One of the most frustrating aspects of working with prospects or publishing articles is the lack of interaction. As an advisor, you can spend a good deal of time answering questions and providing insight, but weeks will go by and many readers never call your office or add themselves to your mailing list. To mitigate this issue, focus on creating an effective call to action, or CTA, when writing to your prospects.
Writing a Quality CTA
An effective CTA is one that keeps in mind the following:
Singularity
Singularity is first, and it’s important. Too many instructions given to a reader can be confusing, distracting, or both. Don’t litter your writing with your phone number in one paragraph, your email in another, and links to your social media scattered throughout. You should have contact information stated clearly at one point in your message or article. This way, a reader can easily find them all at one place, so they don’t have to skim through several paragraphs repeatedly if they want to get in touch in different ways. Make things easy for your prospects. And keep in mind our second point – finality.
Finality
Your CTA should be placed at the end of your writing. If you put it at the beginning, it won’t be fresh in the viewer’s mind when they finish reading. Or perhaps they won’t read what you write at all, jumping straight to your CTA and missing all the information you just provided to them. Placing your CTA at the end gives readers, who are seriously interested in your company, one final push to make contact. However, you can help the process along by keeping an action focus.
Action Focus
Your CTA should include words that are clear and commanding. Don’t simply copy and paste your phone number and email at the end of an article; instead, type a short message that politely instructs the reader on what to do next. CTAs like “Call our office at…” or “Contact us at example@gmail.com” are statistically proven to drive more traffic than a CTA that doesn’t use actionable verbs. When writing an action-oriented CTA, make sure to place a strong focus on simplicity.
Simplicity
A good CTA needs to be straight to the point. In the same way that having multiple CTAs spread throughout a message can be distracting, a long and wordy CTA will glean less results than a concise one. Don’t clutter the message with “feel free to reach out to me anytime, at…” or any similar verbiage. By providing your number and email, you are already letting the prospect know you want to hear from them. Adding pleasantries is nice but unnecessary, and it will decrease the amount of responses you receive. Finally, be sure your message has a sense of urgency.
Urgency
The last thing you can do to increase responses is add a modifier to your CTA that creates some sense of soft insistence. Again, make sure to keep things simple. By just adding “today” after the already actionable “schedule a consultation” helps make it clear that this is something the reader should do right now, even subconsciously.
So, an effective CTA is a single, concise, actionable message, placed at the end of your text that emphasizes a sense of urgency. One helpful way to remember is by thinking of it this way:
A call to action is the final instruction to a reader.
Build your CTA as if you are giving your reader one final instruction before you part ways. If you follow these steps, growing your business can be made easier, as your interactions with prospects become less like lectures, and more like launching pads to new professional relationships.
For more tips on how to improve your marketing today, download our “Marketing Plans 101: 9 Steps to Get You Started” Whitepaper below.