008: Demystifing the CTA - Call To Action

October 24, 2021 Meredith Paige

Taking Back Joy Podcast • Episode #008:

Demystifing the CTA - Call To Action

Sometimes talking to someone in marketing can feel a lot like speaking with someone in the military. Especially when it comes to just how many acronyms they can squeeze into a single sentence - like CPC, CTA, ICP, ROI...

I wanted to demystify one of the biggest acronyms, that if you know none of the others, this is the one I want you to know of. This is the 'CTA' or the 'call to action'. This is about always giving your audience somewhere to go, the next action to take (especially off the back of creating some really inspiring or engaging marketing content).

This is the one thing that if you don't study any other of the acronyms when it comes to the marketing space, I want you to be fully aware of this one and are putting it into practice every single time you put yourself out there into the world.

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Episode Transcript

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Synopsis

Meredith Paige 00:00

Meredith Paige 00:15

Meredith Paige 00:37

Episode Content

Meredith Paige 00:01

Marketing can sometimes be hugely confusing purely by the language that gets used. Particularly in a regional and rural area where you are wearing a lot of hats and you've got to be doing a lot of the roles inside your own business; marketing is made to be way more complicated than it has to be and one of the biggest things that trips people up is simply understanding the terminology of marketing and how it relates to their business.

Meredith Paige 00:24

In practice, you'll hear a lot of things like CPC (cost per click), ROI (return on investment) all those ones are kind of important relating to whatever it is they relate to. But the biggest one that I want you to understand is what a CTA is. A 'CTA' is called is a 'call to action'. And if you don't implement any other of the fancy pants acronyms and terminology in marketing, this is the one that you're going to want to know off by heart, completely understand and put into practice regularly. So many people don't do it, and then wonder why they feel like their marketing isn't working. So let me explain.

Meredith Paige 01:04

A CTA is essentially the next thing you want someone to do after engaging with a piece of marketing content you have put out into the world. This might be a social media post, podcast episode, a flyer or an ad on the local radio station. Whatever marketing activity it is that you're investing your time and finances in, it is almost completely wasted unless there is a call to action. Now, sometimes, people will invest in marketing purely for brand awareness or purely just to get their name out there, which is fine. But you have to understand that there will be very little tangible, measurable results off the back of that kind of marketing. And most of us in the small business space don't often have the bandwidth to invest in marketing that is purely for brand awareness sake. Sometimes that might be sponsoring, like the local Racing Club or spoking a local sporting team. That kind of marketing is probably the to the extent of which we will do brand awareness marketing. But more importantly, it's typically because our kids in the team and we thought it'd be a nice thing to do to support the club.

Meredith Paige 02:09

That's probably the extent of what I see with small businesses as far brand awareness. Most of the marketing that we deal with is designed to have a measurable effect. Any marketing you do where you do want to see some kind of result inside your business, whether that's increased sales, increased social media followers, maybe downloads, particular product/service/prices within your website, a quote and inquiries - whatever it is, that if you're doing this with the idea of wanting to see a result in your business, you must have a call to action. Otherwise, you won't simply see that result because people won't know what to do next.

Meredith Paige 02:47

What I often see is people will put a lot of effort into marketing material, whether it is a TV or radio ad, social media posts etc - they will put effort into this marketing material. And it'll be really engaging, very inviting, if they've got a really good understanding of their ideal client, or the people most likely to do business with them, it will really strongly resonate with them. And so when the person for whom that advertising is for sees that they're energised, they're interested, but they don't have a clear, 'So what do I do next action'. And you want to make this as specific as possible, because it's going to take the thinking out of it for the end user and they're going to know the next step, they can almost fall straight into action. Second to having no call to action is having a very vanilla call to action, such as 'visit the website for details' or 'like and follow us on Instagram/Facebook' for the customer or for the end user.

Meredith Paige 03:43

So you don't want to have no call to action and you don't want to have a vanilla call to action because it's almost just as bad. It's a bit like 'well, pop in if you're interested!' basically. So what you need to do when you're planning and marketing is you need to have an objective and then closely linked to that objective is your call to action. The objective doesn't always have to be sales related and it's important sometimes to just get the customer involved in your business before they make a purchase. That might be downloading something you've put together on your website that'll help them get started on a problem. It might be commenting on a particular kind of post in your social media (sharing their story/problems/experiences with you) or entering into a competition.

