Although social media is largely about brand building and generating awareness, the truth is, brands also want to see measurable results and improve revenues. However, most social marketing ‘how to’ guides caution against building content that sounds too promotional, which creates a new challenge for brands.
Compelling Calls To Action are Critical to Social Success
While designing social content that resembles a sales pitch is not recommended, simply broadcasting information without telling customers what to do usually means missing out on crucial engagement and conversion opportunities. Thismoment’s research on the impact of CTAs on brands’ social success shows:
- The single biggest reason (77%) why consumers follow brands on social media is discounts/freebies (2011 Chief Marketer Study). By including CTAs such as “like this page for discounts” or “click here to avail this week’s offer”, brands can give their sales charts a shot-in-the-arm.
- CTAs encourage consumers to interact with brands by encouraging a response of some sort. Great for engagement.
- Today’s brands consider CTAs to be an important part of their marketing arsenal. CTAs convert visitors to prospects, and prospects to customers.
- By featuring CTAs like ‘share’, tweet etc., marketers can extend the reach of their brand(s) and improve visibility.
Creating Social Media Calls-to-Action
- Keep it Simple and Clear: To make it easy for users to take the desired action, it’s important for brands to keep the CTAs simple, unambiguous and direct. Consumers appreciate direct requests for ‘likes’ or ‘retweets’ instead of having to read though vague, passive requests and figuring out what you want them to do.
Created using Thismoment’s DEC, the Garnier Canada YouTube channel is a great example of how brands can feature CTAs that tell users exactly what they should do. All that interested users need to do is select the “learn more” option to obtain detailed information on various products in the Garnier line up.
- Reward Your Consumers: Although brand loyalty and interesting content are reasons enough for users to ‘like’ or share something online, nothing motivates consumers (especially the prospects) like being rewarded for their efforts. According to Mintel:
- Consumer motivation for engaging with brands online lies heavily with being rewarded for the interaction.
- 24% of Facebook users agree with the statement “I only follow or like a company on a social network if I get something in return.”
The key to creating winning social media CTAs is ensuring you occasionally reward customers with incentives such as special offers, coupons etc. for taking a desired action.
- Engaging with CTAs: Integrating CTAs in your social marketing plan can positively influence users to engage with your brand through some type of action. Besides the usual ‘like’ or ‘subscribe’, brands can further engage with consumers through CTAs such as:
- Share: Asking them to share interesting content.
- Vote for something or participate in a poll/quiz.
- Ask mobile consumers to download apps.
- Write reviews, comments etc.
- Upload videos and photos.
To improve engagement, brands need to ensure that their CTAs are clearly visible and not hard to find.
- Including CTAs on Your Timeline: Facebook’s conversion to the Timeline meant no more default landing pages for brands to feature CTAs. With the Cover Image guidelines explicitly disallowing brands to include CTAs in any form, marketers who enticed fans with the ‘like’ button were greatly concerned.
Brands can overcome this by:
- Including CTAs in the custom tabs or
- Using Thismoment’s DEC to customize their Facebook presence. Instead of having to select the ‘like’ option from the custom apps, users are directed straight to the Tide Facebook tab, which is customized (using DEC) to encourage fans to ‘like’ their page to learn more.
Conclusion
Social media CTAs are crucial, not just for increasing traffic and improving conversions, but also for engagement. Besides allowing marketers to promote brands without sounding overtly pushy, compelling CTAs encourage users to take action and respond. Today’s brands are creating CTAs that are not just relegated to ‘likes’ or retweets; from asking users to participate in polls to simply urging them to “learn more” about the brand, marketers are more confident and direct about what they want from consumers.
- Shama Ahmed
Thismoment
