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Every inbound marketing professional knows that the power of great content combined with engaging conversation will lead to a value exchange opportunity, but what separates the successful from those who miss the mark is the potential attractiveness of your CTA.

CTA is yet another acronym is a world overflowing with TLAs (three letter acronyms) standing for Call To Action.  Hubspot describes five categories of CTA for you to consider:

  1. Basic CTA:  A simple button or landing page offering some form of value exchange item such as whitepaper, webcast or seminar attendance
  2. Social Media Share And Sentiment CTA:  Button or hyperlink that bridges specific social media venues with your compelling content
  3. Contextualized CTA:  Subscription or offers that provide specific education or contextualized information creating a venue for limiting inappropriate leads from taking action
  4. Photo and Mobile Device CTA:  Offers formatted for the specific requirements and limited real estate delivered on mobile devices
  5. Qualifying CTA:  Buttons or offers that create a self selection criteria ensuring only those truly interested will take action

I wanted to offer tips and techniques for CTA best practices, but in the spirit of not recreating the wheel, I came across a blog by Paul Boag who provides 10 techniques for an effective call to action:

  1. Lay the groundwork
  2. Offer a little extra
  3. Have a small number of distinct actions
  4. Use active urgent language
  5. Get the position right
  6. Use white space
  7. Use an alternative color
  8. Make it big
  9. Have a call to action on every page
  10. Carry the call through

You can see that effective use of CTAs is more than just posting up a button with a link to a landing page.  The same art and science applied to your overall campaigns should be given to the specific calls to action you use to capture those leads.