Drive People to Your Offers With Calls to Action (6 Top Tips)

Emily Apr 12, 2021 7:09:20 PM

When it comes to lead generation, three of the most powerful tools included in your website’s armoury are landing pages, data capture forms and the cheeky little attention seeking call to action link, or as we call it the CTA.

CTAs are the secret sauce to drive people to your offers. They’re a powerful marketing tool and a critical component in the lead generation process that help to increase awareness and invite meaningful engagement from potential – or existing – customers.

Basically, if your CTAs aren’t effective at capturing people’s attention and persuading them to click, then it makes your kick-ass offer pointless.

With that in mind one thing is for sure, not all CTAs are created equally. In a world where every brand is fighting for your attention, it’s critical that prospects choose your offer over your competitors.

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In this blog post, we cover 6 topics you need to consider when creating CTAs.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Where’s the best place to position your CTA on a screen?
Is it clear what you're directing your visitors to do?
How do colours impact engagement?
Should you use digital buttons or linked text?
Where do CTA links lead to?
Where can you place CTAs?

The positioning of a CTA is essential to success, so we’ll start here…

1. Where's the best place to position your CTA on a screen?

When determining where a CTA button should go on product pages, email, social media and more, you should let your content guide you.

In the digital marketing world, this is a hot topic and frequent debates occur around the subject of positioning CTAs. The findings often differ wildly. Some argue that a CTA placed above the fold works best, meanwhile, others dispute that CTAs should fall at the bottom of the page. No matter where you choose to place a CTA, it should be made clear, upfront and obvious.

CTAs should always align with your website visitor’s experience, you should always give them enough information and motivation to take action, and place CTAs accordingly. After all, CTAs require visitors to take an action, which they won't do without the proper motivation. If you place a ‘sign up now’ CTA button at the top of your webpage, without giving visitors any information about your services or products, it’s highly unlikely that they will take the conversion action.

2. Is it clear what you're directing your visitors to do?

Visitors should know exactly what will happen when they click on a CTA. Are they expecting to download a free eBook or a checklist? Get a product demo or sign up for your monthly newsletter? The CTA should clearly tell them what they’re getting in exchange for their click.

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3. How do colours impact engagement?

For someone to click on your CTA, they first have to notice its existence. The optimal choice of colour will depend on your brand, but it’s important that your choice of CTA colour is strong enough to contrast with your website design.

Generally vibrant colours like green, red and orange attract the eye and are said to work well. But it's best to test and try colours, HubSpot found that a red CTA button outperformed a green button by over 20%.

With HubSpot CMS Hub not only can you create professional-looking CTA buttons in a few simple steps with no technical or design skills required, but you can also perform A/B testing to see which colour performs best.

4. Should you use digital buttons or linked text?

Research highlights that styling your CTAs as digital buttons instead of linked text can increase your conversion rate by as much as 45%. You may be thinking both digital buttons and linked text offer the same end result, so why’s there such a big difference?

Using buttons for your CTAs makes them stand out to skimmers, whilst linked text can often go overlooked. This is due to digital buttons' unique attributes such as size, design, colour and whitespace. Ultimately, button CTAs significantly draw more attention, making it easier for readers to take the conversion action and ultimately resulting in an increased number of people doing so.

However, there’s a case for using both. Unlike linked text, buttons are limited to just a few words and using more than a couple on each page can seem ‘pushy’. But by mixing buttons with linked text, you can afford to push the limits of your CTA frequency.

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5. Where do CTA links lead to?

CTAs are most effective if visitors are taken to a dedicated landing page after clicking, rather than a random page on your website.

On a landing page, your offer acts as a carrot dangling in front of site visitors to tempt them into exchanging their contact information to receive valuable content offers. This exchange gives visitors free access to meaningful and relevant content that helps them and gives you a new business lead.

6. Where can you place CTAs?

CTAs can be used on product pages, in display ads, email, social media, direct mail and pretty much anywhere you can digitally market your offer.

To place CTAs in a way that they can be leveraged into the lead generator tool kit you’ll need a smart CMS. HubSpot’s industry leading CMS software is specifically built for Inbound lead generation - everything you need, from CTAs to CRMs hard baked into a single CMS.