Today social media has become such a powerful tool that there are everyday 2.3 billion active users doing business. But to run a successful business you need to optimise your social media with your main goals. The best technique to optimise your social media goals is to create a compelling call to action which will have a great impact on the reader who will read your content .
Before going ahead it’s important to make it clear what a CALL TO ACTION means?
It is clear by the name CALL TO ACTION means something that encourages the user or reader of your content to take some action in the form of signing up a form for your mailing list or to encourage them to visit your website. Basically it is a region of the screen that drives the reader to click to get engagement with the brand. It can be in the form of a button or an image but mostly it is in the form of button. An effective CTA can be extremely successful on any social media platform. Like on Facebook adding a CTA button can help you to increase the click through rate by 285%.
CTA’s are a critical part to run a successful online marketing strategy
You don’t need to use call to action everywhere as all the types of content don’t require it. Always remember to use the call to action where your goal is to motivate the person into a deep engagement.
If you don’t use this valuable feature then you may miss the valuable sales than can make your business successful. Without it you’re your social media marketing is will be only branding. To generate a lead and convert it into conversion you need to make your social media call to action more effective.
You can use call to action at different levels of marketing depending on the goal you want to achieve. For example: using it in your tweets to encourage people to click the link to read your blog post or you can use it in your website to sign up for your newsletter or to download an eBook or to purchase a product.
Now the main thing is how to create a successful call to action. Here we are going to discuss about the proven methods to make your call to action effective.
1. Determine your business goals
The marketing techniques that you are going to use in your business depend on the goals you want to achieve. To reach your goal you must have some marketing objectives like:-
Increase in sales
Drive traffic to your website
Increase your brand awareness
To have these objectives it would be much easy for you to decide what type of CTA you want. For example: if your objective is to increase the brand awareness then you should offer some interesting advice to encourage people to view and interact with your post. This could be in the form of retweet on Twitter or a share on Facebook. CTA’s can be used at all marketing levels i.e. getting your audience to connect on social media—to make them turn into a customer. So, for every step along the way you can develop a effective call to action.
2. Create engaging content
When it comes to social media you must have heard of quality content because content is the king if you want to bring quality in your posts or articles. There are different types of content on social media but if you want a customer to complete an action, you want to then you need to create a strong and compelling content. And with a great content you can build trust of people within your brand. Content is the most important factor. Adding any content won’t work unless it is inclined with your business goals.
There are mainly 3 types of content you need to include in your social media.
Educational
Quality content is one which educates your followers. This is considered to be the number one content in marketing for B2B and B2C businesses. If you are an expert in anything then you should offer your advice to educate other people with your compelling content.
Entertaining
Entertainment is a part of life. This type of content is heavily shared on social media from gifs to memes. Though it is entertaining and visually appealing it includes videos, images and comic strips. Unlike any other content it is more liked and shared and is called to be the most engaging content on social media.
Utility
This type of content tells your audience to do certain things and make right decisions. You can use this content to make your fans or followers informed about something to make a decision and keep in mind that you don’t have to provide any story only advice your audience to make the right decision.
So you have to choose which type of content sounds most appealing to your audience.
3. Make them highly visible
Your CTA button or images should be placed adjacent with the readers focus. You can make them highly visible by putting them into the middle of the content where the reader’s natural eye movement captures it. Or you can place them at the top of the page with a bright colour so that it appears to the reader automatically when he opens up your page. Some people use floating CTA’s in which reader scrolls down the website and the CTA stays with them.
4. Add a sense of urgency
Adding a sense of urgency is an important component of every CTA to make them successful. If you want your readers to act fast before its get too late then you do by adding time sensitive messages to encourage your audience to act fast. For example: if you create a CTA, demonstrating a sense of urgency in it and want people to purchase an item on your website then you can write- “Hurry up… only 10 items left in stock”. This would help to boost the effectiveness of your technique.
These types of CTA’s get more CTR (click through rate). They are helpful to increase your CTR up to 15%.
5. Keep action clear on your CTA
Action means using the words like register, start, download, click and call. If you are using a image based CTA then you will found these words constructed on a button. On Twitter you need to be clear and concise as you don’t have much space (less than 140 characters to convey your message) like any other social media platform. Most importantly don’t assume by yourself that your potential customer is clear what you want to make them clear. You should tell your prospects what you want them to do.
