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Top 10 Ways to Make Your Content's Call to Action Count
You've spent hours writing your latest and greatest piece of content. You have a killer story, eye-catching presentation, and even a multi-channel promotion strategy to reach all the right people.
But was it a waste of time and money because you forgot the one essential that makes your marketing matter?
Your call to action.
Every interaction you have with your audience is an opportunity to build and strengthen relationships. Because of this, every piece of content you create — be it a press release, podcast, blog post, email, website landing page, SlideShare, video or ebook – must have a call to action (CTA) that offers the relationship a next step.
There's also the not-so-warm-and-fuzzy reason to include a CTA: It's the only way your content is going to collect leads and earn you money.
It's not enough, though, to slap the same, tired CTA on everything. As the multimedia news release featured in our latest case study shows, your CTA must be an interactive and compelling part of your content experience to drive quality leads.
Make your calls to action count by following these 10 tips.
1. Understand the action.
The call to action in your media outreach is going to be very different than the CTA in your lead generation form.
While an email pitch to journalists should be an ask for a conversation or coverage, your CTA encouraging readers to enter a contest or download your white paper is better phrased as a statement.
Understanding whom you're targeting and what action you want them to take is the first step in determining your CTA's approach.
2. Limit the choices.
The more paths you provide your audience, the less likely they will be to follow any of them. You need to make sure your audience can find their way without getting lost or confused.
When writing your content, focus your audience's attention on a primary call to action. It is ok to offer a secondary CTA; however, you should limit the choices as much as possible.
Although there are a few exceptions to this (blog round-ups, for instance), the majority of your content should point to a single path.
3. Highlight the value prop.
If you want your audience to keep coming back to you, the path your call to action sends them down must be worth it.
Consider the common CTA of downloading gated content. At minimum, you're asking someone to give you their name, email address, and other contact information in exchange for a piece of content.
That content must offer something of quality that can't be found anywhere else. Furthermore, the CTA should emphasize what makes it irresistible.
4. Keep your promise.
While the whole purpose of the call to action is to entice someone to do something, you can't put a CTA out there and not deliver on its promise.
If you're promising an exclusive ebook, it can't be a 2-page rehash of content you previously published elsewhere.
Be honest and upfront about what your audience is getting and what they have to provide in exchange for it. Fail to set expectations and you can expect your audience to be wary of any future promises you make.
5. Stress the moment's urgency.
You don't want your audience to take action later. You need them to take it now.
That sense of urgency is essential to your call to action's success.
Your audience is presented with countless choices throughout their day. If you are lucky enough to grab a moment of their attention, you have to take immediate advantage of it.
Use words like "now" in your CTA and make it simple for your audience to immediately take the next step. By the time "later" comes along, so will someone else's content.
6. Get to the point.
Because you only have a few moments of your audience's time, limit your calls to action to 1-2 sentences. One sentence provides your audience a reason to take action. The other offers direction.
Use active, instead of passive, verbs and avoid jargon to keep those sentences brief.
7. Enhance the experience with visuals.
A visual cue such as a download button or banner will not just cut down your word count, it will also attract more attention than a text-only call to action.
Don't catch your audience's eye for the wrong reason, though. Make sure the visuals you include are polished, consistent with brand guidelines, and the right size/shape for the platform they'll be published on.
8. Reinforce your message with repetition.
If your call to action appears in something longer than a social media post, weave multiple mentions of it throughout your content.
For instance, if you're publishing a press release or blog post, include the first CTA within the first 300 words, followed by at least one more mention in the middle or at the end.
Your audience may overlook the first mention, but subsequent calls to action remind them of the next step.
9. Track, test, and optimize your technique.
Not every call to action will be a home run. Use tracking links integrated with your website analytics to identify which CTAs worked better than others.
Once you have a baseline, try testing different approaches. CTA format, wording, frequency, and location are just a few variables you can adjust to boost engagement.
10. Automate your follow up (when appropriate).
Under no circumstances should you automate the replies to media inquiries; however, if the goal of your call to action is lead generation, make the process more efficient for your audience and yourself by connecting CTAs to your marketing automation software.
For instance, hyperlink a selection of your CTA’s text to a landing page and lead generation form integrated with your marketing program.
Doing this will enable you to spend more time promoting the landing page than worrying about whether or not your audience received the promised download, organizing the contact information they provided, and pushing any qualified leads through to your sales team.
Make an even bigger splash by looking into whether it's possible to embed a lead generation form directly into the content. This will increase the likelihood of engagement by removing yet another step your audience must take.
In PR Newswire's latest case study, we show how mobile point-of-sale developer Lavu used an embedded lead generation form and many of the above call to action best practices to surpass their lead generation goal by 200% and drive 2,000 views in net new traffic to their digital platforms.
Download Lavu Generates Quality Leads & Increases Brand Awareness to see how they did it and get more tips on creating compelling content that inspires your audience to take action.
Author Amanda Hicken is PR Newswire's senior manager of strategic content and managing editor of Beyond PR. Follow her on Twitter @ADHicken for tweets about marketing, the media, Cleveland, and comic books. |
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