At one point or another, you’ve most likely heard that “content is king,” or that great content is the supreme element of an inbound marketing campaign.
While these statements have much truth to them, they provide a false sense of security that great content is the solution to any marketing problem. The reality is, while compelling content is a very important component of a marketing campaign, it certainly doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
More importantly, great content might attract an audience to your article, video, or social media post, but it won’t necessarily make your audience take action. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what we really want? We want our visitors to take some form of action after they consume our content.
The action we want people to take might be as insignificant as clicking the “like” button on the bottom of that post, or subscribing to our email newsletter. Or it might be something much more valuable, such as making a purchase right then and there.
It could be that we want our content to convince readers that we’re the right person for their job, or that we can solve their problem. And therefore, we want them to feel compelled to reach out to us, email us, call us, or fill out a form. The bottom line is that we want them to do something else after consuming the content that attracted them in the first place.
In this light, the content itself is just bait on the end of a fishing hook. It’s what attracted the fish to our line. But getting the fish to take the bait is just one part of fishing. It takes skill and hard work to reel that fish in.
So, how do we do this you ask? Well, there are many different strategies that can be used to compel people to take action. But it all starts with having a call-to-action built into your content.
A call-to-action or CTA is commonly defined as an instruction to the audience that is meant to provoke an immediate response. There are many CTAs on my blog. If you’re browsing on a desktop or laptop device, you’ll see some in the sidebar, most notably the big orange button.
[Tweet “Great content will attract visitors, but a great CTA will turn those visitors into customers.”]
CTAs usually need to be crafted carefully, with your targeting audience in mind. You don’t want to come off as too pushy. You want to say just the right thing to nudge your reader to take the next step. Get them to click that button, or get them to provide their email address.
Sometimes, the best way to do this is to provide them with exclusive access that they can only get if they take action right now. That’s a great approach for bloggers. It has worked wonders for me, both with this website and my previous projects. Give something away that will be perceived as being exclusive, valuable, and relevant to your audience.
However, don’t forget to keep testing the waters with new CTAs and new methods of getting those CTAs in front of your audience. For example, a while back, I was a big fan of Hello Bar. This plugin would create a colored bar at the top of every page on my blog, with a prominent CTA for my newsletter.
It worked great for a while, but then it started dwindling. I’d get fewer and fewer subscribers from that bar. So I removed it and tried something else.
The point is, you have to keep testing and evolving your calls-to-action. Today, popovers work pretty well for getting email subscribers, but six months from now, that might be old news.
Now, don’t expect everyone to convert. That will never happen. But as Wayne Gretzky once said, “You lose 100% of the shots you don’t take.” So give it a try to see what sticks.
And of course, I can’t end an article about CTAs without adding one in at the end. That wouldn’t make any sense! So I hope you’ll take a few seconds of your time to subscribe to my newsletter using this link or the box below.
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