A well-crafted campaign can be undermined by a lack of or weak call-to-action (CTA).
After hours of work and many winning elements all being brought together, missing this crucial part of the process can stop your leads from converting or potential customers moving through your website.
So often, the CTA is an afterthought or an element that is missed out altogether. Instead, you should be planning your CTAs right from the start and making sure they’re up to their very important task. Sometimes it’s the little things that make a difference and that’s certainly the case with CTAs.
A CTA is a prompt that encourages visitors to take a specific action and guides them further through the sales funnel. They can be made up of a hyperlink attached to anchor text or consist of a digital button that helps them to stand out from the page.
Either way, they must be written in an appropriate manner that guides the reader to the next page you wish them to visit. CTAs should be present in everything from blog posts and email campaigns to display ads and social media videos.
Without a CTA, the chances of your audience continuing on to other parts of your website or brand channels are greatly reduced. When designing any digital campaign, it’s important to think about the customer journey and peppering it with CTAs is vital to its success.
Think of CTAs as signposts to where you want your user to go next. Are you hoping they’ll sign up to your newsletter or peruse your products or services? These are the types of actions we should be guiding potential customers towards, but they won’t know that if we as marketers don’t tell them.
Writing a list of content that requires a CTA would be a rather time-consuming task. In fact, it’s easier to spell out the pieces that don’t need these prompts – none of them. Once you start looking for them, you’ll suddenly see CTAs all over the internet. They’re present at the end of videos you watch and even that ‘link in the bio’ you see in Instagram captions is a form of CTA.
While the biggest mistake you can make is to have no CTAs on your content, the next pitfall marketers fall into is assuming that a one-size-fits-all approach will cut it. Just as you have different types of audiences visiting your content, you need disparate CTAs to perform a multitude of functions throughout the buyer journey.
The key to success in crafting these CTAs is to tie each one to a specific goal. That way you can focus on the action you wish the user to take and the most persuasive way to get them to complete it. The clearer you are about where the user is in their journey, their pain points and where you want them to go, the better the resulting CTA will be.
Just like all other elements of your content strategy, you should be planning your CTAs, linking them to the data you have on your clients and ensuring they’re in line with your goals. CTAs are also easily tested, so think about sending out emails with different CTAs to see which are the most effective.
When writing your CTAs, always use a strong verb, tap into emotions and highlight the reasons for taking an action. This, along with customising your CTAs to match the type of user, their position within the customer journey and the device they’re using, will help to ensure they’re a success.
On the Axonn website, you can see a varied selection of CTAs. Look up there in the top right-hand corner. See that button that says ‘Let’s talk’? That’s a CTA that guides users to a handy form they can fill in with their contact information. The same page also lets them sign up for our newsletter.
At the end of this post, you’ll find related articles, underneath that there are more CTAs to sign up to the newsletter or get in touch. Right at the bottom of the page is an array of social buttons, because, even if you leave our website, you can continue to interact with Axonn on other platforms.
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