How to Write a Great Call to Action (CTA). 30-Day Content Marketing Challenge Day 21!

We’ve mentioned before that every piece of content you write should have a purpose, and an important part of meeting your goal for your content is to include a call to action (CTA).

You can write a brilliant blog post, but if you don’t include a call to action, you might have wasted your time. Your audience won’t automagically buy something unless you ask them to (or at least not in very high numbers), and that’s where your call to action comes in.

What might you use a call to action for?

Obviously, a call to action can be used to ask your audience to buy. But if that’s all you’re using your calls to action for, you’re definitely missing out:

• If you want people to sign up to your newsletter, then you need to tell them why they should. Your call to action is an important part of that. A great call to action can massively increase your newsletter sign ups.
• Part of building a community is to get people to interact and comment, and a great use of your call to action is to ask a question and ask them to reply in the comments.
• Use a good call to action to ask your audience to share your posts on their social media
• Use a CTA to guide customers to your help pages and FAQ or to email support if they need some help.
• If you have a large site new visitors can struggle to see where to start. A call to action in the form of a ‘Start Here’ menu tab can help direct your visitors to the information you want them to see.
• You could create a personalised CTA to email a segment of your list, offering a discount or an upsell on their latest purchase.
• Don’t just keep your CTAs on your site. Try using them in your social posts and tweets to direct your audience back to your site to increase your traffic.

What else can a great call to action do for you? Think about what you want your content to achieve and see what kind of CTA you can use to get you that result.

Writing a compelling call to action

• Just like with writing headlines, use a strong, compelling verb at, or near, the start of your CTA.
• Use emotional language that appeals to your readers.
• Be positive and energetic with your language. You’ll make your readers feel more like taking action.
• Heard of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)? Evoke that successfully, and your calls to action will have your audience clicking in droves.
• Numbers work just as well in CTAs as they do in headlines. They’re eye-catching and tell your customers exactly what they are getting when they click – ‘Click here for 15% off”, ‘Buy today and pay only $10’, etc.
• Talk about the benefits of taking action. You’ll get more click-throughs if you give your audience a reason.
• Don’t use jargon or overly technical talk in your CTA. Unless you’re selling to an audience of experts, you’ll likely put people off.
• Focus on what your audience needs and talk directly to them using ‘you’ and ‘yours’ rather than ‘we’ and ‘our’. It’s much more personal.

How to use a call to action

1. Think about your audience before you write your call to action. What will appeal to them? What do they need, and what will make them take action?
2. Write calls to action that fit in with the tone of voice on your site. If you’d use a lot of humour and be very personal in your copy, then don’t suddenly switch and be really formal in your CTAs.
3. Think about the timing of your CTA, partly as it can make a difference to how effective it is, but also because you don’t want to stick a call to action in your reader’s face the second they visit your site. That’s highly likely not to work, and it’s pretty rude and off putting. A new visitor isn’t going to respond at all to a ‘Buy Now’ CTA when they haven’t even seen your site yet.
4. Make your CTA stand out. Use plenty of white space around it and use contrasting colours that attract the eye.
5. Don’t go crazy with CTAs everywhere. You can overdo it. If you put too many different calls to action all over your site, you’ll confuse your audience and they won’t know what to do.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with your CTAs and to change up the language to see what works. Even changing just one word can up your conversion rate in some cases, so don’t be afraid to get creative and see what you can come up with.

Want more on calls to action? Take a look at Sprout Social’s brilliant article on different types of CTA that really work: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/call-to-action-phrases/

Action Point!

Think about your content goals for each piece and look at what sort of call to action you can use to get your audience to take action.

If you already have CTAs in place, why not do some experimenting to see if you can improve your results?

Need a little more help? Comment below!

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Can you believe we’ve just finished Day 21? We’re almost there! Tomorrow, it’s all about making the most of your content by repurposing it.

Don’t want to wait? Prefer to get all of the 30-Day Content Marketing Challenge posts in one place, so you can work through at your own pace? Here’s a link to all of the challenge lessons: https://creativeblueberry.com/30-day-content-marketing-challenge-catch-up/

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