Optimize Your Blog with Calls to Action

A basic inbound marketing rule is to provide valuable content. Make valuable content available everywhere from your website to your lead nurturing campaigns to your customer service and sales cycles. But to get the most out of your content, you have to call attention to it. You need pair your valuable content with a call to action!

A call to action (CTA) is exactly that. It makes your blog reader, applicant, shopper want to do something - and in an ideal situation, do it with a sense of urgency. Your blog is an excellent place to use CTAs. Putting a small CTA at the end of a brief article about related, valuable content will generally be received as helpful, not pushy.

When I post mortgage rate updates on a mortgage broker client's blog, I always include a variation of CTA like this one at the bottom of each article:

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Rates for every home loan type listed above are under 4%! Now is a great time to refinance. Request a free home loan consultation to learn more about your mortgage options.

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On text-heavy articles, I include graphics to draw attention to the CTA. Fiddle with it. Do some A/B testing. See what works best for different types of articles.

However you do it, dropping a call to action in the bottom of a blog article rich with valuable content is a quick, easy way to helpfully encourage your target audience to take action. Give it a try! And check out Hubspot's recent article 5 Locations You Must Add Your Calls to Action for other great ideas.

Massage eMarketing: A Call to Action

A massage therapist whose web site comes up on the first page of a Google search deserves a round of applause. A massage therapist whose web site automatically generates leads and appointments deserves a standing ovation. You want to be the massage therapist who gets clients.

Be Ready to Capture 

To get the standing ovation - and clients, of course - the first thing you need is a way to be contacted. Ideally, online booking is the best way to sell to online shoppers. However, if you don't offer online booking and if you don't have a contact form on your web site, prominently publishing your email address or phone number will do until you can optimize your site with a contact form and/or online booking.

Call them to Act 

After you have your web site set up to capture potential clients, you need to motivate them to contact you - to call you, email you, fill out the form to request more info from you or to book online with you. 

A call to action, CTA, is a phrase that inspires potential clients to take an immediate action - like to book an appointment. Position your call to action in a prominent place on your web site. Use bright, but not obnoxious, colors and a clear, easy to read font. When writing a good CTA, focus on what people really want - do they need sleep, does their back hurt, do they want to honor someone special?

Try these phrases:

• Get better sleep tonight. Book now!
• Stop hurting now. Get a Deep Tissue massage.
• Treat your sweetheart to relaxation. Gift certificates available.
• Pamper yourself. Upgrade to a 90-minutes for $10 more.

Follow the phrase with a way to contact you - the link to your online booking system, contact form, email or phone number. 

Consider Incentives

Offering incentives like discounts, upgrades, free gifts and so on is a great way to motivate people to act. Lauterstein-Conway Massage School, for example, uses its Free Massage School Info Kit to encourage prospective students to speak with an admissions counselor.

Tweak. Then, Tweak Again. 

Remember, update your CTAs regularly, and offer new incentives. If something is not working, you should evaluate what it is you are doing and adjust it. Marketing is often experimental, so once you find something that works, stick with it. However, marketing is also fluid, if your methods seem to falter over time or suddenly stop yielding new clients, adjust accordingly.  

(Note: Some of these techniques will work for print advertising/lead capturing, as well, even if you don't have a web site yet).

 

To learn more about calls to action setting up your web site and marketing online in general, try our new eMarketing for LMTs workshop in Austin or San Antonio.