The term ‘Call to Action’, in its literal sense, might sound like you’re a soldier called out to the frontlines to defend the country. Like, imagine you were the soldier in the movie Uri - The Surgical Strike, and you were called to action.

Now, when you think from a marketing context, a call to action does not mean any different.

How?

Let’s give you some context.

When you land on a webpage, or an advertisement, what do you do with it?

You might navigate through the webpage or the advertisement, scroll up and down, read a little and… that’s it?

Well, no. You’ll try to find a small button, preferably telling you what to do with the webpage you’ve just landed on.

Or, if that’s an advertisement that’s talking about a product you’re interested in, you’ll find a button that says, “buy now”, or “contact us”, just to name a few. These are examples of ‘call to action’.

Come to define the term, a call to action (CTA) is a commonly used marketing term: a prompt, command or an action phrase that tells you to perform a specified action when you’re on a webpage, or you’ve seen an advertisement, or you’ve opened an email. It helps you trigger your prospect into interacting with you. And, the interaction usually happens with a button on a page.

For example, phrases such as, ‘Sign Up’, ‘Buy Now’, ‘Add to Cart’, ‘Apply Now’, etc., play the role of a CTA that appears as a button or a hyperlink on a certain webpage or an advertisement you’ve come across.

CTAs can appear in any place that you require your users to perform an action. A few examples of the most common CTAs are:

Okay, we’ve explained what a call to action is, but why is there a need to have a call to action?

Simply put, a call to action helps in three ways:

Like,

When you land on our Marketing Launchpad webpage, you’ll find this as our call to action -

You’ll find the ‘apply now’ button as our CTA because that’s what we are selling on that webpage - our digital marketing course .

For anyone who’s going through our page means they’re a potential lead who might be interested in applying to our courses. And by adding the call to action ‘apply now’, we’re giving them a direction that tells them what to do next on our page. This direction then helps them to make a decision, and in turn, drives our sales.

So, now you know the impact a call to action has on delivering even business results. The point arises that will having any CTA bring you that impact?

The truth is, no. Every call to action has to be carefully curated, keeping in mind tons of structures and intention to deliver results. Let’s get to how you do drive results through compelling call to actions.

Keep the call to action in lines with what you’re offering, either on a particular page, advertisement, or social media post.

Let’s look at one of our webpages that we have created for the recruiters that hire from us .

The form is for recruiters to apply to our recruitment process to hire students who have gone through the Marketing Launchpad Program for 20 weeks.

The CTA helps them to ‘apply’ but the CTA is called “Hire Marketers” and not “Apply Now” showing the exact benefit they get out of applying through that form.

This is how the CTA becomes relevant to what we are offering to the recruiters.

Add a sense of urgency to the call to action.

Now, the “hire marketers” CTA does not really have an urgency. It might even give away the feeling - “yeah yeah, I’m going to get to hire marketers from here. Will do it someday”

If we add a “today” to the “hire marketers” CTA, you’ll see how it makes all the difference.

Improved CTA - “Hire Marketers Today!”

Now, this call to action not only tells you the benefit of applying, it always makes you feel that you need to hire marketers TODAY. This is how urgency is created.

Words like ‘now’ ‘here’, ‘fast’ are some examples.

Keep the call to action clear, concise and catchy.

You’ll agree that the call to action - “Hire Marketers” is short, clear, and gives away a feeling. It’s because the CTA has all the three - it’s clear, concise and catchy.