What is a CTA?

What is a CTA or call to action? Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. A call to action is really just a marketing term that refers to a prompt on a website or on a piece of content that encourages the audience for that content or on that page to take a specific action. This action could be anything from signing up for that content or on that page to take a specific action. This action could be anything from signing up for a newsletter or downloading a white paper or an e-book, or scheduling a consultation or contacting your firm for more information. Essentially, a CTA is a directive aimed at converting visitors into leads or into clients by guiding them through the desired steps that we have built in our engagement process or our intake process. It is, quite literally, a call to action.

Ctas are fundamental to digital marketing strategies because they serve a clear, direct instruction to potential clients on what they should be doing next. Without these CTAs, visitors to our websites or people who are reading our content are not going to know the best way to engage with our services and, in the context of our legal marketing that we're doing, they're especially crucial, these CTAs. They are what bridge the gap between a potential client's interest in our services and their actual decision to seek legal advice or representation. And a well-placed CTA like schedule, your free consultation today, can turn a casual website visitor who is looking for information into a prospective client, simply by providing an easy and direct path to taking the next step. And in a world where individuals like us and like our clients are constantly bombarded with information and options and the next TikTok thing and whatever it is, a clear and compelling CTA can be the deciding factor that motivates them to choose your firm over a competitor. But on top of this, effective CTAs do more than just prompt this kind of immediate action, prompt this kind of immediate action. They also contribute to the overall user experience that our potential clients are having, because they make the website much easier to navigate. It becomes much more intuitive and seamless when you have strong CTAs, and by strategically placing your CTAs throughout your website and content, on every page and in the obvious areas where someone might click, you are creating a guided journey that leads potential clients to the key points of conversion that we've set up. This not only enhances user satisfaction because it's an easy website to use, but it also increases the likelihood of converting these leads into clients, which is what we want. But crafting an effective call to action is kind of an art and a science, and for us in the legal industry, where we're trying to convert mostly website visitors into clients, mastering this art can be pretty crucial.

So let's go into the key elements that make a CTA effective. These and we're going to split them up into three are clarity and simplicity, urgency and importance, and placement and visibility. And the first and perhaps the most critical element of an effective CTA is that clarity and simplicity, because in this industry, where clients are often looking for help during particularly stressful times, the last thing they want or need is confusion. A CTA should leave no room at all for ambiguity about what action the user is expected to take. So, for example, let's consider a CTA that says schedule a consultation. Now, this is direct and clear. It tells the user exactly what to do and what they will get a consultation. But compare this to a more vague CTA like Learn More. This is something you'll see in website headers all over the internet, and while Learn More might work in some contexts, it kind of lacks the directness that we need. In a lot of situations that we're going to encounter in the legal world. It doesn't really tell us what the next step is in the user's journey or what value they're going to receive from taking that step. In essence, there is no reason for them to click that button unless they want to learn more.

The language we use in a CTA should be straightforward, and we generally want to avoid legal jargon as well. Legal terminology while, yes, it is necessary in certain contexts and we do want to put this in our content on the website in a CTA it can be intimidating and confusing for potential clients. Your CTA should avoid these complex legal terms, and instead we just want to use simple, action-oriented language. Something like get legal help today is much more effective than initiate legal proceedings. The second element here, though, is creating a sense of urgency and importance.

In our CTA A well-crafted CTA we're often going to employ words that have a sense of immediacy, really, and we're trying to encourage users to act quickly rather than postponing and considering their decision. We want them to act. This psychological trigger can significantly increase the conversion rates we have by tapping into what we now essentially technically call FOMO, which is the fear of missing out, and this human tendency will help us a lot, especially because most people have the tendency to try and avoid procrastination, especially when we're faced with an urgent situation like a legal issue. So phrases like schedule your free consultation today or contact us now for immediate assistance those convey urgency. The use of words like today and now emphasize that the action is important and should be taken without any delay. On top of that, indicating that consultation is free or that the assistance is immediate adds a really compelling incentive for the user to take action. Obviously, there's a whole other discussion about free consultations, but you can see how this works in this context. Creating a sense of importance can also be achieved, though, by highlighting the value of the benefits of taking the action. For instance, secure your legal rights Book. A consultation now Not only stresses the urgency, but also emphasizes the critical importance of securing our legal rights, which is obviously a nonsense phrase, but people think legal rights are important and this approach it tells potential clients that the action they're taking look, it's not just immediate, it's not just going to happen right away, but it's also going to be significantly beneficial to the user. That's how we get the user really engaged.

