If you don’t know what a Call-to-Action (CTA) is by now, you’ve probably been hiding under a rock. (Which is not the best place for someone to put a CTA, by the way).
CTAs are the glue that holds together any inbound marketing strategy. If you’re a lady or fella that’s into crafts, you know there are many types of glue: super glue, Elmer’s glue, fabric glue, glue that is so strong you need to use it in an extremely ventilated area… the list goes on. The glue that you use is determined by the project at hand. The same applies to CTAs. The type of CTA you use depends totally on the intent. Is it lead generation? Capturing a form submission? Lead nurturing? Figure that out, and you’re halfway there.
Now, there is no shortage of content surrounding CTAs online. A quick Google search will reveal a plethora of information regarding best practices on CTA design, copy, color, and even page placement.
What are other ways to actually get creative with your CTA placement? Everyone’s telling you to do the same things, so everyone’s doing the same things. We’re marketers, damn it! We’re better than that.
So, I’m here to give my fellow marketers some ways to get creative with CTA placement, and perhaps help you find some unique places to put your CTAs that you might currently be overlooking.
Video
“Video is so fetch right now” – Gretchen Wieners, Mean Girls
Okay, so maybe that wasn’t an exact quote, but it’s true. Video is big right now, and it’s not going away any time soon. Marketers everywhere are adopting video as a new medium for content; consumers are demanding it, after all.
Video is not just a great way to disseminate information and share content in a unique way. It’s also a great way to capture leads, drive conversions, and build funnel pressure.
Adopting video marketing platforms like TwentyThree or Wistia gives you the ability to build CTAs right into your videos! This is one way marketers can start getting creative with CTA placement. Instead of just promoting your video content, you can also insert relevant CTAs for other related content offers and logical next steps for your audience to take at different points within your video content, too.
Chatbots
The future is here: robots are taking over. Before you start to feel uneasy and think you’re starring in the next season of Westworld, it’s actually an awesome thing for marketers.
Marketers now have the ability to build and customize their own chatbots. Not only are chatbots useful for customer service purposes, but they are awesome for educating, nurturing, and yes, driving conversions.
As you can see from my above conversation with Slack’s slackbot, there’s a nice little CTA built into the bot’s artificial intelligence: it’s driving me to go visit their help center.
Marketers can get creative and build CTAs right into chatbot conversations with customers and leads alike. Based on what you know about your personas and what they’re asking, you can drive them to relevant content, helpful resources you’ve built, and even suggest next steps they should take like scheduling a demo or booking an appointment.
Social Media
Historically, it can be difficult to drive conversions from social media. First and foremost, social media is a tool to build your brand’s identity, humanize it, and build a community around it. It is also the obvious choice for marketers to use for amplification and promotion.
And yes, there are ways to get creative with CTAs through social media. Enter tools like Sniply.
With any link that you share through social media (whether it is driving back to your own site’s content or an outside site’s content), you can attach a custom CTA to it with Sniply. That means, you can still be sharing curated content that isn’t always self-promoting, but you can still take advantage of that content for conversion purposes.
For example, if I shared an article from Entrepreneur.com called “Add These 12 Content Marketing Tools To Your Startup’s Arsenal”, but wanted to drive people back to my own website because we’re a great content marketing tool too, I could insert a CTA for my site like Sniply did. It’s not my site or my article, but it has now become a part of my marketing funnel and is helping me drive conversions. Genius!
Smart Content
Smart content is a great way to get creative with your CTA placement. Typically, marketers get hung up with the layout and template of a conversion page that they end up boxing themselves in. Why can’t you have the best of both worlds?
Spoiler alert: you can!
Rather than using the same template for each page that always utilizes the same placement for a CTA strip or conversion point, use smart content instead.
By using smart content, you can instantly change up a page to be the most effective for whoever is viewing that page.
On one page, you might have a standard default layout that has a CTA above the fold (or there are arguments as to why a CTA should also be below the fold) or a form for someone to download a piece of content. On the same page, you can utilize smart content to eliminate that CTA and replace it with another one, change where it shows up on the page or within the text, and change the form that they see or action they are taking based on what you already know about that visitor.
This gives your visitors a more customized experience and makes you more effective at driving conversions. You no longer have to use the same formula for everyone!
These are just a few ways you can get creative with your CTA placement. So, the next time you’re strategizing a wireframe or building a promotion strategy for a new piece of content, keep these ideas in mind and don’t keep going back to the same CTA playbook we’ve all been using.
And, if you need a little help figuring out why your website isn’t converting, check out our “6 Symptoms of a Sick Website” guide below!