What is a call to action?

In simple terms, a call to action, or CTA, is an action statement you want people that visit your website to do.

• Sign up for our newsletter!
• Join our giveaway!
• Don’t delay, adopt a stray!

Some call to actions are more direct and more successful than others. The two may not often go together. If your CTA is too pushy or does not match your overall messaging on your website or social media platforms, your visitors may be turned off and just leave your site. On the flip side, your CTA may not be obvious enough. If your CTA is hidden in the body of a blog post, like many of the reference links we use here in our blog posts, your audience may completely overlook it.

Type of CTAs

There are five different calls to action; or activities that you may want your audience to do. These are lead generation, form submission, read/learn more, product discovery (our “work with us” form), and event promotion. Every time you sign up for someone’s email newsletter, you are engaging in a lead generation CTA. When you are on a blog page and click the “read more” button to be able to explore the full article, you are following that call to action.

Calls to Action are important. In a sea of information, we as viewers and consumers of that information often get bogged down with decision paralysis. We may not know the next steps to take. In this way, specific calls to action can be very beneficial to assist with the customer journey. When a business website practices the inbound marketing strategy, calls to action often aid in information discovery to help inform their audience. A good call to action doesn’t just suck a customer in to buying a product. It helps lead the consumer through a journey that builds that infamous “know, like, trust” factor. It helps create “raving fans” as my friend Lisa says.

Do you need a CTA on your website?

MOST websites will benefit from a call to action. The most popular is the lead generation one, asking people to sign up for your newsletter. A call to action can be the start of your client journey. It may help weed out those that would benefit from your services and those who won’t (aka your ideal client avatar or ICA). It is important for you, the business owner, to understand the purpose of your website. Once you know what you want your website to do for you, the most appropriate call to action is easier to identify.

Your website may benefit from multiple calls to action like ours does. We have a lead generation one where we ask you to sign up for our newsletter. We have a form submission/product discovery CTA when we ask you to fil out the form on the “work with us” page. We also have a “read more” in our blogs/articles. As long as a CTA makes sense, isn’t shmarmy or sketchy, used car salesman feeling; it is okay to have what makes sense for you on your site.

Not sure what you want your website to do for you? Or what your CTA should be? Give our web guy/gal an email and schedule a consult call or chat with them. Have a discussion about your business goals and what your website can do for you. As a quick example, we just finished a website build for a growing bookkeeping company. They are having a hard time managing the growth – a great problem to have! We didn’t do a whole lot of focus on a big SEO push, and their site is more informative with a way for potential clients to reach out to them. Now in six to twelve months if they want to change that, there is a lot of room for improvement to implement specific SEO strategies so they can reap those benefits.

What CTA’s do you use on your website? Are they productive, or producing the results you want? Share with us in the comments below!