Are You Using Calls to Action in Your Marketing?
Let’s start with what is a call to action? Sometimes abbreviated to CTA by corporate types, it is actually the very simple concept of letting your audience know what to do next. For example, if you create a social media post about how to use a particular product, but give no indication that said product is for sale, you may be missing out on custom.
The above is a very obvious example, and of course not every (or even any) organic social media post should be in-your-face selling. But it illustrates the need to give your audience enough information to act upon. If you are regularly sharing social media posts, blogs or newsletters that you don’t know what you want your audience to with, how will they know? Having a specific goal in mind for each piece of content is key.
For social media in particular, your goal can vary from post to post and may not always be direct sales. It might be asking people to sign up for your mailing list, getting them to read your latest blog post, booking a free taster session with you, coming to visit your market stall at the weekend, following you on Instagram, ensuring they know your premise’s opening hours and where to find you, or giving you some feedback on a new design. But make sure you are clear on what the goal is for each post, then you can communicate that effectively to others.
When deciding on your goal, take into account that some of the people seeing a social media post may know very little about your business, so occasionally explaining that your art is for sale, mentioning your cafe location, telling people you can do guided tours, or that you excel at website design are all things you may take for granted, but could be totally new to someone else.
A call to action doesn’t have to be complicated. If you have a Facebook or Instagram shop then simply adding a product tag is a great way to get the message over that something is for sale. If you don’t have that then adding something along the lines of ‘now available’ can work well. Post specifically about what’s coming up in your next newsletter or your opening hours for the week. Do a video where you talk about the contents of your latest blog post. Even if you’re posting about something amusing your dog has done, you can encourage people to follow you if they’d like more fun content about Mr. Floofster.
One thing to be aware of is, although your call to action is simple, you may have to be a little bit subtle when it comes to how you say it if it involves the audience going to another online destination. Some social media platforms don’t like to see, not just outbound links, but even phrases like ‘visit my website’, as they want people to stay on their platform. So you may see a decreased reach for posts that include something very blunt like that. It may also feel a bit on-the-nose for your audience. Experiment instead with phrases like, ‘this week I’ve written about…’, ‘new in stock today’, and ‘my next newsletter will include…’.
There’s lots of ways of doing it, but just remember that the main purpose of a call to action is to make sure that the content you work so hard on has an end goal, something your audience can do or know that will benefit your business. For example, the underlying purpose of this article is to demonstrate that The Perthshire Media Co has marketing knowledge that will be of help to you. Then maybe you’ll want to work with us one day when the time is right!