Calls-to-Action Dilution

Every digital marketing campaign should drive toward a call-to-action.  Even communications that are primarily educational or informational should have some method of pointing people to a next step.  There’s often a fear that a call to action will get stale. That can be a valid fear if your audience no longer values what is being offered. However, that fear can drive digital marketers to over-produce and under-promote their calls-to-action. Focus on making a quality call-to-action and promoting it thoroughly so that your target audience is given a sufficient opportunity to take advantage of the offer.

Technology keeps accelerating the pace of digital marketing.  This rapid pace often shifts focus to what’s new rather than what’s good.   Something new will often get attention but something good will get a conversion. Effective digital marketing is built on quality calls-to-action not just something new.

We work with a client that has had success offering whitepapers.  Their conversion rates were so good in fact that it encouraged them to create more whitepapers.  After all if one whitepaper can create dozens of leads, then two whitepapers can produce hundreds, right?

When conversion rates started to slip on subsequent whitepapers they sped up production.  Producing the whitepapers strained their ability to research and analyze data on the featured topic so the depth of the content within the whitepaper eroded.  To combat that they started producing short reports based on presentations or articles they had previously released.

The reports were not well received so they started creating them more frequently hoping to cover specific topics that would appeal to their different target audiences.  But since the content was not robust and the segments within their list found little value in them. This led to the middle of last year when they were releasing a report every 2 to 4 weeks, doing a blitz promotion of it for several weeks, and then moving on to the next one.

Trying to keep that breakneck pace was exhausting their resources and killing conversion rates. It was a lot more work to offer something new with very few extra leads to show for it.

So why weren’t leads increasing as they offered more calls-to-action? Unfortunately direct scaling doesn’t often happen on calls-to-action unless the call to action is as strong as the first and appeals to an equal number of non-duplicated people. Instead of scaling there is a dilution effect where the same people convert repetitively, poorer quality offerings drop the overall conversion rate, or both. This is further compounded when the call-to-action is not given sufficient time for promotion.

If you find that you’re rapidly releasing calls-to-action but are not getting sufficient leads or sales to justify the effort, then you have either misidentified what has value to your audience or you are suffering from over-production and the call-to-action dilution effect.