What is a call to action?
A call to action should engage a positive response from a user or viewer of your marketing collateral. This could take the form of buttons or features on your website or simply having multiple methods of contact on your literature.
Why use a call to action?
Have you ever been on a website finding out information on a product or service, only to go and buy it from another website? Our marketing company encounters this on 3-4 out of 10 websites that we analyse for prospective marketing clients of ours. Lots of companies’ marketing collateral and websites are great for giving their marketing prospects a wealth of product information, but essentially forget to mention that they sell it!
Calls to action should avert your prospect from going to a competitor.
Call to action examples
Calls to action should be focused on engaging users into making an enquiry with you; essentially a lead. Here are some areas that you should think about when using calls to action throughout various marketing methods.
1.) Contact us. Don’t forget show this throughout your literature and every page of your website.
2.) Give people different methods of contacting you. Live support chat, phone, email and fax if required.
3.) Prospects who don’t want to engage you immediately might want to follow you on Twitter, add you on LinkedIn or like your Facebook page. Give people these options so that you are still in their mind when they make a buying decision.
4.) Look at the highlights of your product offering and ensure that they are prominent within your marketing collateral. If you are the market leader in something, the cheapest, best quality or any other competitive edge – tell people. Use a call to action.
5) Add special offer messages: lower price, sale price, 2 for the price of 1, etc.
6.) Don’t forget to upsell. If you have one product or service that complements another, remember to promote it close to the initial offering. For example, training courses in one discipline might link to online training courses for similar disciplines.
7.) View company video – this is often a synopsis of your entire company wrapped up in 2-3 beautiful minutes. We still only have 24/7 but we are becoming busier in life. People tend to skim-read brochures, articles and websites now so an attention-grabbing video can be invaluable.
8.) Chat live – most business people of the younger generation will use this as online chat is rife socially. It is now coming more into the business environment and personally I would always use an online chat feature rather than picking up the phone.
9.) Download free advice – this can be anything from top ten tips, recipes, user manuals, free coaching, basically anything that will get your market interested. These are often entered via a form on a website, where the user has to put their contact details in to access the information. Remember to ask them if they want to opt out of any marketing communication.
10.) Gadgets, widgets and calculators – we have developed these for some clients of ours such as fuel calculators, countdown timers and an alcohol usage calculator. In terms of your website, this is the Holy Grail. If done well it creates more links to your site, which helps search engine optimization (website ranking), increases enquiries, attracts extra traffic and raises your profile as an informative and expert source.
For more marketing tips please visit our blog. Also, please feel free to contact us to see how we can help your business with effective marketing.
Grapevine are a leading UK marketing company, who specialise in providing marketing solutions for companies across a variety of industry sectors. Take a look at our marketing company work.