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Laura helped build some of the most successful brands on the planet. Brands that you have in your cupboards right now. She worked for one of the world’s largest consumer packaged goods companies. Our agency was brought in to help it embrace the digital revolution. Not surprisingly, we suggested creating immersive, empowering experiences.

When we shared our ideas, Laura actually laughed at us. Out loud. She then did what she thought was a favor: She broke down the mathematics of how great brands are built. She didn’t just talk about how much you should spend on TV vs. print vs. the internet. She also had creative execution down to a science.

She knew exactly how long the ad’s main character should be on the screen holding up the product, how long she should smile and then how long the voiceover should spend talking about the product before returning to the star, who would finish the story by sitting comfortably on a couch eating the product and smiling with a friend.

Nothing Laura said was wrong. She was right about the budgeting figures and creative execution. Her recommendations were based on decades of testing and optimization by a team consisting of Harvard graduates, PhDs and other brilliant thinkers.

Her recommendations were based on scientific, optimized truth. Millions upon millions of dollars were invested building her company’s model. They knew that if they created a product that hit specific taste scores among a test group, they could apply their proprietary system and create a billion-dollar brand. To her, we were just a bunch of kids with goofy idealistic concepts that weren’t tested in the real world.

But Laura’s math had a single, devastating flaw. It didn’t account for the fact that most people don’t sit complacently and watch the entire optimized story anymore. Today, while the protagonist is holding up a product, her audience is checking Instagram. During the voiceover, they are instant messaging. Or worse, they never see the ad in the first place, because they’ve blocked it or have the sound off.

Given that the Mad Men era has been so thoroughly disrupted, the big mystery is why every company isn’t fighting friction.

The Answer Is The Machine And The Shiny Objects

The Machine refers to the multibillion-dollar industry that drives brands to invest in traditional interruptive advertising. Laura is a cog in the wheel of The Machine. The Shiny Objects are the bright new tools that distract marketers into thinking they should use the same interruptive tactics while leveraging the newest technologies.

The Machine was originally a great idea. Corporations’ use of advertising is one of the key reasons why a small number of countries, America in particular, came to dominate the global economy. It provided a tool to drive capitalism forward by increasing consumer demand. The world’s top five economies dominate in the percentage of GDP invested in paid media. Over time, paid advertising became a massive industry that offered all the data, training and education needed to create world-class brands. Great careers and trillions of dollars of wealth were built on it. The Machine worked brilliantly for decades.

The top media and advertising technology firms have an entire ecosystem of support: books, blogs, awards, magazines, research firms and conferences all dedicated to the idea that we can build brands through interruptions. An entire town in the south of France gives itself over to the advertising industry every year. In fact, despite the revolutionary change in consumer behavior, growth in paid media continues to outpace the American economy.

The Machine makes it much easier to buy a brand than to build a brand. Marketers can hire an agency to deal with all the headaches of making the creative. Media properties can deal with all the headaches of getting the creative in front of the right eyeballs. And a research company can take away the headaches of measurement and optimization.

Removing friction, by comparison, is extremely difficult. There aren’t decades of data to create a template for success, like Laura’s TV advertisements. There aren’t exact metrics to measure ROI at a granular level.

There isn’t a rewards system that provides awards and promotions for empowering customers. But the change is inevitable. The data is clear at a macro level. Consumer behavior is changing at an unprecedented rate. Entire industries are getting disrupted in the blink of an eye. The Machine will continue to churn, but it absolutely must adapt, and do so at a much quicker rate.

This Leads Us To The Shiny Objects

These are the new, incredible, metric-friendly digital tools: social media, mobile apps, virtual reality, wearable technology. Each of these has been adapted to fit into The Machine’s love of interruptions. They are designed to allow for the precise targeting of ads. The technology industry continually creates tools that can impact people’s lives in unprecedented ways, and then the marketing industry finds ways to put interruptions into them.

From a macro perspective it makes sense for brands. They’ve always succeeded by following audiences wherever they go. When women started watching afternoon dramas, Ivory Soap needed to be there, hence the name “soap operas.” When social media took off, McDonald’s ironically splashed its logo all over the mildly addictive game that enabled users to spend their afternoons building virtual farms.

But just because the audience has shifted to a new media source doesn’t mean they want brands to play there in the same interruptive way. There are simply too many brands and too many messages for interruptions to break through.

