Today when an increasing number of people are purchasing online or searching for information before buying anything online, you will come across different kinds of Call to Action to guide the audience in a preferred direction.
Marketing has evolved in many ways and has been constantly changing. But one factor that has not changed over the years is the Call to Action (CTA). Call To Action is one of the most important factors in any campaign, blog, video or for that matter in any kind of content.
What is CTA?
According to Wikipedia, CTA is,” Call to action (CTA) is a marketing term used extensively in advertising and selling. It refers to any device designed to prompt an immediate response or encourage an immediate sale. A CTA most often refers to the use of words or phrases that can be incorporated into sales scripts, advertising messages or web pages that encourage consumers to take prompt action.”
In simple words, Call To Action is a direction to your audience to take the next desired action by you. As a blog writer or website owner, it is your duty to guide your audience in the right direction and help them to navigate the website smoothly and make their experience on your website as pleasant as possible.
Call To Action is a phrase or a group of words that encourages your audience to take a specific action. CTA helps to convert traffic to a sell. CTA can also be in the form of Call, Click or Combine, which means you can put a CTA like “Click Here”, “Call Now”. CTA not necessarily always mean a sale.
Call To Action can be in many forms throughout the website, mainly depending upon the content and what the author is intended to do his audience.
Before writing a piece of content it is important to decide what kind of action do you want your readers to take.
Do you want to increase subscriptions? Email Marketing and autoresponders are a must today if you want to reach your audience in a more personalized way. and you should start email marketing as early as possible to keep connected with your readers.
Read More: 10 Reasons Why You Should Start Email Marketing Immediately
Do you want to boost sales for a particular product?
Or do you want to move readers to another content piece?
If you are clear about what you want your reader does, it is much easier to create content as well as Call To Action. For example, while writing this blog, my intention is to share simple tips on how we can create effective CTA’s on our blog post so that we can help our reader to navigate through the website easily and find them useful and relevant content in a click.
So if you see above, I created a simple CTA on the importance of email marketing and why we must start email marketing immediately. So if a reader is interested in the topic of the importance of email marketing, he should not need to search my website. I am guessing here that this piece of content might be useful for my reader and I am providing the link which will directly take him to the content.
Also, through the above CTA, I am directing the reader to another piece of content, which might be useful to him.
And if you have any product which may be useful to your reader, which he might want to buy, direct him towards that page by a relevant Call To Action.
Like I want to let all my readers and content creators know about the best offer which one should not miss, is coming Black Friday Offer, which gives them almost 50% discount. So I create a simple Call to Action which will guide them to a blog that will give detail information about it.
Must Read: Best Buy Black Friday Offer Which You Must Not Miss
So you see it is quite easy to create effective CTA on each of your blog posts, it is guiding your readers to what might be of interest to them.
Importance of Relevant CTA
One important thing you must not forget while creating CTA is it must be relevant to the subject you are discussing with your reader and it must be useful and informative from the reader’s point of view.
As a content creator, we create informative, helpful content on a regular basis and we may have a ton of information on our website. But each piece of content might not be of interest to our reader. So always remember to provide content related to the subject only.
For example, this blog post is all about Call to Action, how to create and where to place CTA’s so that it will be helpful to our readers. So obviously, the reader of this piece of content might not be interested in the product review I have done about Oziva Protein & Herbs, Best Hay Powder! So it is useless to provide a link here about that product. Even if I provide the link of the above review, the reader might not click the link or if he clicks the link, he will not stay on the page for long, which will give me a high bounce rate, which will be harmful to my website from SEO point of view.
Placement of CTAs is another important part, and how it is important for SEO, will see in a moment.
Best Places to Place CTA
Call to Action and its placement is really important for a good conversion. Conversion not necessarily always means a sale or “Buy Now” kind of CTA, but it can be like Click Here or Call Now, Read More kind of CTAs, but its placement is important.
You may have seen CTA at a different spot in a blog post – at starting of a blog post, at the top or in the middle or at the end of a blog post.
I personally feel it is best to have a CTA in the middle of the blog post or at the end of the blog post. When you place a CTA in the middle of the blog post, you allow your reader to read the content, absorb the information and then ask them to take a particular action through CTA, which may convert better. I would like my reader to read my content first, then take the next action.
If you place the CTA at the beginning of a blog post, you are not allowing your reader to read the content, absorb the information. As a content creator, we create content for our readers, so if they leave the page the moment they land on the website, the whole purpose of creating content is futile.
From SEO point of view also it is not a good placement, because if a reader leaves the page within 60 seconds it gives you a high bounce rate, which sends a bad message to Google that your content is not engaging or relevant from the reader’s point of view. So never place an ad or a CTA at the top of your page which will distract your reader or take away from your website.
The best way to place your CTA’s is at the bottom of your page. As it gives ample time to your reader to read and absorb all the information, the reader is well informed about the product or the topic is discussing and now if you ask for a particular action, he is ready.
That’s what Michael Lykke Aagaard of ContentVerve did. He found that a CTA at the bottom of the page outperformed a CTA at the top by 304%.
Sell Without Being Salesy
There is no denying that it’s an art to sell a product or service. It is important not to be salesy, no one likes it if we constantly bombard our readers with “Buy this, buy this” CTAs after every few paragraphs.
First of all, it is important to remember that as a blogger, our first intention should be to give impartial information to our readers, help them to make an informed decision about any product or service, discuss the topic thoroughly, and then ask them and guide them to the best place to buy the product.
If you provide them enough information in a very passive way, without being too salesy, the reader will appreciate you for giving them much-needed information they were seeking. So if not on the first visit, he may come again to your website and buy next time.
Always remember, people do not buy a product, they buy a solution. So provide them with the solution to their problem and they will definitely buy from you.
Conclusion:
Call To Actions are one of the most important parts of any campaign to convert. Which CTAs convert best is an ongoing conversion in the marketing industry, but we can definitely pick some common trends which convert better than the other.
Today more and more people shops online, so it is easy more than before. But it is important to remember that we should inform our readers about the product or service that we sell on our website.
Provide them as much information as possible, educate them before asking them to buy. Give them enough reasons to buy from you.
The wording of CTAs should be very definite yet very subtle, it should guide the readers exactly what action he needs to take.
CTAs can be very creative but the most popular CTAs are like: Sign up, Subscribe, Try for free, Learn More, Join us, Get Started, Give —–A Try, Claim your free trial and so on.
Hey Friends, What’s your opinion about today’s discussion on CTA, let me know in the comments below. Also, have you tried to place any different CTA in your blog post? Share with all of us, and if you want to read about the colours and more secret tips about Call To Action then do not miss this blog post:
Building Convincing Call To Actions On Website
In this blog post you will read about different types of Call to Actions, what colours are effective and also some cool Call to Action Phrases are given, I hope that you will like all this information that I tried to provided with this article.