So what is a Call to Action, and how can you use them? Well, let me tell you!
What is a Call To Action
Imagine this: You spent several days crafting the perfect piece of content. It is full of great information, surely it is going to generate you plenty of leads right? You publish it on your website and it gets amazing views… but the phone doesn’t ring, and the inbox is empty.
What happened?
Without a carefully crafted instruction, your readers didn’t know to contact you. They read your content, they liked it, they might even have shared it – but they didn’t know what to do next.
A Call to Action (CTA) is an instruction or a logical next step for your customers to follow. It is literally a call for them to take action.
This action could be to join your mailing list, sign up for a webinar, contact you for a free consultation, take advantage of a special deal, or whatever you want them to do. You can put a CTA in any of your marketing material – emails, newsletters, blog posts, or on your website. In fact, you need to!
What Makes An Effective CTA?
Gone are the days where you could just say ‘Click Here’. People are constantly bombarded with instructions on the internet, and it’s not 1999 anymore, people know how to operate website links and buttons, so you need to make sure you craft your CTA cleverly.
Here are some points to consider when crafting yours…
Make it Eye-catching: No one can click on your CTA if they can’t see it! Make sure it is easy to see and is visually appealing. If your linked text looks like the rest of your sentence, it is hiding in plain sight.
Make Them Want To Act: Use cleverly crafted words to make it a no-brainer for them to take the action.
Let Them Know What To Expect: Set their expectations so that they know exactly what will happen when they take action.
Make It Clear: Don’t confuse your readers, only provide one action for them to take and make it easy for them to do so.
Make It Relatable: Your CTA must match the content you include it with. So if you are talking about cows, don’t make a CTA about sheep. It has to make sense.
Make It Worthwhile: Your readers are not going to take action if they have no incentive to. Make sure they will get value out of the proposition.
Every piece of marketing material or content is an opportunity to include a CTA for your clients. Are you making the most of the communication with your clients? If not, it is time to start including a Call to Action in every piece of content you produce. It is also an idea to go back and write a CTA into any really popular pieces on your website, or in your collateral that don’t have any included.