What is a Call to Action?

Calls to action are crucial to any inbound marketing strategy. We mention them quite a bit on this blog and the reason is that they are the avenues you can use to funnel people from one spot to another on your website – paving the way for more leads and ultimately more sales.

We’ve talked about different types of calls to action and how you can improve them in order to get more leads, but really, what is a call to action in the first place?

I mean outside of the nightclub, obviously.

A call to action, or CTA is either an image or piece of text that calls out to the user to take action by doing something on the website. It prompts users to become a lead, leads to become customers, etc. When a visitor clicks on a CTA, they are taken to a landing page where the user exchanges a piece of information like an email address for whatever the CTA has offered.

So What Does a CTA look like?

The action itself could be any number of things. You could download an ebook or guide, sign up for a newsletter or seminar, receive a coupon, etc. These CTAs can be placed on your website, in an email, on social media or anywhere you feel that the viewer may be inclined to take a next step.

You may want to keep those ironic mobile ones OFF the freeway.

Many website owners don’t take calls to action seriously as part of a website strategy. When you visit a website, how many times do you realize that the only way to find out anything more about the company is to ‘Call Now’ or ‘Buy Now’. Most people visiting your website are still researching and finding out about your company, so they most certainly aren’t even close to the point of sale yet. What great calls to action do is feed a captivating offer to the user at each point of the sales funnel. They don’t just say ‘Buy Now’. They say things like ‘Download our Free Checklist’ or ‘Sign up for a Free Demo’.

These calls to action are also strategically placed on a page. When you hit the bottom of a blog article about winter tires for example, you may encounter a CTA that prompts you to download a checklist on what to look for in a winter tire. They could be placed in a sidebar next to related articles or they could also be linked within the article itself. The great thing about calls to action is that A/B test sizes, colors, placements and copy and change things on the fly until you dial in what’s working best.

Create a CTA of Your Own

Think about what you want people to do on your website. Where do you want them to go? What do you want them to get out of their experience and also what do you want to get for yourself? Do you want to capture more leads or close more sales? Start thinking about what you can offer your users that will get them to provide you with the information you need to accomplish your online goals.