Top matchBarqar BlogArticle
Bad Websites Are Missing the Call
HMG Creative · Mar 8, 2018
The call to action, that is!
Does every page of your website offer a chance to convert? Does your website make it easy to be your customer?
No? Then you need to revamp your calls to action.
Wait – back up a sec – what’s a “call to action”?
A call to action (CTA) is an instruction for your audience designed to provoke an immediate response. On your website, it’s typically a button or link you add to get visitors to take a desired action – like filling out a form, requesting information or placing an order.
Smart marketers use strong calls to action to drive results.
Drawing the right people to a beautifully designed, well written and SEO-optimized site is essential, but it’s only half the battle. Once visitors arrive, you need to drive them into your sales funnel by getting them to “convert” (i.e., take a desired action). Otherwise, people will abandon your site and you’ll potentially lose business.
Adding strong and effective calls to action to your website generates response – and sales! Here are a few tips for strengthening yours:
- Make ’em bold. Think color (a contrasting color that complements your website’s color scheme works great). Think buttons. Think easy-to-read fonts.
- Make ’em compelling. Use direct, action-oriented language to clearly explain why and how a visitor should take action – and keep the copy short.
- Put ’em everywhere. Add CTAs to every page on your site (static pages, landing pages, blog posts, and other content pages) – so visitors always know what to do next.
- Get creative to grab attention. Install flyouts, pop-ups or add CTAs to sidebars (check out examples by scrolling down our Home page).
Read full article ↗
Also relevantBarqar BlogArticle
The Lead Volume Problem: Why Invisible = Invisible (A Blunt Conversation for Owners)
Barqar · May 11, 2026
customers are satisfied and referrals are steady, the issue isn’t the offer or the service quality. It’s discoverability.
A lead volume problem breaks down into three distinct failure modes:
-
Bad offer: Your service doesn’t solve a real problem your market cares about, or the benefit isn’t clear.
-
Pricing problem: Your rates are misaligned with market expectations or your positioning.
-
Visibility problem: The right customers exist and would buy, but they can’t find you.
Most service businesses have the first two nailed. The third one? That’s where invisibility lives. And invisibility is why phones don’t ring.
The Three Channels Where Service Businesses Actually Get Found
Your customers don’t search for you everywhere. They search in three specific channels, and most service business owners are strong in one, weak in two, and completely missing from the third.
-
Local and AI search: Google Maps, organic local results, directory listings, AI searches. The “near me” searches and map-based queries that dominate service discovery.
-
Referral visibility: The digital footprint that backs up word-of-mouth. Review sites, industry directories, social proof that makes referrals credible and easy to act on.
-
Owned channels: Your website, email list, social media presence, content you control directly. The places where you build authority and stay top-of-mind between referrals.
Here’s the reality: if you’re weak in two of these three, your lead flow will be inconsistent. You’ll get a burst when someone refers you, then silence. You’ll rank for one specific search term but miss dozens of others. You’ll have customers but no way to reach them when you have capacity.
Read full article ↗
You’re Measuring Marketing Success Wrong: Stop Counting Leads and Start Counting the Ones That Actually Close
Barqar · Jul 20, 2026
generate more leads, but they’re never told which leads actually converted, where those leads came from, what messaging resonated with them, or what made them different from the 95% who didn’t buy.
The fix is structural. Establish a regular feedback cadence between marketing and sales, even a brief monthly review of which lead sources produced closed deals is a meaningful starting point. More importantly, work backward from closed customers. Look at your last 20 closed deals and ask what they had in common. Where did they come from? What search terms or ads brought them in? What content did they engage with before converting? What was their buying timeline?
This feedback loop does something crucial: it tells marketing what actually works, so they can do more of it. Without it, coordinators are guessing.
Problem: Misaligned Targeting Attracts the Wrong Audience at Scale
When your targeting is too broad, you cast a wide net and catch a lot of fish, but most of them aren’t the kind you want. You attract people interested in a tangential aspect of your offering, people comparing you to a completely different solution, people in the wrong industry or company size, or people with the wrong budget or timeline.
The volume looks good. The team feels productive. But downstream, your sales team discovers that 80% of leads don’t fit your ideal customer profile. They’re wasting calls. They’re chasing prospects who were never a realistic fit to begin with.
The fix: define your target audience with specificity. Not “small businesses.” Not “companies in tech.” Get narrow. What company size? What industry vertical? What annual revenue? What problem are they trying to solve? Who are they comparing you against? What’s their buying timeline?
Read full article ↗
Why You’re Spending 10 Hours on Canva When You Should Be Running Lead Campaigns: The Marketing Coordinator’s Time Trap
Barqar · Jun 8, 2026
generate more leads, but they’re never told which leads actually converted, where those leads came from, what messaging resonated with them, or what made them different from the 95% who didn’t buy.
The fix is structural. Establish a regular feedback cadence between marketing and sales, even a brief monthly review of which lead sources produced closed deals is a meaningful starting point. More importantly, work backward from closed customers. Look at your last 20 closed deals and ask what they had in common. Where did they come from? What search terms or ads brought them in? What content did they engage with before converting? What was their buying timeline?
This feedback loop does something crucial: it tells marketing what actually works, so they can do more of it. Without it, coordinators are guessing.
Problem: Misaligned Targeting Attracts the Wrong Audience at Scale
When your targeting is too broad, you cast a wide net and catch a lot of fish, but most of them aren’t the kind you want. You attract people interested in a tangential aspect of your offering, people comparing you to a completely different solution, people in the wrong industry or company size, or people with the wrong budget or timeline.
The volume looks good. The team feels productive. But downstream, your sales team discovers that 80% of leads don’t fit your ideal customer profile. They’re wasting calls. They’re chasing prospects who were never a realistic fit to begin with.
The fix: define your target audience with specificity. Not “small businesses.” Not “companies in tech.” Get narrow. What company size? What industry vertical? What annual revenue? What problem are they trying to solve? Who are they comparing you against? What’s their buying timeline?
Read full article ↗
Your PPC Campaigns Aren’t Failing, You Just Can’t Prove They’re Working: How to Show ROI Your Boss Actually Understands
Brad Smith · Jun 15, 2026
block. Once we connected the full customer journey and added call tracking, the picture reversed: PPC was driving 60% of their revenue. The campaigns weren’t failing. The proof structure was.
Marketing coordinators default to platform-native metrics, clicks, impressions, average CPC, quality scores, because they’re easy to pull and they live in your dashboard. But a business owner reviewing the marketing budget doesn’t care about any of that. They care about revenue. Leads. Cost per acquisition. Whether the money spent on ads is actually driving customers through the door.
Why Clicks and Impressions Data Fails to Convince Leadership
Here’s the hard truth: impressions and clicks feel impressive to marketers, but they’re almost meaningless to a business owner.
Consider a hypothetical scenario. A service business runs a PPC campaign targeting local customers. After three months, the metrics look strong on paper: 15,000 impressions, 450 clicks, a 3% CTR. The campaign costs are reasonable too. So you build a report, include these numbers, and present it with confidence.
Then your boss asks: “How many of those clicks became customers?”
You hesitate. Because you don’t actually know. You’ve been tracking clicks, not conversions. You have no idea if those 450 people ever filled out a form, called the business, or showed up at an appointment.
This is the core failure of vanity metrics. They measure activity, not outcomes. And for service businesses especially, activity means nothing if it doesn’t connect to actual revenue.
Here’s what actually matters for a service business:
- Cost per lead: How much did you spend in ads to get one person to raise their hand?
Read full article ↗
