Stick the Landing, Your Call to Action
Besides your headline, your CTA (Call-to-Action) is the most important part of your advertisement.
Your headline gets people to give you their attention. Your CTA gets them to give you their money… It’s also the place most advertising goes wrong.
It’s easy to talk about something you’re excited about… You know; the thing you sell.
But it’s not always so easy to ask for money… You know; the thing you have to do at the end of your sales message.
Here are the three main ways I see advertisers mess up their CTA.
1. Not having a Call-to-Action at the end of their ad.
In the industry, we call this “Reminder Advertising”.
If you’re Nike, Kraft Foods, or Oreo Cookies, you can get away with this kind of advertising. Those brands are just trying to remind you they exist, so they can maintain their market dominance. But you’re not Nike.
You can’t spend all that time and energy on your advertising and not have any kind of pay-off at the end.
If the perfect prospect reads your advertisement, it connects with them, and you don’t have a Call-to-Action at the end…
It’s like meeting somebody at the bar, having a great conversation with them, feeling a spark of magic between you…
And then, at the end of that conversation – instead of getting their phone number, or setting up a second date – you’re like, “well, that was fun. Maybe we’ll meet again, sometime.”
That’s not a smart way to approach your advertising.
At the end of every advertisement, you need a clear call to action; something you want your prospects to do next, so you didn’t just waste your money on the advertising.
And that leads us to the second way people can screw up their CTA…
2. Having too many Calls-to-Action.
I get it. You don’t want to exclude any potential sales with your advertising. If someone’s not ready to buy, you don’t want to lose them completely.
So you add a Buy Now button, a Call Now button, and a Follow Us On Social Media button.
On your sales page, you’ve got your toolbar at the top. There’s a Home button, a Contact button, an About Us button, a Shop Now button, and the list goes on.
You pay a bunch of money to get people to your sales page… And then you give them 18 different options on how to leave your sales page. And only one of them leads to a sale.
If you’re writing a sales page, wipe it clean of everything, except the one action you want people to take… Buy Now.
The same thing goes for when you’re writing an advertisement or marketing email; give people one Call to Action. And it doesn’t always have to be “Buy Now”.
Sometimes the goal of a landing page is just to get somebodies email or to get them to book a call with you.
Sometimes it’s just a “Lift” message, where the only goal s to get your prospect to the next step of your funnel.
Either way, there should only be one Call to Action in any ad or piece of marketing you put out there.
Oh, and don’t screw up your CTA with our third offender…
3. Having a Cowardly Call to Action.
When it comes time to ask for money, a lot of marketers, copywriters, and business owners tend to beat around the bush.
This comes back to people’s aversion to asking for money.
We start to use what I call “weasel words”, like should, probably, might, could, strive, etc.
“We STRIVE to provide the best experience possible.”
“This MIGHT be the best product you’ve ever seen.”
You get the point.
When you use these weasel words, it starts to feel like you’re selling from the heel. It conveys a lack of confidence in your offer. And if you don’t have confidence in your offer, why should your reader?
So remember to stick the landing. End each piece of copy with a clear, confident, singular call to action.