To study the problem, my firm created a panel of people representing audience segments ranging from teenage girls to middle-aged men. We strapped cameras to their heads and loaded screen-capturing software on their digital devices. We found that they were exposed to a branded message every 2.7 seconds on average. As they consumed social content, they made a decision every 2.1 seconds on average. Without offering some form of value, it’s almost impossible for brands to get into the stream and make a meaningful impact.

Yet, The Shiny Objects could be a perfect tool for removing friction. Consumers are almost perpetually connected to a digital device. They look at their mobile device every 6.5 minutes that they are awake. They want brands to play in this game. They want content that informs and empowers. They want to be inspired and educated. They want to make smarter purchase decisions. But they don’t want to be interrupted.

TV arrived with a bang after World War II, as a whole new generation was trying to build middle-class lives. Its advent was an amazingly powerful thing. For the first time, sound, pictures and stories came into consumers’ living rooms free of charge. Early on, advertising provided a valuable service. It not only provided incredible new content; it also helped educate us about new products and brands.

Then Fred Flintstone got in the way.

For its first two years, the show was sponsored by Winston cigarettes. At the end of every show, Fred and Barney would light up Winstons and tell each other how delicious they are, thanks to the filter tip. Fred, Barney and generations of cigarette advertisers made cigarettes seem pretty cool. So people smoked them. Then people got sick. Millions died.

Then, it turned out that the assholes who made those cigarettes knew they were deadly.

It didn’t take long for the audience to realize that advertising lies. It seems crazy to think that at one point, the audience actually believed advertising. Why wouldn’t they? Brands had the trust. Then they broke the trust. It’s not just that the audience avoids ads, it’s that they don’t even believe them when they see them.

It’s the end of an era.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Jeff Rosenblum and Jordan Berg, excerpted from their book Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption, published by powerHouse Books

The Blake Project Can Help: The Strategic Brand Storytelling Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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A call to action (CTA) is your chance to turn a lead into a conversion. For this reason, it is an essential aspect of your marketing and advertising strategy. Whether it’s for email marketing campaigns, advertisements, or landing pages, a CTA is crucial to success, and a lackluster call-to-action can make well-crafted content fall short. 

Writing the best call to action for your web content can be a little tricky, however. That’s why in this article, you’ll get to know more about what a call to action is. We’ll highlight some calls to action examples, how to write CTAs, and what an ideal call to action phrase looks like. 

What is a call to action?

A call to action is a marketing tactic and term that describes any design to prompt an immediate response or sale. CTAs can be graphical illustrations, phrases, signages on web content, ad campaigns, etc. It’s telling the reader of that blog post, ad copy, or ad video, “Oh, since you love this, here’s how you can partake in it.” Call to action statements guide the consumer of that content on how to buy what you are selling.

A CTA can be used in several instances, including blog posts, web pages, landing pages, copies, email marketing campaigns, online bios, etc. Recently, call to action social media posts are increasing in popularity as well. 

It’s safe to say that the idea of what a call to action should achieve is relatively uniform: sales, conversions, sign-ups, subscriptions. If your calls to action aren’t getting people to buy your product or service, sign up on your platform, or aren’t achieving your objectives, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and make a better CTA.

So the next question is: How do you go about writing a call to action?

There are a few fundamentals to start with:

• Clarity: A call to action isn’t a lengthy or wordy speech; it’s just 2-10 words. Keep it short, clear, and straightforward.
• Call for action: Your CTA has to elicit an action from the viewer. You want your reader to do something, so your CTA should have a verb (e.g., “download,” “get,” “discover,” “talk”).
• Make it pop: Your call to action adverts, website call to action, or call to action button should stand out from the rest of the text, theme, or layout of your content. Where to put your call to action button or call to action advertising is solely your call, but experts have argued that putting it above the page fold is more effective. This means your page visitor does not have to scroll down to see the CTA.

By and large, an ideal approach to CTA marketing is to lace the word(s) or phrase(s) with an imperative mood like a pseudo-commanding tone, e.g. “Click to join,” or “Start now.” This essentially shakes your potential customer off the fence of indecisiveness. 

Your reader should feel like this decision is low-risk, but has high value. Therefore, writing persuasively and creating a sense of urgency or FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is a compelling call-to-action marketing tactic.

Call to action examples

Let’s go through some examples of call to action formats and phrases that you can use as inspiration.

