Strong Call To Action In Digital Marketing Campaigns
Marketing Tips NEWS: Digital Marketing
In marketing, a call to action is the critical step to drive readers and viewers to do something; it’s what converts someone noticing your ad, blog post, or web page, into a customer. It’s an essential turning point in your sales funnel, from lead generation to the success of an interested customer actually taking action.
The critical question, though, is how to make a strong call to action (CTA) that is irresistible to potential customers.
What Are Calls To Action?
A call to action, or CTA, is a text or graphic instruction to readers, directing and encouraging them to perform a specific action. A variety of techniques in language and graphic design compel the viewer to take the desired action, buy, subscribe, learn more, and so on. CTAs are excellent for making a purchase easy to increase sales or subscribers, drive website traffic, and more.
CTAs are integral to digital marketing. The best CTAs cannot be ignored and are enticing, and will prompt visitors to action as intended, but weak ones go unnoticed, and bad ones can even discourage visitors and confound your efforts.
There are a variety of formats for these, but the most common ones are contextual text links leading to landing pages, opt-in forms, requests to follow on social media or CTA buttons. These can come in the form of banners on the edges of web pages, pop-ups, and slide-in CTAs. Exit intent pop-ups come up when website visitors are about to leave a page, for a final push to convert.
You can also have text with no links, but these are often ineffective, as it adds an extra step for the viewer.
CTA Button
Using a CTA button, instead of text, increases conversion by as much as 45%. They’re a critical aspect of any marketing campaign because they help counteract decision fatigue and distractions.
Choose a contrasting or distinctive colour to highlight, such as a dark red or bright blue button, or a black button on a light background, so your CTA button stands out.
Active Language
Avoid generic and weaker language, and get to the point with a more active call to action phrase. Offer something new and interesting, and present your action as the obvious or only choice, with a direct CTA. Action words are more vibrant and compelling, with a feel of more urgency and excitement. Short, direct, and powerful CTAs are more persuasive and fit better for limited-content ads.
Eye-catching pictures that support your case are also helpful.
Start your bid for attention strongly, too, with a statement that demands notice and will get an emotional response, then build on that, until you get to the end, with a powerful but simple CTA to ‘get started’ or ‘order now’.
Using a direct command verb (order, save, sign up, grab, volunteer) followed by an adverb or qualifier (now, today, while supplies last) or clarifying subject (this deal, newsletter, subscription, your opportunity), or both, is a consistent, strong formula to follow.
Some call-to-action examples using this formula would be ‘Claim your 30% off now’ or ‘Get yours today’.
Emotion and Enthusiasm
An effective CTA will provoke emotion and make a connection with the customer.
Friendly, first-person language creates a personal connection that is more successful. If you can create CTAs that are more personalized, you can boost your conversion funnel even further. Personalized CTAs perform as much as 202% better than a basic ones.
Adding adjectives like a dream, once-in-a-lifetime, and luxury help make that connection, as does a reminder of your unique selling point.
Making a promise like ‘save more money on your taxes’, or leveraging fear of missing out, like ‘get yours now’, which implies everyone else already has one, further drives an emotional response. Numbers, such as a percentage of savings, make a strong impact. Good image choices to invoke emotions make for highly effective CTAs, too.
Stick With A Simple and Clear CTA
Clarity is key. Depending on your brand image, you can go with a humorous tone, a strongly emotional one, or a more serious one. However, regardless of the direction you take, make sure the final CTA is clear and understandable. Your customers need to know what to do and what their benefit is.
Carefully Leverage Multiple CTAs
You can have a secondary CTA stand with and support the first. For example, you can use ‘buy now’, but support with another CTA of ‘save 20%’. You can provide a choice of CTAs, too, such as ‘buy now’ coupled with ‘learn more’. If people aren’t ready to buy, you have given them another easy option that still keeps them engaged.
CTA Buttons and Landing Page Strategies
Use clickable buttons to help with navigating websites and guiding customers optimally through landing pages for maximum effect. A clickable button helps you prioritize actions and lead a visitor along a path that is most likely to convert that visitor. Making it easier for the customer reduces decision fatigue.
Social Proof
Modern audiences and consumers are increasingly relying on testimonials and social proof. Tying this directly to a CTA builds confidence for the viewer.
Novelty and Suspense To Draw In
Sometimes, a carefully-planned mystery, by not giving away too many details, can lure your audience in. Be sure to make it not too cryptic though, or confused viewers may navigate away.
Target Audience
An essential part of a good call to action is to be highly tailored to your audience. It helps you invoke the emotional response you want, and it’s critical for showing your customers the relevance to them.
If the CTA is highly relevant to the customer, there’s a much higher chance that the customer will follow up with the action. Knowing your audience is critical for this aspect. The CTA should be highly motivating to your audience, so find a way to connect to a strong motivation. Start by identifying your main goal, and what you want your customers to do, and then clarify why your target audience would want to do it.
Don’t Forget The Why
Emphasize the benefits of taking your desired action. People are more likely to act on a call to action if they have a clear reason to. When they understand the benefits to them, especially if there is a sense of urgency, people will react.
For your CTA button, consider embedding the benefit directly into it, to emphasize why the reader should take action. Some effective call-to-action examples of this are:
- ‘save money on insurance now’, instead of ‘contact us’
- ‘get ahead with money-saving tips’ rather than ‘read more’
- ‘Enjoy a free consultation on us’
Check out ads for your competitors, to see some call-to-action examples within your industry, and consider how well those CTA examples capture a user’s attention.
CTA Placement
Be sure that your call to action and CTA button are high enough on the page. Many customers do not scroll down on web pages, so if your CTA is too low, they won’t see it.
How To Determine If You Have A Successful CTA
There are two common ways to assess how effective your CTA is. You can track the number of people clicking on your CTA, or the numbers that actually take the directed action after clicking on it. Ongoing testing and tweaking help ensure the best results.
Barker Social can help you with creating effective CTAs. From creative strategizing, designing stunning and impactful graphics, developing clear and evocative language, and thorough testing and tweaking, we create powerful CTAs to make your audience take notice.