The Role of The CTA

An effective CTA or a call to action is small but mighty. No matter what the digital marketing services you’re leveraging: search engine optimization services, PPC marketing, content marketing, social media marketing or even traditional marketing, the seemingly minor addition of a good CTA to marketing collateral is essential for generating leads and sales. Whether you’re creating marketing campaigns on your own or collaborating with a digital marketing agency, a proper CTA is essential. The more thought and strategy you put behind a call to action, the more opportunity your marketing will have to be successful. 

What Kind of Digital Marketing Materials Require a CTA? 

Every piece of marketing collateral should include calls to action, including, but not limited to ads, emails, landing pages, social media profiles and posts, even your print marketing collateral should have a call to action. 

What Is the Point of a CTA? 

Calls to action are designed to incite action. Once a potential customer engages with your content, ad, or video through any channel they must be told how to take action either through a store, a link, or a simple method of contact, be it a phone number or email address. By effectively prompting your potential customers to engage with your business is how you generate leads or sales.

How To Build A Good Call to Action? 

Generally a call to action will be simple and start with a verb that immediately instructs the reader on what they need to do. Giving this clear direction encourages your traffic to engage with your advertising in the way you want.

Common CTA Starters:

• Call 
• Contact
• Email 
• Sign Up 
• Read More 
• View More 

While all of these verbs are simple, they give a clear action on what to do next. Simplicity is important to a good call to action. Calls to action that are too long or that elaborate too much will likely either get buried in the other content or overwhelm the audience. You don’t want to create any chance of confusing the reader.  A simple call to action fits the formula: “verb” + “why”. For example, you could write “Contact us to learn how to increase your profitability.” Or if you’re linking to a page you can make your CTA even more concise “Start Generating More Business.”

To take your call to action up a level, you can introduce time to your CTA. FOMO or “the fear of missing out”, is a common psychological effect that’s leveraged in marketing collateral to create a sense of urgency.  This is great for limited time offers promoted via social media marketing and PPC marketing. To leverage FOMO you can use terms like “sign up while supplies last” or simply include an expiry date. 

Customizing Your Call to Action

When you’re developing your social media marketing, PPC ads, or even your website content marketing strategy, you’ll need to tailor it to your brand goals, and target audience. Your CTA is no exception. Your CTA should always be aligned with your brand, your audience, and the intent of your content. A B2B services page CTA should sound different from a retail Instagram ad. 

If your brand tone is professional, your CTA might be:
“Schedule your strategy call today.”

If your brand is more playful, it might be:
“Grab yours before they’re gone.”

Whatever your tone, keep it clear and direct. And remember, every channel gives you a new opportunity to test and refine your CTA’s for maximum impact.

Testing Your CTA for Conversion Rate Optimization 

Based on your audience and your landing page intention you’ll find that the effectiveness will vary depending on the wording of the call to action or its placement. Your CTA is never “one and done.” The wording, design, size, and placement of your CTA all impact its performance. Using A/B your digital marketing agency can test and compare different versions of the same CTA to see which performs better. Try switching out “Get Started” with “Get a Free Quote,” or testing top-of-page versus bottom-of-page placement.

Leveraging tools like heatmaps, click tracking, and user flow analysis, can also help determine how users are interacting with your CTAs. If visitors are skipping over it, it’s time to test a new approach to maximize your results. 

Get More Out of Your Digital Marketing Strategy with Xi Digital

A well-crafted call to action may only be a few words, but it’s one of the most important elements of your digital marketing strategy. It guides your audience from interest to action and plays a direct role in whether your marketing efforts drive real results. Whether it’s a landing page, social media campaign, or paid ad, at Xi Digital, we build high-performing marketing campaigns that include strategic CTAs designed to convert. 

Ready to improve your results? Contact Xi Digital Today.