In the marketing world, the term CTA is everywhere. We hear it all the time. We use it all the time. We try to maximize its effectiveness with tests constantly. But what is this crucial bit of marketing jargon that you need to implement on your website?
CTA stands for Call to Action. It means a conversion on your website. All those buttons that say “learn more” or “contact us” or “buy now”. Any other number of quick little links, require the reader to take an action. They need to click. They want to learn additional information. Essentially, it’s all the language on your website that invites someone to take act further.
Let’s take a deeper dive.
Why They Matter
Calls to Action activate your sales funnels. They start people on the journey to learn more and to eventually become customers.
CTAs are incredibly important because they keep people on your website longer. They encourage people to learn more about your business and possibly turn into a sale. Those who spend time on a website found organically through a search engine convert into a sale 8-times higher than by other marketing means. So it’s important to optimize your website with CTAs to ensure people stay longer once they land on the page.
Additionally, customers actually expect a CTA on your website. If they like your product, they want to buy it. You need a CTA that makes it easy to take that action. If you want people to learn more about your company, you need an “About Us” section that’s easy to find.
Essentially, your conversions, business, and revenue stream can all depend on the CTAs you have on your website.
Where to Put a CTA On My Website?
You’ll see CTAs in various places on a website. It’s in banner and sidebar ads. You see them throughout product pages. You see them on the home page of a website including you to click through and learn more on additional pages.
Essentially you need to make your CTA easy to find. Users come to your site and expect to find contact information at the bottom and different menus at the top. You need to have CTAs sprinkled throughout your website in places where a potential customer could look and instantly know what they need to do.
There’s no one right place to put a CTA on your website. But you absolutely need them. At the end of a blog post, you could link them to a product that you talked about. Or you could link to another blog to learn more about a particular subject. You need to include language like “to learn more about website content and why it matters, click here.” And then link to that additional blog post. That’s just one example, but there’s dozens of places to do it. You need them next to your products. You need them to get people to visit your blog. And you can experiment with different places to put them to see what converts the best.
You can also put CTAs onto your social media posts that encourage people to visit your website. In fact, much of your social media posts should be encouraging people to take additional action. For example, “CTAs can increase your revenue. Read here for more information on how you can implement it on your website.” Even when you’re talking about new products or services you should always point them back to your website where they can learn more.
How to Make My CTA Effective
If you’re still not quite sure what kinds of CTAs to include on your website, consider some of these examples:
- Buy Now
- Add to Cart
- Learn More
- Details
- Read More
- Try Now
- Subscribe
- Help / Chat Now (with a chatbot feature)
Once you place your CTAs, make sure the links to additional pages actually work and don’t take you to an irrelevant page or even worse, a missing page that will show a 404 error. Then on the page you link to, you also need to make sure your copy and goals for the page are obvious. If your CTA is a “Buy Now” button, it needs to take you to a shopping cart feature. If you’re linking to another blog, you need to hook them in with good content right off the top.
Hopefully that gives you a starting point to kick off and think of different places to implement them on your website. There’s no wrong way to implement a CTA on your website. Just include it so people take action and stay on your site for longer. These could be the final pieces that make all the difference to more sales and conversions just exclusively off your website.