When developing an online marketing campaign, your goal is to entice readers to make an immediate purchasing decision. The use of powerful, evocative language can create a sense of urgency, but it can also backfire, making those same readers decide your business is all hype. By taking the time to create a legitimate call to action in your writing, you can meet your primary objective without losing credibility.
Designing Your Call to Action
Your call to action statement is usually the final thought with which you leave readers at the end of a blog post or online marketing article. It doesn’t matter if your copy was about specific details of why they should use your company, or if it was a more general piece to educate readers about how your industry touches their life or business. If you aren’t tacking on a statement encouraging readers to contact your business, why write the article?
When creating a legitimate call to action, it’s important to think about the value you provide your customers. While you can add your contact information or links within an online article, that is not enough incentive for every visitor to become a buyer. Forget to state the benefit to them and they may forget to use your business.
Writing Your Call to Action
To create your call to action statement, start by making a list of the benefits you can offer customers, not the features. For example, banks won’t devote time telling you what direct deposit is or how a debit card works. Instead, they sell you on saving time, saving money and gaining faster access to your funds.
Ask yourself these questions when writing your call to action:
- Am I explaining how this improves a customer’s quality of life?
- Does this show the customer how to save or make money?
- What need am I filling for my customer with this?
Hitting one point is often sufficient to create a genuine need for your product or service, but you’ll notice increased response when you can meet all three objectives in your call to action.
Evaluating Your Call to Action
A potential pitfall for any call to action comes while creating the sense of urgency. After reading the call to action, the reader should want to purchase or learn more about your company. To avoid driving away potential business or damaging the company’s reputation, ensure you don’t cross an ethical line.
After you write the call to action statement, make sure:
- Everything is true. If you write that you can help anyone lose 20 pounds in one week without diet or exercise, you must be able to back up that claim for anyone who contacts you.
- It’s not exaggerated. A call to action implying that without your product people will die, home values will plummet or another extreme is rarely appropriate. You’ll notice an increase in traffic to your website from dramatic claims like these, but most won’t convert to sales unless you have supporting data.
After you know your call to action isn’t in false advertising territory, ask yourself if it makes sense. Creating a legitimate call to action is as much about word choice as it is content. If those two closing sentences aren’t concise enough for customers within your target market of all ages and education levels, you should reconsider your vocabulary. Cerulean and azure are words that can paint beautiful pictures; however, you’ve just lost the sale if your reader doesn’t understand your company’s custom bedding is blue.
About Jonathan Larkin