Call to Action Images

Pictures and images are worth a thousand words. That’s why a lot of companies like Square opt for this type of format:

 Source / SquareUp.com

Source / Blog.Wishpond.com

Remember when we talked about the position of your marketing call to action and the importance of keeping everything above the page fold? Above are practical examples from Square and MVMT. Everything from signing in to making a purchase can be are accessible from the homepage.

Here’s another example from Netflix:

Source / Netflix.com

Notice the imperative tone: “Get started,” “Watch anywhere.” 

Here’s another call to action example:

Source / Avg.com

AVG kept it simple. The company made its CTA pop out and kept everything above the page fold. Take a second look; it’s telling you that you can download the AVG antivirus software for “FREE” by just clicking on the green button, even though you’ll still need to part with some cash if you wish to secure additional protection for your PC. They kept their call-to-action focused on the free version of their software, which though is an option, lowers the risk factor that keeps most users away from considering paid subscriptions. 

CTAs in Graphics

Depending on your business values or ideology, you may choose to use graphic designs with more colorful illustrations to execute your marketing call to action.
 Source / Blog.Wishpond.com

Here’s Zendesk, a leading customer service software provider using a clean graphic design on their website’s home page.

Social Media/ Text CTAs

As a copywriter or social media manager, your marketing skills come in handy if you can mesmerize a potential customer with a killer ad copy and the best call to action words. 

Source / Blog.Hubspot.com

This post advertising Nemo Hornet 2P Tent has a more subtle CTA with a sense of humor. It’s a great example of how calls to action can be used more subtly on social media, boosted by the text surrounding it.

The Best Call to Action Words and Phrases

In the digital advertising space, a lot of time, effort, and money are spent on web and graphic designs, page layout, user interface, and more. Because of this, sometimes little attention is given to the CTA button. It’s more than a button or link; it’s an expression and reflection of what your ad copy is all about. Inject some dynamism and creativity and choose a phrase tailored to your ad campaign.

Looking for a list containing the best call-to-action words might be a long shot, but here are some call to action words and phrases that have proven effective. These could also pass for call to action button examples:

• Get Started
• Sign Up Free
• Create Account
• Learn More
• Explore
• Discover
• Get __% Off
• Try for Free
• Shop Now

Conclusion

To wrap things up, paying more attention to your call to action will do your marketing project a whole world of good. For most successful CTAs, the devil is in the detail. Speak according to your brand identity, be creative, be clear and concise, use action verbs, sprinkle a little bit of witty humor if need be, and viola! You’ll be good to go.

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THE ORIGINAL? PitStop Lagos – January – 2021 Source : Adsoftheworld Agency : Arden & Newton Lagos (Nigeria)	LESS ORIGINAL Obra Nossa / April – 2021 Source : Best Ads on TV Agency : Santiago Comunicaçao (Brazil)

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Businesses exist because of customers. 

Regardless of what industry you are in or what products or services you sell, your customers are the most important part of your business. Because without customers, there is simply no business for your company to exist. 

As a result, your marketing must factor in what influences consumer behavior. 

Marketing is so much more than creating a catchy phrase or jingle. You need to figure out how to meet your customers’ needs, what their values are, and speak to them in ways that they would want to engage to build a successful marketing campaign.

But what exactly is consumer behavior and why is it important to marketers? 

What is Consumer Behavior?

Consumer behavior definition in marketing is the study of how people make purchasing decisions and understanding the reasons that affect their purchase, such as social or psychological factors. 

It is a study that uses data insights from surveys and reports to find the “why” behind each buying decision. Often, this means looking into different facets of consumer behavior and answering questions like: 

• What are the consumer perceptions about a certain brand, product, or service?
• What motivates a consumer to select one product over another and why? 
• What factors in a consumer’s everyday environment affect buying decisions and why?

Of course, there are many more. But using the answers to these questions can help businesses make better decisions and effective marketing strategies by aligning their techniques with their desired target audiences. 

As we have seen time and time again, successful brands and companies align their marketing strategies to factors affecting consumer behavior as to the foundation.

They’re not generating products and marketing plans based on their ideas alone, but instead, look into how consumers behave and take that information to match up their product design and marketing strategy to what consumers want and need. 

Every consumer has a different thought process and motivation for buying a product. Despite being customers of the same product, their difference in lifestyle or income can have influences on behavior and their approach to purchasing. 

As marketers understand the varying factors, they can adopt customer differentiation to tailor their strategies according to different consumer groups. With this, businesses can expand the width of their services to be able to effectively serve a wider group of consumers. 

