Improve Your Print Marketing Calls to Action
If your print marketing efforts aren’t generating the ROI you’re hoping for, it may be time to take a look at your calls to action, or CTA. CTAs are what tell the ad viewer what to do next and how to do it. Surprisingly, some advertisements completely lack a CTA. Neglecting to include at least one CTA (or including too many to the point of confusion) can be hurting your results.
Consider CTA placement
There are plenty of marketing studies available that make use of eye-tracking tests to see where a viewer’s eye naturally focuses on different types of marketing collateral. You can use the basics of this research, along with some critical thinking, to identify the places on your ad that are most likely to catch a viewer’s attention. This is where your most important marketing message and CTA should be.
Make the CTA copy actionable and descriptive
“Try it now” is a straightforward enough CTA, but it doesn’t tell the viewer enough. Where can they try it? How should they use it? These are questions that can be answered concisely and wordsmithed in a way that will pull your CTA out of a sea of generic language and into the forefront of the reader’s conscious.
Make your CTA pop with good design
Eye-catching design will help your CTA go from bland to unmissable. Contrasting text and background colors along with appropriate imagery can serve to better highlight your offering.
Make it clear
We mentioned above that “try it now”, while an actionable CTA, is vague and overused to the point of ignorable. What “try it now” also fails to do is describe what exactly “it” is. Be descriptive without being wordy to ensure your message isn’t lost, and let your copy and design work together to accomplish this goal (an image alongside CTA copy may clarify what your product is or does, for example).