Meredith Paige 04:24

To take it back a step, you need to have an objective for your marketing. So that might be I want to grow my mailing list for my weekly newsletter because whenever I send out a sales newsletter, I tend to get a lot of sales for the back of it. I want to use this marketing to grow my newsletter, or I want to use this marketing strategy to increase my social media following to again, increase the number of people I can pitch to when I've got a new product or service. It might be to increase foot traffic on a particular day. Perhaps if you're quiet on a particular day during the week, you might want to run a special or run a marketing campaign that specifically brings people in on that day to increase trade, because there's no point increasing trade on your busy days, the busy days look after themselves. So that needs to be your objective. And then the call to action needs to be very closely linked to that objective. So people are doing the exact thing you want them to do in order to help you meet that objective. If your objective is 'I want to grow my email list', then the call to action must be enter your email and your name in this box below to get XYZ. If you want to grow social media following maybe run a competition (you also have to double check, Facebook and Instagrams competition rules because they feel like they probably changed recently). There are certain things you can't get people to do on social media to promote your business. So you can't get them to promote your business on their page, you can't be seen to be leveraging private pages to promote a business. So do your research there, but have a very clear CTA.

Meredith Paige 05:55

It might be 'share your story on Facebook' or 'Hey, have you ever experienced XYZ - comment and share your story below to go into draw to win etc'. So that way, you're getting people to engage with your content and social media, they're sharing their stories, and they're going into the draw to win a prize. Or if you're going to you're trying to increase trade on say, Wednesdays, the call to action would be 'visit us on Wednesday between 9am and 2pm and INSERT INCENTIVE'. So the call to action really does need to be closely linked to an incentive to otherwise your customers simply won't do it. So it needs to be a 'go in the draw to win' or 'find out more' or 'get in quick'. They need to see themselves being put at an advantage by doing the thing you want them to do. That's why competitions are really good and it's really good way to incentivize people engaging with your business, and actually taking action on that, because there is something in it for them. So we need to remember to that. Think about your own buying habits. When you're engaging with businesses, you know, you don't engage with a business because you're doing in the goodness of your heart, you want something out of their business, you need something and they fulfil a need that you have. So there is something in it for you as a consumer and if you incentivize the action that you want consumers to take, they got more likely to take it because there's something in it for them.

Meredith Paige 07:14

Now that you have a clear objective for your marketing, and you have a call to action that's linked to that objective, then that needs to be woven in to whatever marketing platform is that you're using. So if it's a print piece of print material, give them not just your website, give them a specific link on your website, or give them your social media handle with some very clear steps about what you want them to do. If it's showing up making sure that they know what day, what your trading hours are and your address - make it very clear and easy for them to do the exact same exact thing that is that you want them to do.

Meredith Paige 07:50

Once once you've got your idea of your calls to action, then you just need to get in the habit of using them whenever you're making an appearance in your marketing. So every time you're posting on social media, ask people to share their story or to tag someone in this who needs to hear this right now. or encourage your friends to get on board. Again, just make sure you double check the Facebook and Instagram competition guidelines to make sure you're doing the right thing. Even it's not a competition encouraging people to share their story. Maybe react with 'this emoji means this reaction, this emoji means this reaction' or posting a photo of their own experience etc. Whatever you can do to encourage people to share their story and engage is really good for the customer. It's also really good for the algorithm! If you're doing something on radio, make sure that you have something to throw your customers to at the end of it.

Meredith Paige 08:47

Give them something very, very specific action to do off the back of hearing your radio ad, not just see the website for more or follow us on social media for more. Look, if you're doing advertising, you don't need an immediate response and is just brand awareness advertising. Those kinds of calls to action are fine. But if you do want your marketing to actually have a tangible result inside your business, you do need that clear, measurable objective for which is connected to a clear, understandable call to action.

Meredith Paige 09:26

I hope this gives you a bit of insight into how you can make your marketing much more effective by giving your customers a really clean action to take. Whenever you invest in marketing, then you also have a really good way of measuring the effect of that marketing on the back end. Like if it was applying to download a voucher or signing up for a particular offer or checklist or anything like that. At least that way you have a really clean measurement metric for the success of that marketing. And so that way you know how measure if it is a good idea to re-invest in it down the track. But if you feel like there's something missing from your marketing and you feel like it's not quite sticking, I would encourage you to start thinking about calls to action and clear objectives first, and this just might be the next step you can take to make your marketing that much more effective and more worth the time, the energy and the finances you're dipping into it.

Meredith Paige 10:19

Thank you so much for joining me this week, guys. I really hope learning about calls to actions and objectives has a really tangible effect on your marketing and I'll see you next week.