Do you have an email list a mile long or a social media follower count to rival an influencer – but still lack sales when it comes to your product? It may be because you’re missing the essential piece you need to of motivate your audience to take action instead of just passively taking in information. Let’s dive into how you can turn audience members into leads and leads into sales with a CTA.
Make the Most of Your CTA
The strongest way to motivate your audience to take action is to craft an effective call to action, also known as a CTA. A call to action is a digital marketing strategy that is meant to steer visitors towards taking a desired action. There are three major ways to design a CTA:
- A hyperlink
- A button
- Text with no hyperlink
In other words, a CTA could look like anything from a pop-up banner on a website directing the user to begin a free trial, to an Instagram caption that directs a user to purchase a product through a link in your bio.
A call to action can be a highly effective way to drive traffic to your company’s website, take users directly to a product’s page, or help buyers easily start or continue their journey. And because a call to action has the potential to be so powerful, it’s important to put yours together with a lot of thought in mind. Valuable customers can be lost to a confusing or lackluster call to action. Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can ensure that your call to action creates a captive audience that is ready to follow your directives.
Always Provide Clear Direction
As previously stated, your call to action should be clear and concise in order to be truly inspiring. Before you write your CTA, you should have a clear goal in mind. Where do you want your audience to go or what do you want them to do? Make a choice about this and then craft your messaging and design around this. The last thing you want is to give your audience mixed messaging about what action they should take. For this reason, avoid suggesting two actions in one CTA. There should be separate calls to action for when you want someone to join your mailing list versus when you want them to join your membership club. You will inspire confidence in your brand if you are able to communicate effectively with your users.
Tell Your Intended Audience What to Do
Another important aspect of creating a call to action is making sure that you target it toward the right audience. Everyone hopes to have a large audience but despite its size, your focus should be on cultivating a captive audience. One way to do this is to pay attention to where in their journey the audience is when viewing your CTA. Are you speaking to people who are in the awareness stage and are just beginning to learn about your company? You might want to lead them to your website instead of directly to a product. However, if you’re speaking to buyers in the decision stage, they would benefit more from a direct link to a product than a pop up asking them to join your mailing list. Take a look below to see the various stages of the buyer’s journey:
- Awareness – the buyer realizes, or becomes aware, that they have a problem.
- Consideration – the buyer clarifies their problem and begins to do research on how they can solve it.
- Decision – the buyer weighs their options and makes a decision about the best provider for a solution.
Where CTAs Make Sense
There are a few major pieces of internet real estate where you will want to place your CTAs in order to garner the most attention and generate success:
- Your Website – if you have a company website, you can include calls to action here! This is likely one of the first places that a potential client or buyer will find you, and you want to help encourage them to further their process with you. If you have a blog, you can also include CTAs in the posts that you regularly publish.
- An Email Campaign – If you are blogging or have a company website, chances are that you are also engaging in email marketing to communicate regularly with your audience. You’ll want to take advantage of CTA marketing in each email campaign in order to make your email list more likely to go where you want them to. If you’re sharing a blog or a new course, include a big button that readers can easily click to go directly to the hyperlink nested inside.
- Social Media – If you aspire to inspire an audience, social media is one of the best ways to do so. Social media is a platform where you can really cultivate a community for your audience and help them relate to your brand personally and understand why your brand works for them. You also get the best of both worlds with social media because you can include a call to action in a sponsored post via a button, or in an organic post with a directive to your link in bio.
- Google – Google is a powerful place to include a CTA because if you play your cards right when it comes to buying ads, you can reach millions of people who may become customers. Because Google is a vast search engine, be sure to include a very specific and simple CTA so that people don’t simply move on to what they think might be a better option.
Use CTAs to Motivate Effectively
There’s a reason that CTAs are a huge topic in digital marketing right now. In the age of the internet, you need to be able to make users stop scrolling and pay attention to your product. An effective CTA will spark their interest and inspire them to partner with you in finding a solution to the problem that they have.
If you’re interested in working with a company that can help you create a strong digital marketing strategy for your new app that, get in touch with our SEM Nexus team today.