You’ve just completed your landing page that will greet visitors who click on your paid search ad. You pat yourself on the back because of how nice it looks. The page contains information on your product and great graphics. Obviously, your prospects who clicked on your ad will love it, right? Well, maybe….or maybe not. You have about three seconds to attract their attention, engage them, and give them a reason to continue. Will your design do that?

Text and graphics are important - don’t get me wrong - you very much need to attract and engage. What happens next is the tough part. You have even less time to convince the prospect to accept your call-to-action and proceed to the next step in your sales process.The important call-to-action starts with the ad and is reinforced on the landing page. Contact marketing expert Kim Gordon ( www.smallbusinessnow.com) offers a fairly comprehensive list of good calls to action in her article in Entrepreneur Magazine:

  • A limited-time, free or discount offer
  • The chance to see, learn or experience something new
  • A pass to an event
  • A customer reward
  • A fun experience such as a game or a movie
  • A contest, poll or vote
  • In-depth information
  • A deeper product selection or step up in service
  • A subscription or membership
  • The opportunity to make a difference
  • A special guide or white paper
  • A pathway to taking part in the community

By using one of the examples above, you’re enticing the prospect to learn more about you and take the next step in their buying or information gathering process. With competition growing by the day in online marketing, you need to give your site visitor a reason to stay and move on.

Calls to action are becoming such a focal point in online marketing that Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now has created a seminar series around the practice. I’m hoping to attend one in the near future. As he writes in his recent book, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark, online marketing revolves around leading your prospect from one link to the next:

“The essence of the Internet experience is how visitors click from one hyperlink to the next. How they feel about the experience is determined by whether each click fulfills their expectations and needs. Satisfaction with each click (a micro-action) increases their confidence they’ll get what they came for.”

Strong calls to action and comprehensive follow-through on those action requests are what build that confidence in your prospect. Although the time is short, you can win over that prospect in the three seconds he or she is giving you.

As Joseph Carrabis, founder of NextStage Evolution, writes, you have alot of work to do in a very short period of attention span.

“Thus material must attract, engage and cause the individual to take action all within a 3-10 second time span because most people, in our time-crunched world, will barely give you those 10 seconds unless they know they’re going to find some value in the information presented.”

Here are a couple of other good articles I came across on the topic:


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