Social media marketing can really engage your customers. But creating the best possible engagement can be fruitless if you don’t get your audience to do what you want them to.
Every social media campaign has a purpose and an action you’d like your audience to take, be it buying something, sharing something with their friends or giving their personal details. For this, you need strong calls-to-action.
Socials media campaigns need a purpose
Here are our top tips on creating effective calls-to-action on your social media platforms:
1. Work out exactly what you want
You can’t expect your users to do something for you if you haven’t pinpointed exactly what it is. Of course your end goal is to create huge sales and boost traffic but these are huge missions which need to be reached through a series of smaller targets.
Once you know what your particular social media action is hoping to achieve, you can work out how best to communicate this to your audiences.
2. Express what you want people to do with clarity
There’s no point in dancing around the issue with lengthy wording and flowery language. This is an instruction and your users should be left with no confusion as to what you’d like them to do.
“To encourage users to take the desired action, the following key points should be considered be clear – if you want users to Like your page, make it explicit that Liking is the social action you’re expecting,” says Manoj Krishnapillai from marketing apps provider Owned it.
3. Give people a reason to get involved
Your users will want to know what is in it for them – especially if what you want them to do requires a few minutes of their time. If what are are offering in return for their actions makes sense to them they will follow through.
4. Make your call to action stand-out
People aren’t going to search around one of your posts or pages looking for clues to what you’d like them to do. Be obvious and make your request as bold as possible.
Try using colour or different font to make it shine out. You could also repeat it in various locations or at least try and keep them above the fold.
5. Create an obvious pathway
If you have made a very clear and obvious call-to-action and your users have followed the initial stage (clicking a link etc.) you could lose your momentum by not making the next step an obvious follow on from the last.
The next landing page that your users find themselves on should show continuity. If people think they’ve gone the wrong way they will abandon their task.
6. Test methods
Chances are you might not get it right first time. Your message might not suit the platform you’re using, the hook might not be strong enough. Whatever the reason, you should test different options until you find the right one.
“Campaigns that works for a particular product/ brand may not work for all, so try different iterations and identify the one that works best for you,” says Krishnapillai.
“Many people have preferences, when it comes to sharing on social networks. If users don’t participate in Facebook campaigns, it doesn’t mean they are not social or not interested. You can always go back to them with the same campaign but with different social network.”
7. Analyse results
You should make a note of how your social media campaigns and their calls-to-action are performing by looking at a number of key performance metrics.
Check out your impressions, click-throughs and conversions rates to see what is working. Most analytics tools will allow you to track these kind of actions so you have a good idea of where you are.
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