Besides, customers have come to expect personalization from companies. According to a report by Instapage, 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized or catered to them.

This makes learning consumer behavior more necessary than before, as companies need to understand how to appeal to these consumers.

An extra point is, studying consumer behavior can also be helpful to quickly identify consumer opportunities. By studying what customers are looking for or emerging trends, your company can be the first to identify gaps that are not met. 

For example, a recent change in consumer behavior is driven by COVID-19 that warrants the increasing need for health supplements that boost immunity.

Nutritional companies that monitored the change in eating patterns of consumers would be able to quickly react to this trend and produce immunity and respiratory health-boosting supplements to fill in the void in the marketplace. 

Now that you understand the importance of your consumer behavior in marketing, this next section will show you how to put it to use in a 4-step process. 

How to Integrate Consumer Behavior with Marketing?

1. Understand Your Consumers

First and foremost, it’s critical to understand your consumers. And where better to understand the factors that influence buying behavior of your target audiences than directly from your customers themselves. 

Encourage your customers to drop a review or sign up with review platforms like G2 or Trustpilot to help solicit feedback. 

Then, take the time to read your reviews, get feedback from customer support and search up your own products or website online to see what people are saying about your brand. 

You can even do a quick Google search to see what people are saying about you. Just simply search your ”brand name + reviews”. 

When going through your reviews, make sure you read them neutrally and try understanding where your consumers are coming from. 

Here, you should be able to identify important insights like what is your customer’s favorite feature, why do customers prefer you from other brands, and more. 

Most importantly, take the opportunity to create a buyer persona. This should help you have a better idea of who you are speaking to when creating your marketing campaigns. 

For example, BiQ’s buyer persona may be male, small business entrepreneurs in their 30s who are operating a digital marketing business. 

Take a look at how Keyword Gap Analysis drives success in Digital Marketing.

2. Know your Competitors

As good as you are with your customers, you must know your competitors even better. And in digital marketing, you can have direct and indirect competitors. 

To quickly explain, direct competitors are businesses that compete with you directly by selling similar products or services. Meanwhile, indirect competitors are businesses that might be selling a different product or service but are potential substitute options. For example, think McDonald’s and Subway. 

No matter the competitor, you are competing for the same resources — target audience.

By learning about who your competitors are and what they are offering can help you to make your products, services, and marketing stand out. It will also let you communicate with your target audience and set your prices competitively to navigate challenges in your market. 

So how do you do this? It’s easy. Simply paste your domain URL in competitive analysis sites like Alexa or SEMrush to identify similar competition.

Next, dig up information on your competitors. Find out who they are and similarly, go through their reviews, customer feedback on them, and look for gaps you can take advantage of. 

Look at this review for example, while many praise SEMrush SEO features and solutions, it can still be hard to navigate and overwhelming for beginners.  

Understanding this gap, we have created BiQ SEO Suite which places emphasis on ease of use and friendly interface that has brought us our customers today!

3. Use Keyword Gap Analysis to Minimize the Gap Between Yourself and Your Competitors

At last, you can’t talk about digital marketing without keywords. 

Now that you have your customers and competitors down, it’s time to do a complete keyword analysis for your domain and your competitors.

This is known as keyword gap analysis and it offers a side-by-side comparison between your keyword profile and your competitors’. 

You can use tools like BiQ Rank Intelligence and simply enter the domains to start your keyword audit and discovery. The report will show you all the ranking keywords for each site and you can analyze them according to their rankings and traffic to compare them. 

When going through the list, you want to look for overlapping and common keywords missing from your site. To make this easy, group your keywords into two categories:

a. Keywords you rank for, but they don’t

This category consists of your keyword strengths and represents search terms that you might be ranking higher over your competitors. 

Make sure you track these keywords using BiQ’s Rank Tracking to keep track of your site traffic. Your ranking should correspond to your site traffic and will be a good indicator of the increase or drop based on your ranking. 

This will let you keep an eye on the competitors who are trying to steal your keywords while tracking algorithm changes and other anomalies. 

More importantly, these keywords should also inform you which are the relevant keywords you should be targeting. As you are already ranking high for these keywords, Google sees you as the authority for the topic and you might want to get an extra boost when you optimize or create content for related keyword groups. 

b. Keywords your competitors are ranking for, but you don’t

This list consists of your keyword opportunities. Your competitors most likely have done the SEO and identify the valuable keywords that your audiences are searching for. 

