I am a firm believer that every piece of content you create should have a call to action, whether it is a product page on your website, a blog article, or social media post. Read below to find out why!

Everyone knows the power of content marketing, right? You know you create a piece of content with the objective that they will take action. e.g. buy your product, sign-up for a free trial, download your white paper, subscribe to your newsletter, follow you on LinkedIn…

When it comes to social media, it can be a trap. Many companies feel they have to be active on a particular platform that is popular, and that they have to post regularly. And they do just that – of course, there are benefits to brand awareness when people regularly see your company name in their feed. (If that is where your target audience is) But it soon just becomes noise. It can be a vicious cycle; creating content for the sake of it. Often brands lose focus on why they are doing it in the first place. Without a call to action you will likely not get great results from your effort.

Not every interaction is a sales pitch

Now I am not saying that every interaction with your audience needs to be a sales pitch, in fact I am saying that it definately shouldn’t. But it should have a purpose. It should be telling your audience what to do next.

What is a Call to Action?

A call to action or CTA is a prompt to your audience designed to get them to take action. It is usually using an imperative verb such as;

• Call now
• Find out more
• Subscribe
• …
• Buy Now

It is designed to show prospects how to take the next step and is usually positioned to create a sense of urgency / fear of missing out, if the action is not completed now.

Always have a call to action, even if it’s just to comment.

If you post a passive piece of content then your audience’s reaction will be passive too. If you want to get more engagement on Social – a good CTA could be to comment on the post, share the post and you can be creative in how you do this.

If your article is about “10 ways to do X”, the CTA could be, Do you have any other ways to do X? Write them in the comments below.

Or, share this article with someone who needs help doing X… and so on

This way at least you are guiding people with the next steps. It is not that people are stupid and don’t know what to do after reading your content, it is quite the opposite – Humans are smart so if you have managed to capture their attention, well done, but they will already be moving on to the next thing, processing lots of information, so a little nudge can help them – to help you.

It is also a gratitude trigger. If someone does something nice for you, we often want to show our appreciation. This is called reciprocity, read more about that here. You can leverage this. If you have provided value through your content, why wouldn’t your audience want to show kindness back to you, by sharing it, or why wouldn’t they want to come back for more? – So maybe the CTA is simply, subscribe to get my latest posts, or come back next week for more.

Try it!

Take a look at the content on your website, does it have the right CTAs? Remember, I am not saying every interaction is a chance for you to launch into a sales pitch, but are you guiding your readers on what they can do next?