If you’ve been marketing for any length of time, you understand the importance of calls-to-action. Without effective CTAs, your prospects will be left wandering around the Internet without continuing their buyer’s journey with you. But even smart marketers can sabotage the effectiveness of their CTAs by making these four errors.
Being afraid of using too many CTAs. Yes, focus is essential, and you need your prospects to be directed toward one action. But many marketers leave prospects out there because they’ve only developed one or two CTAs that they use everywhere. You need a variety of different CTAs that you use in various places to have the highest chance of capturing a prospect’s interest. Think about top-of-the-funnel CTAs as well as middle- and bottom-of-the funnel ones. Look at placing them not only on your main website pages but also in your blog posts and on your social media posts.
You’re trying to speak to everyone at once. If you serve prospects in multiple markets or industry categories, you need to create custom CTAs for each of those groups. What appeals to one group won’t appeal to another group, but trying to appeal to everyone will mean that your message is diluted and doesn’t hone in on the specific needs of anyone. Don’t be afraid to write blog posts and create premium content for each of your target groups. If you can organize them in some way to clearly delineate what content is for whom (such as categorizing your blog posts or housing premium content in different sections of your website), then great, but it’s not necessary. People will seek out what applies to them if you make it easy to access.
You’re not matching your CTAs to the content they’re with. To see maximum results, you need to coordinate your CTAs with your content. If you include a CTA at the end of the blog post, make sure the CTA is on the same topic, or for the same target prospect. At the end of a piece of premium content, use CTAs that offer additional information to follow up. You know a prospect is interested in a particular topic if he or she is reading about it already—so take advantage of that knowledge and give him or her more!
You’re not experimenting with design. Design absolutely influences click throughs. If a particular CTA isn’t getting the click-throughs you think it should, along with changing up the copy you should try changing the design. Try a different color or style. Do some A/B testing to see what resonates with your particular audience.
Creating effective CTAs is both an art and a science, but when you go beyond the basics and make next-level improvements in your CTAs, you’ll see their effectiveness rise.