What Is Call to Action Marketing?
Thursday, May 19th, 2011Call to action marketing or CTA marketing is a powerful marketing technique designed to motivate customers and visitors to your site to take some kind of action. It’s simple enough to do, but if you omit call to action marketing then you’re not going to convert on any of your goals, it’s as simple as that.
This article will define what is call to action marketing and how you can use it to move your site’s visitors or customers.
Call to action marketing pertains most notably to the kind of copy which you use at a certain time to motivate your reader to take action. Your are calling your reader to take your desired action. The most classic example of it on the net would be the phrase “click here”. This is used everywhere to motivate readers to click on some kind of link to take them to another page which the writer wants the reader to go to.
The “click here” example is often used in conjunction with other copy to especially motivate the reader. So if you wanted to meet with a lawyer and found their ad online, it could read something like “to schedule a free consultation, click here”.
Offering some kind of free incentive works very well in setting up a successful CTA. People are much more motivated to take action when something free is involved, so the combination of mentioning the freebie and how to get it with the specific action of “click here”.
Another aspect of call to action marketing is the presentation of your copy. “Buy Now” is a very common call to action, but you can get a lot of mileage out of how you present this phrase to your reader.
You can go change the font to make this CTA a lot bigger and more visible. You can attach it to a flashy and attractive button. You can change the color of the call to action or the button. You can add an exclamation point. You can animate the button the call appears on and have that phrase flash then swap out for another CTA, so it could alternate between buy now” and “click here”. This will get your reader’s attention much more easily than a static CTA.
The other important aspect of call to action marketing is where you put your CTA. Typically you’re putting this at the end of your content. You’ll use the rest of your page to explain the content on the next page to get your reader ready for what to expect, then once you’ve peaked their interest you hit them at the bottom with the call.
In other words, you can’t just slide in a CTA wherever you want and expect your reader to take action. It works hand in hand with the rest of your content, so you can’t have one without the other and expect results.