One of the most important elements of your online presence, in terms of effectively marketing your brand and improving engagement with your audience, is your call-to-action, or CTA. Although having a powerful online presence offers almost limitless opportunities to grow and expand your business in ways you can’t with just one store at a physical address, dealing with your customers in person allows for a type of engagement that can’t be perfectly recreated with an online presence.
Creating convenient online engagement opportunities for your target audience means creating a CTA that brings results by improving conversion rates for your professional and financial growth.
What is a CTA?
A call-to-action is a short phrase that prompts your audience to take action asap. Within a website, it typically includes clickable text, buttons, or images that lead visitors to perform a certain action, such as:
-Purchasing products
-Downloading files
-Subscribing to a newsletter or service
-Contacting staff
-Member sign-up
-Starting a free trial
In essence, a CTA seals the deal. If it’s strong and persuasive, a CTA engages your online audience to create more followers, provide wider exposure, and bring in more sales. But how do you create impactful CTAs that will bring big results? Begin by asking yourself two very important questions.
What are my goals?
The very first step in perfecting your CTAs actually takes you right to the core of building your online presence. Asking this question allows you to pinpoint why you set up a website in the first place and helps you narrow down your most important goals. In other words, your goals and actions correspond with each other. Say, for example, the goal of your site is to expand your massage therapy business. In this case, your action would be to schedule an appointment, and the CTA could read, “Schedule a Free Consultation” or “Book Your First Session”.
If you want visitors to do more than one thing, you can choose to have one prompt prominent on one page and one on another page or set up your site layout to support both CTAs without creating competition between them.
What does my audience want?
Knowing what your audience wants is just as important as important as pinpointing your own goals. However, it’s not always as easy to determine exactly what visitors to your site want to see and do. It helps to imagine scenarios involving someone you think might be in your target audience - a typical or potential customer.
Ask yourself what they are doing on your site, as well as what tone and vocabulary will appeal to them. Even create profiles of typical target customers. In addition, look at what competitors are doing. Learn from their failures and successes, as you learn about yours.
Now, it’s time to look at the most desirable characteristics for a successful CTA and how to achieve them.
Is it clear and visible?
It can’t be stressed enough that a successful CTA is a clearly visible CTA.
Here’s how to guarantee that your visitors won’t miss yours:
-Color palette should accentuate your CTA and make it pop. Busy, clashing colors take away, but you do need some contrast for emphasis. Also consider what colors evoke which emotions.
-Size and distinction of your CTA needs to mark it as a section of the site that should be noticed, not overlooked. However, don’t frustrate visitors frustrated by filling half a webpage with your CTA
-Location, location, location. Where your put your CTA will have significant impact on the success it. Choose prominent, clutter-free spots that don’t compete with other buttons and place it where you think the visitor will be ready to take the desired action.
Is it short and to the point?
Use other space on your website to show off your wit and personality, if that is good for your product or service. However, your CTA should be quick and right to the point. Great examples include “Download Your Copy”, “Buy Tickets”, or “Sign Up and Get $25 Off”.
Although this directness in your copy may seem off-putting, remember that your CTAs are simply a final step in the process, and other aspects of your site, such as images and content, create the atmosphere.
Is the language action-oriented?
The language in your Call-to-Action needs to be proactive and begin with an assertive, imperative verb. This explicit kind of invitation motivates readers by focusing on them and strengthening their confidence in moving forward. In addition to these questions, here are the final steps in perfecting your CTAs.
Add a sense of urgency.
Adding a sense of urgency to your CTA will motivate potential customers to take immediate action. Words like “Here”, “Now” and “Today” help to prompt quick reactions. And, phrases that can add urgency to your CTAs are “Take Advantage of Our Best Deal Ever” and “Grab Limited Discount Code.”
Don’t neglect other important elements of your site.
Just as important as an impactful CTA is a good CTA environment. Remember that you need to lead visitors to the CTA to begin with. This means that content leading up to the prompt needs to be informative, engaging, and motivating, as well as flow to the CTA as naturally as possible.
Track and analyze.
Once your site’s content and CTAs are set for takeoff, it’s time to track and analyze their impact. By keeping tabs on the success rate of your CTAs, you have a crucial element in evaluating your site’s overall performance and improving your marketing strategy to foster growth.
Test, improve, repeat.
At this level of evaluating customer experience, you want to always test and improve, to keep up with the changing needs of your target audience. This is a time when you can experiment, compare, and improve various CTA strategies. For instance, certain colors might bring more clicks, or changing “Buy Now” to “Purchase Now” didn’t make the CTA button more effective.
Keep track of your tests carefully to always improve your understanding of what triggers action in your site’s visitors and improve accordingly.
Want to take your business to the next level? Let JanMar Agency help! With a combined 70 years experience, we provide an innovative outlook on talent management, marketing and design with the skills to back it up.