Even the most engaging marketing content can fail to achieve its goals if it isn’t clear about what it wants the audience to do next. For instance, does your content encourage the prospect to watch a video, download a free white paper, or make a phone call to interact with a salesperson?
If not, then the audience isn’t being prompted as to what specific course of action it’s expected to take. In other words, your content is missing its “call to action,” or CTA.
This is important, since some statistics indicate there is a 14 to 28 percent greater conversion rate for landing pages that include them. If that doesn’t seem like much, consider that a good website conversion rate typically falls between 2 and 5 percent across all industries. In fact, the term conversion refers to the moment a user responds to a call to action.
Consider these six best practices for crafting effective marketing content with CTAs:
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Tap into what motivates your prospects.
Marketing content that contains CTAs should be highly relevant to the audience it’s targeting. This goes back to the importance of building buyer personas to understand what your audience needs most, their biggest challenges, and what keeps them up at night. Then be sure the CTA is presented as the trailhead to the solution to these problems.
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Be specific on how they’ll benefit.
While benefits aren’t the CTA itself, they’re essential for leading up to it. Instead of giving benefits in broad terms (“improved efficiency,” “lower costs”), use customer research to present actual numbers—20 percent faster or an overall cost reduction of 30 percent within six weeks of implementation, for example. This confirms that the solution’s advantages are both real and measurable, making it more likely the prospect will heed the CTA.
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Make it stand out.
Graphic design, images, and white space should be used to make the CTA highly visible. Place the CTA in a prominent location so that it isn’t lost in other copy. It’s also fine to have more than one CTA button or link integrated into marketing content so that prospects don’t miss out.
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Make it extremely easy to take the first step.
Make it clear what audiences need to do, and make it easy to do it. For instance, if your CTA asks prospects to fill out a landing page form, keep it to a few basic questions. You can always collect more data over time. In fact, asking for less data initially helps to ensure the CTA will be followed.
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Create a sense of urgency.
Make provisions that encourage prospects to take more immediate action, such as offering discounts, free trials, or other valuable content for a limited time. FOMO, or “fear of missing out,” is a real thing and reduces hesitancy to act. Also, use power words and phrases that evoke immediacy, such as “contact us today” or “download now.”
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Measure effectiveness.
Finally, marketers should use tracking links and analytics to determine just how effective their content and its CTA actually are. Any time a prospect arrives at a next step, it should be visible how they got where they currently are.
Bottom line, a CTA should be included with most types of marketing content. The content should be compelling enough that prospects are not only intrigued to learn more—but through the CTA—are better enabled to do so.
If you need assistance driving greater sales leads, contact us today. We’re adept at creating compelling content and marketing strategies tailored specifically to meet your goals.