In marketing, a good ‘call to action’ – which elicits the desired response from our reader or viewer – can elevate content from merely insightful to truly valuable.
There’s psychology at play here. Testing tells us that ‘learn more’ is not an especially persuasive call to action (CTA), while ‘get your free guide to corporation tax planning’ is. Specificity and relevance matter, as much as the action itself: ‘learning’ is passive, while ‘getting’ is active.
But, while it’s easy to get hung up on the semantics, the golden rule is this: when producing any content for marketing, we’re not selling the product, we’re selling the next action.
To grasp this better, picture your customer’s journey as a series of steps, with your aim being to guide them from one step to the next as quickly as you can. Well-planned content serves as your tool for helping a potential customer progress through that buyer journey, starting with highlighting their pain points, easing their concerns, preparing them for change, and supporting them during the implementation phase, and even after the initial excitement fades.
Sadly, there are no shortcuts. A usual B2B sale takes a long time, lasting nine to 12 months, often involving six-figure amounts and needing approval from higher-ups. This means that choosing to invest in a new product or service is rarely a quick or easy choice.
So, don’t try any queue-jumping tactics, they don’t work. While the instinct is to skip stages in a bid to try to close the prospect as quickly as possible, you risk confusing people, or turning them off with irrelevant content that doesn’t resonate.
For example, if your customer is at stage one – which is the ‘I don’t think I have a problem’ stage – and you show them a stage three piece of content, which is typically when a buyer is resistant to change because they fear it will be costly and time consuming, you’ll baffle them, because you’ve not addressed stage two, which is raising awareness of the need for change.
It’s only at this point they realize they’re starting to fall behind their competitors and that change is necessary. This is why it’s so important to be sequential and targeted. This knowledge will also help you to write on-point calls to action.
Another thing to consider is that a call to action – however beautifully written – can easily fail if there are unnecessary hurdles to consuming content.
A common friction point is when brands send prospects from an email to a report using a call to action such as: “Download our new report on digital transformation in the insurance sector now!” These can be gorgeously designed and expertly put together, packed full of useful data and interesting insights, but then they’re published as a downloadable PDF.
There are two problems with that. The first is that this content may be ‘hard gated’ behind a form. Your reader has to offer up their personal data in return for downloading the report. Industry figures tell us that this yields somewhere between 50% to 75% less engagement, not to mention many people will use fake names and junk email inboxes and systems to access the report.
The second problem is that PDFs are static and unyielding documents. They tell us nothing about our audience — we’ll never know if they ever read our report, even if they downloaded it.
There are ways around this. If you move on from PDFs to more responsive alternatives, you can place a gate anywhere within your content. This would allow readers to see, for example, an executive summary, before parting with their data. If people can clearly see value in your content, they should be more willing to give up accurate information.
But this is still a barrier to entry, so you will get some drop offs.
Better still, let your reader get right the way through to the end, then add a really good call to action: “If you enjoyed this report and found it valuable, we’d love to add you to our mailing list so you can be among the very first to read our latest manufacturing industry insights.” That way the data you do collect is going to be far more valuable.
Ultimately, what you place in your emails or on your buttons is just part of the picture. Today, you need to combine a seductive invitation to the next desired action with removing everything that makes taking that action more trouble than it’s worth.