The call to action (CTA) is one of the most important components of your inbound marketing strategy, and really – it’s also the element that connects your marketing team to your sales team. If you’ve put a huge amount of effort into your online marketing strategy by investing your resources into creating a professional website, running a regularly updated blog, strategically using SEO keywords and more, then you’ll want to have effective calls to action in order to actually capture all the leads that you have generated. While your marketing efforts help to draw in more web traffic as well as to get visitors to come back to your website, it is your CTAs that will turn those visitors into real leads that your sales team can then nurture.
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The CTA is the prompt that appears on a website, often at the end of a piece of blog content that incites readers to perform a certain action – usually by clicking a provided link. The prompt can be in the form of a line of text, a button or an image. Many companies use their CTAs to get readers to download a free eBook, download a free coupon or view a free webinar in exchange for the personal information of the reader, which they sometimes obtain by asking readers to sign up for a newsletter.
In order to understand the importance of the CTA, you need to understand the job of the sales team. Back in the day, the sales team would cold call potential leads based off of lists and attempt to introduce and close a sale on a product or service within the time period of that phone call. The buyer’s cycle is much longer now. The marketing team provides content that allows consumers to complete a large part of the buyer’s cycle by themselves, such as discovering the brand and then doing research on it and how it can solve their problem.
The CTA is what helps to capture potential leads by offering readers something of value in exchange for their personal information. The sales team then has a captured lead that they can nurture into a customer over time. These leads are much stronger than any cold calls due to the fact that they have already completed a large part of the buyer’s cycle on their own and that they have proved their interest in your brand by taking advantage of your incentive. This does not occur without a CTA – it is the direct link between your marketing and your sales.
In order to provide your sales team with the quality leads that they need, creating an effective CTA is a must. The following are some of the elements that make up an effective CTA:
- Use effective language – The CTA should include words that incite action, such as download, contact us, click here and more. Additionally, you’ll want to use words that provide a sense of urgency so that readers don’t mull over whether they should click your call to action or not. Words that create urgency include now and today.
- Provide a valuable offer – It needs to be obvious what the offer is or else readers won’t click to it. Make sure the offer is relevant to your content as well.
- Provide good content – Your readers won’t click on the CTA or make it that far if the content is poor. Good content and good CTAs complement one another.
- Make sure it’s visible – Make sure your CTA stands out from the rest of your content. For example, using contrasting colors.
The CTA is incredibly important since it’s the element that turns your website’s visitors into captured leads for your sales team to nurture.
