Why the Play Button is the Most Clicked on CTA in the Digital World

Video plays a vitally important role in online marketing. The play button is the most clicked on CTA in the digital world because, let’s face it, online traffic loves video!

A CTA could be anything from adding a product to a shopping cart to downloading an eBook to playing a video. In fact, including video on the same page as your CTA increases conversion by up to 80%.

CTAs lead users to landing pages where they can receive a free offer (eBook, quote, etc.) in exchange for personal information such as name and email. Check out some examples of effective CTAs that we use in our blogs:

You’ll notice all of the above CTAs use action verbs. These create a sense of an active solution for the online user. Call-To-Action buttons should feature striking, action-oriented text which creates better website conversion than non action-oriented words. However, not all CTAs need to have a sense of urgency. Your Inbound strategy is all about converting leads at the right stage of their buyer’s journey, and this means that not everyone is ready to jump into the decision stage right away. Tailor your CTAs to each stage of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision.

Personalization is Key

To maximize the effectiveness of your CTAs, always strive to use language that appeals to your ideal customer. A VP of Marketing will have different pain points than a web developer or video producer. It is important to strategize and think about these different ideal customers before implementing your marketing plan. A concise and helpful way to differentiate these people is through the use of buyer personas.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on market research and real data about your existing customers.—HubSpot

When creating your buyer personas, consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better. 

It’s About the Journey

If your company is just getting its proverbial feet wet in the world of online marketing, fear not! One helpful jumping off point to determine ideal buyer personas is to map out a buyer’s journey for your website. Consider the three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. When people find your website through an organic web search, what are they looking to accomplish? Are they seeking information for a new problem, or are they ready to compare solutions and execute? Ideally, you should have CTAs that help users at any given stage of the journey. This means having offers like “Request a free eBook” (awareness) as well as “Get your quote today” (decision).

At DII, our inbound marketing strategy includes offers for eBooks, whitepapers, videos, free consultations, coupons and product demonstrations. Diversifying your offers makes yourself an authority in your field, as well as providing value to users so they stay on your site longer. The more clicks through your site, the more leads generated!

Use Technology to Your Advantage

If you already use a CRM in your business, you know just how powerful and robust its services are. And if you haven’t employed a CRM yet…what are you waiting for? CRMs store, track, and automate a wide range of information and workflows which makes life easier for your sales and marketing teams. HubSpot is a popular and powerful CRM which can help you design the perfect CTAs. You can personalize any detail in your contacts database, like persona, industry, and lifecycle stage. The goal is to display the most relevant and effective CTAs to move leads further down the funnel. You can even tailor CTAs to anonymous visitors based on their location, device, referral source, or preferred language to customize the experience for everyone – even first-time site visitors.

A/B Testing with CTAs

Use A/B tests to establish the effectiveness of different designs and text in your CTAs. Color, shape, font, and text body are all important factors in crafting the perfect CTA. A/B testing is the perfect way to compare and contrast the success in your click-through rate, and ultimately conversions on your site.

Check out an example of A/B testing for video CTAs, from our partners at Vidyard.

Notice that the simple change from “My” to “Your” led to a dramatic decrease in conversion. The devil is in the details, so it’s important to leave no stone unturned when it comes to video CTA testing. Video CTAs are important not only to get your users to start the video, but to engage with it as long as possible. 

Video has become a staple in digital marketing, and that is only becoming more important as we move through 2017. Videos increase lead generation, conversions, and sales. So keep testing different CTAs until you see an increase in video engagement. (For more information on engagement, click here).

More Applications for CTAs

We often find that our clients only use, and only think about, a CTA in its most traditional form: the offering of an informational resource. The purpose of this CTA is to generate leads, but you can (and should!) use CTAs during every viable part of a user’s experience on your website. Below are a few examples.

• Social media sharing: Sharing videos on social media has a positive feedback loop of exposure for your content. As users comment and share across various social media channels, other users will be more likely to see your video content and comment/share themselves!

• Lead nurturing: After people have already interacted with your company and visited your site, they are closer to the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey instead of the awareness stage. Nurture your leads with different kinds of videos that appeal to the different stages of the buyer’s journey. Informational videos, testimonials, and product demos are all valuable tools to provide users with visual material.

• Close the sale: In the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, your prospects are hot enough for your sales team to have direct contact with them. “Contact sales” is a great CTA because it gets the ball rolling for closing a deal, but it does so on the user’s own terms.

If you have any questions or feedback, drop us a line in the comments section below or give us a shoutout on Twitter!