Calls to Action: Development Process

Web design has continued to be at the heart of our focus this year, and we’ve ventured into specific areas of it on the blog so far. We’ve ventured into web design trends, leads and lead generation, and two weeks ago we started looking at the concept of calls to action (CTA). On our previous blog, we defined them and gave some common examples that you find on websites and even on social media. This week we want to take it one step further and talk about the process of developing a good CTA that will help move your audience to the next step. 

Now, like we discussed last week, a strong call to action not only provides clarity about next steps for your customers or ideal audience, but it also helps provide structure to your marketing and messaging. In the digital world, we also have the added benefit of making CTAs easily clickable and interactive. In order to develop a strong call to action, though, there are several things to consider like your audience, your business goals, and your overall end goal. 

The first step to creating a strong call to action is by knowing your intended audience. Not every product and service is intended for everyone. Instead, you have an ideal customer, and you have to know who they are to craft strong CTAs. Once you can define your target customer, you have to understand the way they think. Think through what motivates them to buy products and services, what kind of offers they prefer, what problems they have that you could solve for them. Once you understand that, you can use that information to distill what specifically would inspire them to take the next action with your business. 

Once you understand your audience, the next step involves phrasing. Choose language that fits your brand and speaks to your targeted audience. You might need to try different wordings to find out if more informal or formal terminology brings you greater results. Several common tactics with CTAs include utilizing time-sensitive offers, questions that prompt a response, or phrasing it as a solution to a problem. You can even opt to use humor or elicit an emotional response with your CTA. There are a lot of different ways to approach them, and don’t be afraid to change your calls to action if they’re not eliciting the type of response you’re wanting. 

Also, remember that calls to action should never be very long. In general, they should be 15 words or less, although yes, there are always exceptions to the rule if they’re well done. 

**An example from Donald Miller’s Small Business Flight School

From there, the next step involves understanding the buyer’s process. If you sell a simple product, an effective CTA for you might be as simple as a call to “Buy Now.” However, for businesses offering services, their process may not be as straightforward; the same might be true for more expensive products. For a longer sales process, your CTA might look more like offering a free resource or a free trial that requires an email address to access it. In general, people are much more willing to engage in that instead of launching fully forward with a new business. This allows you to have contact information for a potential customer and also gives the potential customer something useful and helps them to gain a greater understanding of how your organization could potentially help them. 

So, once you’ve understood your audience, tested out your wording, and figured out the steps in your buyer’s process, the last step is pretty simple. To make calls to action more accessible on a website, make it look different from the rest of your text. The easiest way to do that is by utilizing buttons and placing them in key positions so that visitors can easily find them. You can also use bolded text or even text inlaid in an image.  

We hope that this little crash course in digital calls to action is something you are able to use time and time again. We’ll be continuing with new topics related to web design next month on the blog, and in the meantime if you have any questions about our web design process, you can find more information here.