So make sure to identify decent volume, valuable keywords missing from your list and add them to your keyword strategy. You can target them by analyzing Google’s search results and finding gaps that will allow you to create better content. 

On the other hand, if there are keywords you have already created content for but have still yet to rank high, analyze your ranking competitors’ keywords and identify if there are any missing keywords you should be optimizing into your existing content to make it more relevant. 

For both scenarios, we recommend using BiQ’s Content Intelligence that will make the writing and optimizing process much easier. It offers WordGraph analysis which will automatically compare your content to the Top 10 rankings and provide suggestions to improve.  

At the same time, take the chance to understand the keyword strategy your competitors have and decipher their tactics to get high traffic. 

Overall, you should get insights and identify the differences between each domain’s ranking keywords. Look into your data and see what kind of keywords are each domain ranking for? 

For example, is your domain ranking better for long-tail or short-tail keywords? What about your competitors’? How many keywords does your competitor include in their content? and more.

The key is to identify patterns and find search terms that you may have missed. 

Often, many marketers target high volume keywords but you also want to pay attention to low search, high intent keywords as well. 

Just imagine if you are an ecommerce store selling trainers, there are obvious phrases like brands and models of shoes that all your competitors will be targeting, but what about the specific long-tail keywords?

For example, extra-small shoe sizes, specific styles of shoes like cricket cleats. These phrases may not have a high volume of traffic, but by nature, they have high intent and are more likely to convert compared to keywords like Nike shoes. 

You want to make sure you discover these hidden keywords during your gap analysis. 

4. Understand The Types of Consumer Behavior In Your Industry

Now before you begin creating content for these keywords, there are 4 types of consumer behaviors you should know to better build your marketing funnel:

• Routine Shopping – Regular purchases done by consumers, this behavior is associated with low product pricing and shows low involvement without the need for much research. An example would be grocery shopping at the supermarket or buying snacks.
• Limited Decision Making – Buying products occasionally. Consumers in this category are purchasing something that costs more but is not expensive and will require a moderate amount of time for research, often through recommendations as they make the purchase. For example, buying clothes or looking for a good Mexican food place. 
• Extensive Decision Making – Products in this category are usually unfamiliar to customers, expensive, and not frequently bought. This may take a longer time for research and consumers will be looking at multiple factors such as checking product ratings, asking friends and professionals for more information, comparing options before making the final decision. 
• Impulse Buying – Impulse buyers often show the tendency of a customer making purchasing decisions at the spur of the moment, without planning in advance. These purchase decisions are often triggered by emotions or feelings. 

Knowing this, your digital marketing interactions should be founded based on these 4 types of buying behavior. 

Let’s say you are targeting impulse buyers, your sales page copywriting then should focus on triggering your customer’s emotions and place emphasis on limited-time offers.

5. Use the Discovered Hidden Keywords

Finally, one last important lesson is that even if you have your keywords, you need to learn how to use your keywords with the right type of content to convert your audience into qualified leads.

While most SEOs often resort to written content, you should also use different content types like infographics, videos, and other forms of content that match the user’s search intent. 

According to a report by Wyzowl, 96% of people prefer watching an explainer video to learn more about a product or service and 84% of people say they made the decision to purchase a product or service after watching a brand’s video. 

Despite this, in 2021, we still only see 14% of businesses using videos in their marketing mix.

What’s most important here is to always meet the search intent of the target keyword and align it with what your consumers are looking for. And most importantly, use these hidden keywords in your marketing to invoke a specific consumer behavior you want to target. 

Read how to drive more organic traffic to your site on our recent blog.

Key Takeaway: Use Keyword Gap Analysis to Target Buyer Keywords and Shape Consumer Behavior

As the business world evolves, so do consumer habits and tastes. What stays the same is that consumer behavior is still the most vital component to crafting a great marketing campaign.

Digital marketing is about basing decisions on actual data. Understanding your consumer behaviors can deliver insights that will help you make better digital marketing decisions that drive action. 

By integrating competitive keyword analysis and consumer behavior, your business can get an unprecedented advantage over your competitors in terms of product visibility and conversion. 

So what are you waiting for? Start implementing keyword gap analysis into your marketing strategy today with RankingGap!

You can learn more about our keyword gap analysis strategies in our main blog here.

Updated: 2 August 2021

When life is bitter, drink black coffee indoor and grab yourself some self-help books while listening to cafe lofi. Win Wei is just another being that enjoys life and the wonders of digital marketing. Oh, I do love myself some swimming, too.