As a marketer or a business owner it is essential to use effective call to actions in order to promote your products and services and to entice online users to take action with regards to your offers. In the context of online marketing a call to action is one of the most important tools needed to get users to respond to your marketing message.
Employing the right call to action (CTA) on your web page, landing page, Facebook, blog or whatever other platforms you use to connect with the online world is all about grabbing the users attention. Essentially a call to action is an image or piece of text which prompts visitors to make some form of action. Some examples of an action might be a subscription to a newsletter, a download of a white-paper, a product sample, viewing a webinar, connecting via a social media platform, making a purchase etc.
CTA’s should be used to direct people to landing pages where you can gather visitors contact information in exchange for your marketing offer. A really good call to action can result in more lead generation and a better rate of conversion for a website.
So how do you decide on where to place your call to actions? You might have loads of web pages to consider when you are trying to decide on the best place to position your CTA’s. You might consider some of the following locations:
Website:
You should try and spread the number of CTA’s across your website. The most important place you should have one is on the home page. The home page is probably the most visited page on your website so it represents an excellent opportunity to drive traffic and users to other locations which are heavily served by your marketing campaign. It might be a good idea to have 2 or 3 different CTA’s on your home page. Other important pages where a CTA should reside on a website would include individual product and category pages and the contact us page.
Blogs:
You should look to include them in the side bar of your blog and also on all the articles you publish.
Blogs are are a great place to place an Image Button call to action . The content of the blog itself also a great place to create additional text based call to actions. Good places to include theses is in the body of your article, at the beginning, middle or end of the piece of content. Enticing users to download some content, subscribe to the blog, follow on facebook, twitter or sign up to news letters are just some of the important actions you might want your users to take.
Emails:
If you are running an email marketing campaign you can bet that one of the most important aspects to the success of your campaign will come down to the effect that your call to actions are having in your emails. Every email should contain some sort of action. Within the body of an email there should be links to a destination you want to take that recipient to. A good practice to follow would be to include a link in the first few sentences, a link in the middle and one placed at the end of an email. By clicking any of theses links the user has clicked on a call CTA.
Also the subject line itself should be utilised as a call to action. After all you do want people to open your emails! And another great place to position a call to action is within the signature of an email. After the recipient has read your credentials, the inclusion of one last CTA might just be enough to convince them to take an action to sign up to that all important blog you want to promote.
Paid Search & Media
There is a whole host of different paid media formats such as banner ads, online paid directories, press releases, article marketing distribution and video distribution sites etc. By utilizing CTA’s in your marketing messages there is a huge opportunity to broaden the scope of your lead generation through the use of such paid media formats.
Paid Search platforms such as Google Adwords and Microsoft Ad Centre are platforms which are synonymous with the inclusion of call to actions in ads which appear on theses platforms. A good CTA in a paid search ad can mean the difference in getting a click and not getting one. Having your ads optimised to include relevant CTA’s that drive traffic to relevant landing pages is a critical component and one that will have major influence on the success of any paid search campaign.
Facebook, / Twitter Linked:
Social media platforms represent a great opportunity to display your CTA’s. With Facebook you can introduce them into your business page, use them in your Facebook ads and sponsored stories. Perhaps the most straight forward place to utilize a CTA would be through the posts you place on your wall.
On a twitter page you can include links to other social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn to entice your followers to connect with you on those social media platforms. But the most common call to action you can use is within the individual tweets you post. After building up and establishing enough social media authority and engagement amongst your audience you can then start tailoring your tweets to include a simple but effective call to actions.
Just about every social media platform can be used to promote your marketing message. LinkedIn is another particularly powerful platform to use and include affective CTA’s especially amongst the B2B community. Features such as LinkedIn answers is a great place to entice users to click on some downloadable content such as webinars and white-papers where appropriate. LinkedIn’s DirectAd platform allows you to direct your message towards large groups of influential communities. Making the appropriate use of CTA’s in your ads on LinkedIn can be a great way to entice your audience to take action.
Conclusion:
You should maintain a wide mix and verity of different types of call to actions across the various online marketing channels you use to promote your campaigns. Testing and measuring your call to actions will help determine which CTA’s need refining in order to get a higher rate of response from your marketing message.
Connect With Us