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Strategic CTA allows brands to guide their visitors through the purchasing journey.

To cater to the ever-changing trends in social media as well as to keep up with customer’s short attention span (right now, the average is about 8 seconds), business owners and marketers are forced to constantly come up with creative marketing ideas to keep these potential customers’ interests triggered and keep them long enough to convert them into actual leads.

One of the strategies that is effective enough to encourage a sort of reaction from customers in a campaign is through CTA.

What is CTA?

Stands for “Call to Action”, CTA in its essence means asking customers to do something the moment they saw the brands’ posts or ads online. You probably see this type of CTA marketing in e-commerce posts, which usually takes in the forms of “Send a Message” or “Learn More” or “Buy Now” buttons.

What’s so interesting about CTA is the sense of urgency that it emphasizes along with the strategic placement of the buttons. The buttons will then send customers to whatever landing pages brands have set, i.e. checkout page, content page, chat, or website.

Why CTA?

If you’re a seasoned marketer, you know that CTA is not new in marketing. Still, CTA, if done correctly, is extremely effective to increase your chances of attracting and converting potential customers and generating revenue.

Strategic CTA allows brands to guide their visitors through the purchasing journey. The best thing about CTAs is their versatility that can drive a variety of different actions depending on your content’s goal.

CTA’s Best Practices

How do you create an effective CTA marketing strategy?

Design and Position

One of the most essential yet simplest thing marketers could do to improve their CTA marketing strategy is to pay attention to its design and color. Think about it, most customers are usually drawn by interesting copy or design of a post before they click the link. Using contrasting colors on your CTAs will make them stand out compared to the rest of your page. The position of CTAs is also important. Place the CTAs wherever they make the most sense in your context. Remember, higher conversion rates have nothing to do with whether your button is above or below, as long as it’s placed alongside the right amount of good copy.

Prezi’s CTA button “Give Prezi a try” has blue color, the same blue from their main logo, and the minimalist design on the website makes the button pops. That bright blue is strategically placed on the homepage, which immediately takes users to its pricing page.

Number of CTAs

When adding CTAs, it’s important that your value-added propositions are clear and speak directly to your visitors and their needs. An effective proposition sets clear expectations on what value the customers will receive. Determining how many CTAs you need depends on the complexity of your business.

Business with longer sales cycle like HubSpot uses a variety of CTAs. When you scroll down their website, you can see that they offer different conversions that cater to different visitor’s needs. On the other side, a straightforward business like Dropbox only uses one CTA button placed close to a crisp value-added proposition.

Balance the CTAs

As mentioned before, having multiple CTAs depends on what kind of business you’re running. When using multiple CTAs though, brands need to balance them to optimize their efficiency. These CTAs act as interactive guidelines for visitors by presenting them with multiple options.

Take Spotify for example. As soon as you reach Spotify’s homepage, you’re presented with two CTA buttons that give you two choices: “Go Premium” or “Play Free”. While it’s clear that their main goal is to attract customers who are willing to pay for a premium account and the CTA for users to sign up for free is very much secondary, but still, when customers are presented with these options, it somehow creates the perception that the choice is theirs to make and they are not forced to pay to enjoy the app.

Compelling Words

Apart from eye-catching buttons, effective CTAs also require action-oriented language to stir up customer’s desire to click the links. Brief and clear words such as “Sign up”, “Subscribe”, “Try for Free”, “Join Us”, or “Get Started” could potentially trigger audience’s actions.

Netflix, for example, successfully uses its CTA buttons to increase its audience base. How? Well, Netflix understands the biggest fear users have before committing to sign up is the fastidious step to cancel if they end up not liking it. Netflix efficiently tackles that fear with the “Cancel Anytime” and “Join Free for a Month” CTAs.

Creative Phrase

CTAs do not necessarily need to be short words. Brands can also utilize a creative phrase to attract customers’ attention. CTA phrase can create a sense of welcoming customers into the brand’s exclusive community.

EPIC successfully pulls the implementation of creative CTA phrase. Their main call-to-action stands out with a simple phrase “Let’s start a new project together”, which gives a hint to users looking for a creative partner as well as the company’s confidence in their work and team.

Wrapping Up

Every business is different and so is the effectiveness of CTAs. That’s why brands need to do test-and-trial to know what types of CTAs work best for their audience and businesses. The beauty of CTA marketing strategy after all is its simplicity and flexibility that leads to a marketing strategy that can be converted every time.