Help your audience with a well crafted Call to Action

A call to action, or CTA, sounds simple and is consequently often underestimated, or given only cursory time and attention. It is a specific instruction or a prompt to your reader or website visitor, asking them to take action. For example, it could be asking them to visit a website, make a purchase, or sign up for a newsletter. Regardless of whether your marketing is online or offline, you should consider CTAs for everything you produce.

Why CTAs are so crucial

In general, people don’t want to have to think too hard, when reading something from a company or charity, to work out what it is wanted from them. So, assuming you don’t have money to waste and need your marketing to be effective, it’s your job to make it clear to them what they need to do. This is where CTAs come in.

Having CTAs on your website and in your marketing materials helps guide people towards taking the next step in their journey with you. It clearly communicates the desired action to take, making it easy for your audience to then take that action.

CTAs are also useful in helping you track the effectiveness of your marketing campaign as you’ll be able to monitor the number of clicks or conversions. You can therefore, over time, start testing what wording has the most impact.

What makes a good CTA

A compelling CTA is one that is clear, specific, and urgent.

It should therefore be action-oriented, using verbs like “buy,” “register,” or “subscribe”.

It should be distinctive, easily noticeable and stand out from the rest of your content. Colour is therefore important – pay attention to what works with your brand, what is appropriate for your audience, what grabs attention without jarring but is of sufficient contrast to stand out.

There are lots of studies into whether one colour over another works best for conversions and if you can you should definitely test different options. But make sure you’re looking at your page holistically, there’s no point going for a colour because one study says you should if the rest of your material is the same colour, the impact will be lost.

Just like the colour of your CTA needs to fit with your audience, the CTA itself needs to be relevant to your audience, not be there for the sake of it.

Overall, a clear, persuasive CTA is an essential component of any successful marketing strategy, it helps guide your audience towards taking the next step in the journey you’d like them to take.