Tip: Using active words and adverbs on Twitter can help you to get more CTR (click through rate). Use action words with more verbs and adverbs with few nouns.
6. Do ask
On social media posts which include the words like ‘comment’, ‘share’, ‘like’ get more share, likes and comments rather than the pots without these. You need to solicit a response to attract prospects to your social media pages otherwise it’s totally a waste (your hard work + precious time). On Facebook the posts which include these words get more specific action compared to posts which don’t use them.
Tip: Make them easy to respond for your participants and also eliminate extra options means if you are offering too many options then your prospects will not act in that direction in which you want. As a result they get confused and they put off doing anything.
7. Make a consistent presentation on your landing pages
To make your call to action work, you need to send your prospects the appropriate steps in the purchase process. Show continuity and maintain a consistent presentation by using the same wording and graphics.
Tip: if you want to yield better results then you should use more than one landing page because it translates user to more targeted offers.
8. Understand your audience
The needs and motivations of your website audience are qualitative as opposed to quantitative data. To get the quantitative data you can get it from analytics or A/B testing which gives you the data about where your visitors are clicking on your website. But to reach to the needs and motivations of your visitors you need to talk to your visitors and build a strong relationship with them. You can do this by:-
Talking them face to face or through email, phone calls or through Google Hangouts. But instead choosing these electronic mediums you should go for physical phase to nurture the relationship with the sense of trust which you can’t get over a phone call.
You should have a genuine conversation with your audience and that conversation should not be in the form of interview. You should ask them about their problems and the struggles they are facing and tell the ways to get overcome with them in a polite manner.
9. Create a powerful hook
You need to hook your audience to stop lurking to your page content and take an action. To accomplish a powerful hook you need to find out the way to draw your audience attention. You need to skip the promotions if you want your audience to get hooked.
10. Add social proof
Adding a social proof to your page will help you to convince your potential customers. From the customer point of view they need to know why they buy your product. A social proof can be in the form of product reviews to help customers to make decisions or in the form of company’s logo to credibility to your product or can use testimonials with photos to attract minded buyers.
11. Optimise your call to action
You can optimise your call to action in the following ways.
– Your call to action should be contextually relevant to the content you are using on any social media platform with a consistent voice and a politeness in your language.
– Make your readers feel that the opportunities are limited. So they should grab the offer within the limited time, and do ask them to share your offer using different sharing buttons.
– Your call to action should stand out visually with the perfect blend of colour, typography and wording.
– Don’t give your prospects too many options because your readers will get confused and put on clicking anywhere without taking time to consider your offer.
12. Test your call to action
Don’t just assume that your call to action is performing the best without performing the tests to know how your target audience reacts. Every element of your call to action can be tested.
– Text- Check the text on buttons and also the information surrounding them.
– Graphics- Test the photographs you use and other images.
– Colour- Test the colour considering the text and button colour and also the background with the use of white space.
– Size- Test the size of the call to action which should be relative to the rest of the content.
– Placement- Check the placement where your call to action will appear on the page.
13. Measure your results
Call to action is easy to evaluate on any social media platform. Here are some of the metrics to track and monitor your results.
– Impressions- This means the total number of people who saw your call to action.
– Click through- This means the number of people who have taken action by clicking on your call to action.
– Click through rate- This means the percentage of people who checked out your offer out of the number of people who saw it.
– Completions- This means the number of people who completed out your form and submitted it successfully.
– Completion rate- This means the percentage of people who filled up the form out of the number of people who only clicked but didn’t do any completion.
14. Track your call to action
There are really very simple ways to track the effectiveness of your call to action. No matter if you don’t know analytics. You can track them other way also with the following steps.
Step 1 Create a specific promo code on social media which needs to be redeemed to get the office.
Step 2 You need to count that how many people used that promo code, you created.
Step 3 Create a trackable URL. You can create it on Google URL builder.
Step 4 Check the results in the Google Analytics Account. And for that you need to create your account in Analytics.
Step 5 Now you only need to design a coupon and get its print out.
So create a compelling and effective CTA for your business on your social media profile to achieve your business goals and marketing objectives. So if want to get the best call to action you need to create such CTA which is more than the words within a button. The key point is to know your audience very well to get an idea where your CTA should be placed on your page.
