Welcome to step 8! If you missed the last tutorial you can find it here. Today we are going to be building on what you created in step six – creating content. If you are following along, then in step 6 you created tons of great content that was relevant to your target audience and helped you stand out from the crowd. Now we need to create a strong call to action to entice your customers to interact with you from that content.
To start off with lets talk about what a call to action is. A call to action (often referred to as a CTA) is telling a visitor what you want them to do. You are calling for the visitor to take action. This could be a button or link located on or near your content asking the visitor to take the next step and become a lead. There are several different types of call to action, for example:
- Subscribe
- Chat now
- Buy now!
- Register
- Share now
- Pin it!
- Schedule an appointment
- Ask a question
- Learn more
- Call now
Pretty much any word or phrase can become a call to action, but that doesn’t mean all of them should be. Every day marketers all over the world test different calls to action, with varying results but two things should will help to generate the most leads possible.
- Use action text. Avoid using boring words like “submit” and “enter” and use striking, action-oriented text. Words like “get,” “reserve” and “try” will be more interesting to the customer and sound more rewarding.
- Imply Urgency. Creating a subtle urgency in your call to action can do wonders for your click-through rates. Saying things like “today only” or “limited time” or even just adding “now” will help to imply a sense of urgency to your customer.
When creating a call to action it is best to say what you want to say in just a few words. You want to create specific action-oriented text, and keep your text to two to five words. It is also important to use large and legible text, your call to action should be large enough to read easily in a readable font, however you don’t want to create a call to action so large that your customers can’t tell its a button!
When picking out colors for your call to action it is important to create an eye-catching visual that is easily identifiable as a call to action. This means that you should generally avoid grey for call to action colors as customers tend to see grey as something that is not clickable. You will want to create call to actions that don’t clash with your site as a whole but they should stand out, since the whole point of creating this content is to convert someone. When it comes to colors the best possible thing you can do is test different options. There is a wealth of A/B testing software out there that will allow you to generate two (or more) different calls to action and show them to different visitors on your site. Doing this will help you to see the colors that convert the best for your target audience.
Did you get all that? There was a lot of information in this step, and in reality there will be some trial and error in creating the right calls to action to reach your targeted audience. If you are still lost and need inspiration to create your calls to action check out some of the great sites below.
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/02/20/call-to-action-buttons
https://blog.bufferapp.com/words-and-phrases-that-convert-ultimate-list