Let’s face it: The success of your marketing campaign relies heavily on how effectively you can get people to do something. Whether it’s to download a guide, join a webinar, or buy a product. Making irresistible CTAs not only encourages user engagement, but it also generates leads, cultivates customer relationships, and increases your website’s conversion rate. And with how internet-savvy the netizens have become, simply creating a site or a landing page that “looks good” just won’t cut it anymore. If you want to influence them to take action on your offers, you need to have a compelling CTA.
In this post, we’ll be taking a closer look at how you can create CTAs for your website that visitors can’t ignore. Ready? Let’s get to it.
1. Optimize your website first.
More than having a good-looking website, online business owners should place more value on creating a better experience for digital consumers. Why?
Consider the following statistics:
- 40% of users will leave your site if pages take more than three seconds to load. (Source)
- As much as 85% of mobile users expect sites to load as fast or faster on mobile than on desktop. (Source)
As a start, you can check your website’s current page-loading performance using GTMetrix:
With that said, it pays to invest in making sure your pages load fast, regardless of what device people will be using, the volume of site traffic, and other factors.
And here are some ways you can accomplish that:
- Optimize for mobile display and navigation.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN).
- Reduce the sizes of high-quality images.
- Eliminate un-necessary third-party plug-ins.
If you’re not familiar with how a content delivery network works, it’s basically a service that delivers your page content faster by fetching data from the nearest server to the user. This reduces latency, which is the time it takes for data to travel from server to the ‘end user’.
2. Learn more about visual marketing.
Not everyone who dives into digital marketing is well-equipped for the task from the get-go. Sometimes, a lot of research is required, especially if the goal is to understand the minds of online users.
One marketing discipline every agency should invest in researching is visual marketing.
You can easily harness the power of visuals in your marketing material by creating ad banners, email sign up forms, or blog posts that contain visually appealing design and colors.
The focus is more on providing images, videos, and other multimedia to attract people’s attention. Just don’t overdo it or you’ll risk making your website cluttered.
You can use online photo-editing tools like Canva or BeFunky if you’d like to try your hand at creating engaging images:
For creating stunning infographics, we also suggest using Venngage. They offer a wide range of design templates that you can tweak to suit your specific content needs.
Infographics are increasing in popularity, and many agencies use them to explain services, share insights, and teach people how to do specific things. Here are some helpful tips about using CTA in infographics you should know about:
- Tell people specifically what you want them to do. Example: “Follow us on Twitter”, “Download our PDF”, “Schedule a free consultation”.
- Position the CTA at the bottom of the infographic. This is because you want them to take action, but only after they’ve gone through the amazing stuff you’ve shared in the infographic.
- Design your CTA to stand out from the rest of the infographic. This means making the CTA really ‘POP’ and not just blend in almost invisibly with the rest of the image.
3. Harness the power of words.
CTAs are, in essence, just a bunch of words strewn together that tell people to do something. But just using random works isn’t going to get you the results you want from site visitors.
There are CTA sentences or phrases that have continuously produced amazing results for agencies, and some of them are the following:
“Get Started Today”
“Sign up for FREE”
“View/Book a LIVE Demo”
“Contact Us Now”
“Learn More Here”
You may have noticed a pattern from the examples shared. They either create a sense of urgency or encourage people to act now or today. This encourages them to take action immediately, which is what you want.
And when you combine good design with a good choice of words, you’ll definitely end up with CTAs that are powerful and produces results. You can even include them in other aspects of your content marketing, such as in how to end an email, or in your email subject lines.
Just don’t forget to make the text the center of attraction, so people know exactly what it is you want them to do.
Combining The Three
Let’s summarize what we’ve covered in this post. Basically, the three things you need to focus on to increase CTA engagement from site users are:
- Optimize your website’s loading time;
- Use visuals effective; and
- Know how to use words.
Doing all three will change the face of your website for the better. You’ll end up with happier site visitors because you’ve done your part to give them the best experience. At the same time, your business benefits because they’re more likely to make a purchase or avail of a service.
And the great news is that these three things aren’t difficult to do. They also won’t take long to integrate into your business’ current development and marketing strategy.
Conclusion
It’s important to get each part right. Your business depends on it.
If you don’t think you have the necessary skills to implement the above-suggested changes yourself, we suggest hiring an expert. This may be a content writer who can create better landing page copy or a web designer who can take care of site optimization.
But make no mistake that investing the necessary resources to make these changes happen will reap amazing results, in the form of increased sales, higher leads, and better user engagement.
Just don’t forget to make adjustments if you think you could have done better. Test different fonts, colors, designs, and layouts. Sooner or later, you’ll find out which mix works best for your brand.
3 Responses
Timely posting! In the last couple of months, I have been going over this on my client sites. I’ve adopted the ‘un-refusable offer’ method – basically make the CTA something free for the user to get them to act, i.e. free guide, download, discount code, e-book, etc (way different for each client). Just starting to get some results in and there’s been a noticeable jump in CTA performance. Also, with the infographics you mention, they definitely work for improving how long people stay on the page, as well as their likeliness to click the CTA.
Helpful post, thanks!
One of the biggest things that businesses and companies do wrong is shoving to much content in to small a space.
Creating, and leaving space, draws curiosity and exploration.
As well, offers just the right offer for the right customer and audience base is key as well.
Great post, I expect more like this!:)
Totally agree!