Hey 👋 The Crew here.
If you’re wondering how our week is going:
- The coffee tastes like heaven.
- The office plant is flourishing.
- The weekend is around the corner.
Let’s say things could be worse. Much worse…
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Sick of getting poor-fit leads?
You put all that work into setting up a lead gen funnel and nurturing “leads”…
… Only to end up with people who can’t afford what you have, or don’t really want what you have.
Frustrating, right? Luckily, it’s a fixable problem.
HubSpot’s Introduction to Lead Generation guide helps you reexamine your entire strategy—from top to bottom—by focusing on quality just as much as quantity.
You’ll learn how to:
- Define and qualify the leads that truly matter to your business.
- Manage and gauge potential lead value through lead scoring and nurturing.
- Track and analyze your results so you know what went well and what can be improved.
Plus, you’ll find a real-life case study of a successful lead gen campaign where 40% of the registrations were perfectly aligned with sales goals.
Not every strategy works for every business, but this guide will help you build one that’s just right for yours.
The Center-Stage Effect
In the early 1980s, Scandinavian psychologist Karl Halvor Teigen conducted a study where he asked people to pick a number between one and 12 for a cash prize.
Here’s what the responses looked like:
The middle four numbers were picked over 76% of the time, with the number seven being the favorite.
… A sign that our mind is driven towards the middle in most situations.
More than two decades later, Ana Valenzuela and Priya Raghubir did extensive research to back this theory up.
Among other things, they discovered that people tend to focus on and buy the products placed in the middle of a shop window, a shelf, etc.
They called it The Center-Stage effect.
A central placement sends a subconscious signal to our minds that something is more important—causing us to stop and focus on that thing more.
This effect plays a vital role in conversion rate optimization. Let’s see how you can use it, too.
Three ways you can leverage the Center-Stage effect
1) Put the most important product in the middle
If you’re listing multiple products, the most important one should always be in the center.
This doesn’t mean it’s the one you want to sell. If your product is a decoy, you still want to put it in the center so that it gently points to the better, slightly more expensive product.
If you’re showing a list of products, always put the most popular or the ones with the most value in the middle.
Some brands go a step further and highlight the product in the middle so it stands out and sends a clearer “I’m important” signal to people’s brains.
It’s where you often find products labeled as “best value,” “best deal,” “most popular.”
It’s no coincidence that these options are often the ones that have the best returns for the company as well.
2) Place your call-to-action (CTA) in the middle of the landing page
A good landing page has a single, defined CTA.
A great landing page puts that CTA button in the middle.
Here’s one example:
No dilly-dallying here. No additional text, no useless explainers.
The crisp, confident copy is almost in the middle, while the blue button is placed exactly at the center.
Wix isn’t the only one doing this. Here’s another example:
The pattern is obvious, isn’t it?
3) Avoid placing important things by the edges
Being “edgy” in marketing usually means being invisible.
A 2006 study discovered that humans have a set of social and cultural norms that make them neglect edges:
- If you’re a student who wants to avoid the professor’s attention, you sit in the corner.
- Unlike executives, lower-ranking employees sit at the sides of a meeting.
- The least popular products are always in the corners or bottom of the shelf.
Naturally, if you want to sell a product, you should avoid placing anything of value in the corner of your ad or a landing page.
However, if there’s something you want users not to pay attention to, but must point out—like a disclaimer, a potential downside of the product, etc.—then edges are your go-to place.
But we didn’t tell you that…
MUST-KNOW B2B BENCHMARKS: So it’s been weeks and you still haven’t closed that B2B deal. No worries—the average journey typically takes six months. Dreamdata’s report shares insights like this and more based on 414 B2B companies they analyzed. Download the free report now.*
CONTENT MARKETING: Is the ROI on your content hit-or-miss? Boris is a content marketing consultant who can help you create an effective, product-led content strategy that will drive consistent growth for your B2B SaaS just like he did for companies like Hunter.io and Hubstaff. Visit his website to book a free consultation.*
MARKETING DATA: Selling to millennials can be tough. But on a positive note, you can find them on almost any popular social media platform. The question is—how to reach them? This article looks into the popular “Gen Y.”
AI MARKETING: In case you’ve missed it, OpenAI has just released a multi-modal AI assistant who can talk to you in real-time, observe your environment through the camera—and even sing a song with another AI buddy. Eerie, or awesome? You decide.
GOOGLE: The tech giant has an AI update up its sleeve, too. The company is revamping its search engine and will introduce “AI overviews,” a successor to Search Generative Experience (SGE), or put simply—AI summaries of your search queries. And that’s just the start.
*This is a sponsored post.
ICYMI, last time we looked at the Decoy Effect.
The “Meet us in the middle” Crew
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