But last up, the third key element here. This is definitely not the least. The third key element is placement and visibility. This is really really important because even the most well-crafted CTA will fail if it is not visible or easily accessible to the user on your website or on your content. The strategic placement of these CTAs on your website or in whatever marketing material, is absolutely crucial to ensure that we are catching the user's eye at the right moment.

A common best practice when it comes to websites is to place the CTAs above the fold on your website, meaning that users don't have to scroll down to see them. Usually this is in the header or in the menu, but it's just above that first scroll point. This ensures that the CTA is one of the first things that a visitor sees when they land on your website. So if they're higher up or lower down in the funnel, depending on how we define it they may move to that action quicker. So, for example, having a prominent contact us today button at the top of the homepage, this could immediately direct potential clients toward taking action, even if they don't care so much about the rest of the information on your website.

But the thing is, a single CTA placement like that is usually not enough. It's really important to have multiple CTAs strategically placed throughout the website. So, for instance, after detailing your legal services or having a specific page related to family law or custody issues, you would put another CTA, maybe at the bottom, like schedule your free consultation. This reinforces the action that we want to have the user take. So they see it at the top and they see it at the bottom and this repetition, it's a gentle reminder that the user should take this action and ultimately for us, it increases the chance of conversion as the user is navigating around the site.

But in addition to placement, the design of the CTA button itself plays a pretty critical role in visibility. The button should stand out pretty significantly from the rest of the page and this can be achieved through contrasting colors or bold fonts, adequate white space around the button. There's a lot of ways to make this work and we're not going to talk about design too much today because I'm not a designer, but this is a really critical part of A-B testing your CTAs. So don't skip playing with the design and A-B testing. We've talked about it a lot on the podcast, also known as split testing. This is probably the most powerful method when it comes to optimizing your CTAs. So we're essentially just comparing two or more variations of the CTA to see which performs better. We can use Google Optimize or there's software called Optimizely out there.

But this process, at its core, what it involves is creating these multiple different versions of the CTA, such as, you know, different variations of the wording or the color, the size, the placement, and then testing these variations against each other with different segments of your audience. And what we need to monitor here. The really key metrics to monitor during an A-B test. What we're really looking at are three things that's, your CTR, your click-through rate, your conversion rate and your bounce rate. These metrics are going to tell you which version of your CTA is more effective in engaging users and driving desired actions. So, for instance, if your red button results in a high CTA and more consultation requests than an orange button, then you'll conclude that that version is more effective. You'll switch over to the red button and you'll test something else.

I've skipped through the testing process quite a bit here, because we've talked about A-B testing a lot before and we're going to talk about it more. But the thing is, a-b testing is an iterative process. It's never done. After every test, we're going to use the insights we've gained to form a new hypothesis and then conduct another test and, over time, this type of continuous optimization is what leads to the most significant improvements in your CTA performance, or any online marketing performance, and, at the end of the day, that's going to boost our conversions and our client acquisition and our revenue.

Now we're not done with CTAs, because there is a lot of other cool stuff. In the future, we're going to talk about segmented CTAs, behavior-based CTAs, ctas that are personalized in emails, and all kinds of different dynamic call-to-action things that we can use both on our website and in other content. But for today, what's important is that you have a strong CTA on your website and that you include a CTA with pretty much every piece of content that you're doing. If you're not driving users to take action with your business, you're wasting your time when it comes to content and because I know I've just scared the pants off of a couple of you by saying that we're going to go ahead and wrap up here, but don't forget to turn the notifications on and check back next week for another episode of Legal Marketing 101. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out RosenAdvertisingcom for more. Thanks.