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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Kim Albee
February - March 2013

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How to qualify customers with calls to action

A call to action is only effective if it is appropriate to the relationship you have with a prospective customer.

Imagine if you introduced yourself at a party in this way: “Hi, how are you? I’m Kim. Could I have your full name, phone number, e-mail, address, the company you work for and your position?”

No one does this. It’s rude or socially awkward at best.

Typically you would ask for a person’s name and then start to talk about things that you have in common before asking for personal details.

If you wouldn’t interrogate a person at a party, then don’t do it on your website.

“Call us today!” is a common call to action on many company websites. Most people ignore those words because they are not ready to talk to a live person about the company’s product or service.

Companies that exclusively use “high hurdle” calls to action will only capture the few people that are already prepared to become customers. Using a variety of calls to action can greatly increase your sales by qualifying potential customers based on interest levels.

Why use calls to action?

A call to action is any direct request for a person to take an immediate action.

Calls to action can present low to high hurdles for a potential customer depending on the difficulty of the action being requested. Companies should use calls to action that are low, medium, and high hurdles to attract people at all stages of the buying cycle.

  • Low hurdle calls to action encourage simple interactions with your company and are a great way to introduce your services. A low hurdle can include requesting an email address in return for access to a white paper.
  • Medium hurdles are slightly more involved interactions which a potential lead will generally only perform for something of more significant value. An example of a medium hurdle is having to register in order to view content on a newspaper website.
  • High hurdles show you who the most interested prospects are so that you can connect with them directly and ask for their business. A high hurdle includes someone giving sensitive information such as a phone number or physical mailing address in order to be contacted.

How Different Calls to Action Work

Low Hurdles

Start by giving people low hurdles if you want a clear picture of who your potential leads are. Calls to action with low hurdles allow you to capture leads much earlier in their buying process, before they even have fully formed ideas of what they need.

When you capture a lead’s information early on, you can even begin to shape the buying process because these prospective leads are coming to you to learn about your products and services.

An example of a low hurdle is a valuable resource such as a free newsletter in exchange for a name and email address.

Medium Hurdles

Next, measure trust with medium hurdles. A medium hurdle might ask for information about the person’s job title or organization or even ask what their top concerns are. As a potential lead engages with you, you can build a progressive profile on them. This is easier if you have some kind of lead nurturing software.

You can also start to offer more premium content with medium hurdles. If you offered a checklist or a report for the low hurdle, consider offering an e-book or registration in a webinar. When you see that your leads are willing to give you more information, you know that they are beginning to trust you.

High Hurdles

Finally, high hurdles create a bridge from marketing to sales. Now you can ask visitors to call you.

You can also ask for the phone numbers of those who have responded to calls to action with medium hurdles. Do not ask for a phone number or sensitive information earlier in the process because you are more likely to get fake numbers and bad data.

An example of a high hurdle that my company uses is asking all prospects who want a free 30-day trial of our software to sign up for a 30-minute call with us. By the time a person is ready to try our software, many of them are willing to commit to a phone call. The ones who are not willing to speak to us are also probably not ready to make use of the software.

By insisting on the high hurdle, we were able to boost our conversion rate and turn more of our leads into long-term customers.

Tuning your Calls to Action and Content

As you learn more about your leads by seeing which hurdles they’re responding to, you can keep tweaking your offers. Even if you don’t have a lot of information about your leads, keep trying different kinds of calls to action: focused, humorous, creative, outrageous.

Information about how leads move through your buying process is very powerful. The businesses that are engaging leads early and learning from how those leads respond are going to win over the businesses that just say, “Call us today!”

Contact: Kim Albee is president of Genoo in Golden Valley, which helps customers with Internet marketing best practices. www.genoo.com