the circumstances of our web visitors at the moment they choose to view our landing pages. (On the internet, no one can tell when you’re in the bathroom!) So the best thing we can do is to offer the visitor a choice of contact mechanism. The person can make their own decision about their most convenient way to get in touch.
Here’s an example from one of our own landing pages. The CTA here is “Book a discovery call”. The button and choice of copy suggests that this will lead to an online booking form – and that’s true. But we also offer three alternative mechanisms for action. Can you spot them? (answers below the image!)
The alternative mechanisms for action are:
- There are phone numbers in case you prefer to make a call. (On a mobile screen these phone number links are tap-to-call.) Note that we show our office hours – so that a person viewing the page out-of-hours knows to choose a different contact mechanism.
- There’s a link to send us an email (in fact via a contact form).
- There’s an option for live chat – we’re currently trialling WhatsApp for this. This option only shows when we have someone on hand to handle the inbound chat.
Offering a phone number has a secondary benefit – it signals that we’re a real company with human beings on hand who are willing and able to receive your call. Even if the visitor prefers to make contact via some other mechanism, the presence of that phone number helps to engage and persuade. We like to include a phone number on a landing page whenever possible.
Always remember that your landing page’s CTA is in competition with all of those alternatives that are just a click of the back button away. For example if a person is ready to make a phone call RIGHT NOW and your landing page only offers a contact form while your competitors offer a choice of mechanisms for action, you’ll lose that hot lead to a competitor who shows a phone number. Multiple mechanisms for action increase landing page conversions.
Secondary CTAs
The golden rule of marketing priorities: never compromise. Except when you have to compromise.
It is a good guiding principle to pick a single CTA and stick to it. But there are situations where it might be desirable or essential to offer a choice of CTAs.
For example, perhaps you are running a campaign that will naturally bring in a mixture of top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel visitors. (A lot of LinkedIn Ads campaigns do this.) You want to encourage the bottom-of-funnel visitors to get in touch, but you’d still like a chance to convert the top-of-funnel visitors – who, by definition, won’t be willing to get in touch with you just yet.
In circumstances like that it’s OK to have a secondary CTA. But make sure it is presented in a way that is obviously secondary in the visual hierarchy of your landing page. Here are a few ways you can do that:
- Make it a text hyperlink, when the main CTA is a button – like the link to the contact page on this example from one of our own landing pages:
- Use a “ghost button” (where the button styling has lower visual salience) like this “Download Datasheet” example:
- Put the secondary CTA in an exit popup. If a person is about to exit a page, the primary CTA has already had its best shot at converting them, so there’s nothing to be lost by trying something different with a prominent secondary CTA like this newsletter signup form:
And that’s my cue to wrap up this blog with a reminder to sign up for our newsletter! We’ll continue this series on landing pages next time with a deep dive into the next step in the conversion journey – the contact form.
Have more questions about high-performing landing pages, or B2B marketing in general? Please get in touch, one of our consultants would be happy to chat!
Are Google’s “AI Overviews” relevant for B2B?
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