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May 2009, Issue 63 |
Reach the C-suite: The High-Value CTA By Ahmed Taleb, Senior Director of Strategic Planning, Bulldog Solutions Potential buyers of your services have a broad set of concerns that must be satisfied before they begin the buying process. If you're simply serving up content about features and benefits, you're ignoring their preferences and illustrating to them your lack of insight into their buying process. Successful BtoB marketing organizations must understand the buying behavior of specific decision makers and build an effective call-to-action architecture that matches prospects' buying behavior with specific value offerings designed to satisfy their objections and help move them through the sales pipeline. This architecture is a critical part of conversion planning and sales readiness: It sets your sales team up for success by identifying and engaging prospects who are ready to buy. This excerpt from the new white paper, "Conversion Planning: Building a Call to Action Architecture that Speeds Your Sales Pipeline," defines high-value calls to action and explains how they can help marketers reach top executives. Download the complete white paper. One Size Doesn't Fit All Most calls to action fall into one of three categories. They are designed to:
Mapping Your Calls to Action Each of these types of calls to action has a specific application and should be positioned within your marketing program to deliver maximum benefit. Most marketers fail to create a broad enough set of calls to action within their toolkit to allow them to target specific buyer behaviors. This is particularly apparent regarding the challenge of reaching hard-to-reach or executive-level stakeholders. For this group, traditional calls to action such as subscribing to a newsletter or downloading a white paper simply aren't effective. Often these high-level prospects are too time-pressured to respond to anything less than a high-value offer. For these targets, we recommend creating a stand-alone call-to-action program that brings a broader value offering together with consultative selling: the high-value call to action. High-value calls to action can take many forms, but inherently they all strive to achieve the same end result. If executed correctly, they provide a much shorter path to a direct, executive-to-executive conversation. This falls in the category of a call to action that is designed to gain permission—but it does so on a much more involved level than a lower value offering. The key to making these CTAs work is to identify the right types of offerings. Remember, it's a "give/get." The high-value call to action gets extremely useful information from prospects, but must deliver equally useful information back to them. Some High-Value Call-to-Action Examples For example, a typical senior or C-level executive may have a strong understanding of their business, but might lack perspective of how their business ranks in certain areas according to an industry-wide set of best practices. A tool that provides an assessment and shows their position against benchmarks from their industry vertical would be a highly valued resource, and therefore a strong marketing tool. At Bulldog Solutions, we offer such a tool to prospects who are concerned about their progress in, among other areas, implementation of a marketing automation platform. Because marketing automation can be complex, executives might be concerned about whether they are getting maximum ROI from their marketing automation investment, but not quite sure how to go about measuring how effective they've been and determining areas for improvement. The assessment tool gives them insight specific to their situation, and in turn, lets us know if there are key areas in which we can help. They do invest some time in the initial survey—again, I'd think back to the garbage in/garbage out realities. The more accurate their answers, the better the insight they receive in return.
Other examples of high-value calls to action might be access to an exclusive case study with in-depth analysis of how a company in the executive's vertical met a specific challenge; or exclusive, even customized briefings from industry analysts or other though leaders.
Return to MWJ Home John Farrell is the community correspondent for Healthcare Goes Mobile and editor of Mobile Health Watch. He can be reached at jfarrell@medtechpublishing.com. Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, Director of Field Marketing. |
Example of a High-Value Call to Action: A Survey in Exchange for a Custom Analysis of Strengths and Weaknesses |
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