4 Strategies for Better Lead Generation With CTAs and Landing Pages

When creating content for your business, it can be easy to fall into the trap of vanity metrics. Likes and impressions can collect around a piece of content, giving you a quick feeling of success, but they don't enable you to understand what exactly you’re doing right.

With a lead generation content strategy that's designed around your business goals and a set of relevant KPIs, you can start to see the impact on the whole buyer's journey, and you can pinpoint where and when your content marketing is provoking action.

Lead generation can comprise many different tactics, including paid advertising, calls to action, and landing pages, all of which provide a tangible number you can track and improve as you analyze what’s working. But with 34% of salespeople citing lead qualification as their biggest challenge, it’s important to know how different lead generation tools work and how to generate leads for your business — before you spend money on a whole strategy.

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How to Generate Leads With CTAs and Landing Pages

CTAs and landing pages are good ways to track and optimize how you’re generating leads from your website.

What is a CTA, and how does it work? CTA stands for call to action. It’s the part of your content that acts as an instruction or an imperative, telling the potential buyer what to do next. This action should always align with your goals and KPIs.

Landing pages are a natural partner to CTAs. While CTAs encourage readers to visit a landing page for more information, the landing page invites the visitor in, capturing details about them by offering gated content in exchange for their contact information.

A good landing page will represent the look and feel of your company while clarifying what a new visitor can expect from handing over their details. It’s a mutual exchange designed to educate and nurture the lead.

How to Optimize Your CTAs and Landing Pages for Lead Generation

Here are a few steps you can take to craft CTAs and landing pages that will generate more leads from your website.

1. Review CTAs through the lens of a buyer.

Visitors coming through your site will be at different stages of their buying journey, so you need to craft a variety of CTAs to increase the likelihood of them encountering an action they are ready to take. CTAs that lead to scheduling a demo call, for example, might be effective for those at the very end of their buying journey but will be almost invisible to someone at the early discovery stage. The colder lead will need some more information or an educational download instead. Keep viewing your website through the lens of the buyer’s journey, and you’ll get more opportunities to capture a variety of leads.

2. A/B test new CTA formats.

Some CTA formats will inevitably be more effective for some buyers than others. Performing A/B testing will allow you to see what works best for your audience. Gather data, and you’ll find that you can probably improve most CTAs by making them more attention-grabbing, making them more distinct from the surrounding webpage content, adding color, or making your language clearer and more persuasive.

Here are some specific things you can A/B test on your CTAs:

3. Study your landing page analytics.

Studying metrics like the bounce rate will enable you to see whether visitors are clicking but ultimately not taking further action. Other metrics, including leads generated and sales influenced, can also be illuminating. Through HubSpot, we can follow leads when they download a piece of content, so we can judge which content strategies are contributing most to new revenue. Our whitepaper "8 Steps to Thought Leadership Through Content Marketing” has secured 2,297 new leads, for example, and after engaging with it, 14 leads went on to become customers.

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4. A/B test landing page formats.

Just like you did with your CTAs, testing the language and appearance of your landing pages is vital for optimizing the buyer’s journey. One way to boost the impact of your pages is to keep consistency between CTAs and landing pages. Keep the experience flowing, and potential buyers will be reassured that they can trust you. Be clear, concise, and attention-grabbing, and include a contact form so that you’re always capturing information.

Here are some specific things you can A/B test on your landing pages:

The question of how to get more leads from your website is an important one with an ever-changing answer. Tracking, analyzing, and adjusting lead generation strategies like CTAs and landing pages will give you the control to boost engagement with leads and align your website with your business goals.

To learn more about how you can measure the success of your content marketing strategy for lead generation, download your free guide below!