Are You Making this Mistake in Your Calls to Action?
Read Time: 5.0 minutes
Make your Calls-to-Action specific.
— Chase Dimond, $55K/M Email Marketer
Last week, we focused on a TED Talk by Pixar's Andrew Stanton. We did a deep dive into his greatest storytelling commandment: “Make Me Care.”
This commandment is central to every aspect of storytelling. It impacts whether you make a connection with your audience, or not. It influences the action your customer takes, or not.
Of course, making your audience care is only part of the goal when it comes to storytelling in business. There's another challenge—and that's getting your audience to take action. A Call to Action (CTA) should be in practically every piece of content you produce. But how can you make your audience care enough to actually respond?
What’s the Tip?
Today's tip is that you should spend time crafting your Call to Action. That's right, we just used the word "crafting" in conjunction with writing a CTA.
"But shouldn't I spend most of my time on my headline?" you may ask. Fair question. In fact, advertising icon, David Ogilvy, is famous for saying: “on the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
So yes, your headline is fundamental. It's the first conversion point in your copy. That's why, understandably, storytellers and copywriters spend LOTS of time, energy, and thought writing (and re-writing) a headline that inspires their audience to read their blogpost or article.
But what about the call to action?
First, make sure to include one! Would you believe that just 10 years ago, up to 70% of small business B2B websites lacked a call to action?
No doubt, it's gotten better. But simply including a call to action on your website or in your copy is a fairly low bar in 2022. The challenge today is crafting your call to action in order to boost conversion rates.
How Do You Use It?
When it comes to crafting a powerful CTA, start by going one level deeper than you think you need to in order to reach your audience.
What does that look like?
The key is this; don't instruct your audience to take action—inspire them to take action.
Instruct = Click Here
vs.
Inspire = Next Stop: More Sales
Instruct = Learn More
vs.
Inspire = Discover the Difference
Instruct = Subscribe Now
vs.
Inspire = Get Free, Value-Packed Content Every Week
(PRO TIP: Stop using the word learn. It sounds like work - plus there's not a clear benefit.)
What are Some Examples?
Here are two examples that actually inspired this issue:
 
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See what Chase does in each case? Instead of focusing on the action itself (do this or click here), he focuses on the benefit or the value of taking the action.
Super simple. Super powerful.
(PRO TIP: If you see a post on LinkedIn that you want to save for later, click on the three dots to the top right of the person's post and then hit "save".)
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What’s the Benefit to You?
The benefits of taking the time to craft your CTAs are:
- greater audience engagement
- greater potential for higher conversion rates
When you move from instruct to inspire, you create more clarity and specificity around your CTA. Clarity matters because a confused customer won't buy. People are more apt to act when it's clear what they're acting on. Specificity matters. For example, which are of these two CTA's would you be more likely to click?
Lose Weight Fast
vs.
Lose 10lbs in 30 days or Your Money Back
Clarity + Specificity = Clearer, More Compelling Calls to Action.
TL;DR
- Headlines matter, but so do your calls to action. Both are essential conversion points in your copy.
- Inspire, don't instruct.
- Go one level deeper when crafting your call to action. Be clear and specific.
Whenever you're ready to start creating better content faster, so you can boost conversions, we're here to help!
1. Master the 3 StoryHacks you need to create better content faster in our Private VIP Workshop.
2. Get real-time feedback for a special project or presentation and elevate your business storytelling with live, virtual 1:1 Coaching.
We hope this issue has been helpful. We look forward to seeing you next week!
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