You’ve done the hard work. You’ve gotten visitors to your content. Hooray! But before you break out the champagne and start celebrating your efforts, ask yourself, “What happens next?”

Getting traffic to your content hub, your blog, your campaign destination, is only one part of the equation. If you want to keep visitors engaging with your content and your company, you need to provide that perfect next step. And one way to make the most of those hard-earned clicks is through calls-to-action.

A call-to-action can be as simple as a bit of hyperlinked text. Or in the Uberflip platform, it can appear as a CTA tile. They could be form CTAs or link CTAs, maybe they appear next to, amongst, or over top of your content, but anyway you slice it, CTAs are all about directing your visitor’s behavior. And we, as marketers, can help visitors navigate the experience using this very simple tool.

I like to call it creating an engagement path, but in essence, it’s getting your visitors to that perfect next step.

There are a hundred different ways to use CTAs (Don’t believe me? Challenge accepted!) But for brevity and focus, let’s look at some simple and more advanced CTAs you can implement.

Simple call-to-action examples every marketer should use

1. The contextual content CTA

This one is a no-brainer. The most basic CTA you should treat like Frank’s hot sauce and put on literally everything is a link CTA that drives traffic to another piece of content. This can be a blog article, a template, or, more commonly, a premium asset. It’s like a content recommendation, but it’s 100% marketer controlled and is most effective when contextual to the experience. Is someone reading about high-converting copy? Then put a CTA that points to “The Marketer’s Guide to Copywriting” next to that article. It’s relevant, it’s contextual, and you as the marketer can guess that if they’re interested in article 1, they’re going to convert on ebook 2.

In this example, presenting the option to download a free ebook on a topic related to the blog it appears by is a great way to convert traffic into leads on your blog or in your content library.

2. The webinar sign up CTA

Part of your content strategy should be moving visitors through the funnel and moving a visitor from a casual reader of top-of-funnel content to a more engaged lead who has signed up for your company’s webinar is a great way to accomplish this. Again, contextual placement of webinar CTAs that link to a sign-up page will help you direct the buyer path. In this example, you’ll want to set reminders to swap out the link and copy to match the recorded version once the live event is over.

3. The subscribe for more content CTA

Whether you’re directing visitors to your subscription page or collecting email list signups amongst your resources, you should be using the highest traffic pages of your blog or content library to collect email addresses. It works well because it’s a soft ask and allows you to ensure those who found you from organic search stay connected with your company or brand. In theory, this could be your default CTA since most blogs and content hubs are populated with top of funnel content.

At Uberflip, we use an animated image to ensure our Subscribe For More Content CTA stands out amongst the rest of our tiles. But at a bare minimum, you should provide opportunities for your visitors to convert into subscribers so you can send them your best content and put them on a path of both trust-building, education, and perhaps eventual purchase.

4. The discount code CTA

Offering a discount for a product, service or event registration? Use a CTA to not only direct them to the purchase page but apply the discount code via a hyperlink. This way, you’ll reduce friction for the sale by putting in the hard work up front to ensure you convert on those purchases or registrations.

We used this method to ensure attendees of our road shows received a discount when they signed up for a large annual conference. Because this CTA was sent only to those who had attended our events in the past, they could click-through to savings easily.

5. The demo request CTA

Ah yes, the ever elusive demo request. While it can be hard to convert casual visitors of your blog into marketing qualified leads, it’s not impossible. So it’s worth including a demo request CTA in your Hub in very strategic places.

For instance, placing a demo request CTA alongside or amongst a customer story or case study would be an obvious next step. If someone is reading about your customers’ success with your product or service, they’re not too far off requesting a demo themselves. The same is true for bottom-of-the-funnel content such as product-focused updates or webinars, buyer’s guides or ROI calculators.

Inspiring call-to-action examples you can implement with Uberflip

6. The on-demand experience CTA

Want to create an on-demand experience like this?

You can do it with CTAs. First, promote the on-demand experience on your blog using a link CTA and then gate each asset with an overlay CTA. Once the visitor has been profiled, the gates disappear for all items in the stream and you’ve created an on-demand experience that’s easy to consume but gated for those who come in via search.

In this example, we created an on-demand experience for our annual conference Conex: The Content Experience. It allowed us to upload our speaker’s presentation videos and provide a digital conference experience to those who couldn’t make it in person. More bang for our buck, more value for visitors, and we could create a bingeable experience easily.

7. The time delay CTA

This one can be annoying if you’re not careful. It’s what’s affectionately (or not so affectionately) referred to as a pop-up. But hear me out. There are times when a time-delay CTA can be useful and effective.

Case in point. We’ve been using them to gate templates. Here, we need to give the visitor time to read a bit of the post and see the visual of the template they’ll receive before we ask for their email info.  

Another strategy you can use is to ask readers to subscribe to your blog or email list after reading a bit of your content. Simply use a 30-second time delay CTA over a blog post but make it dismissable so if a reader wants to subscribe they can, but if not, they can dismiss it and continue reading without becoming irritated.

8. The book a meeting CTA

If your company, like most, has reps assigned to different territories, then there are cases where the best next step is for the visitor to book a meeting with a specific rep. This is useful when you’re sending out account-based marketing streams or specific follow-up for an event.

We love putting faces to names, so including an image of the rep with a simple “Talk to XX” and a link to their appointment booking solution is a great way to get visitors to book a meeting.

The same is true of customers. If the goal is to get your customers to adopt a new feature, renew their contract, or simply engage with their customer success rep, you can use this same style of CTA for customer engagement. 

9. The back to stream CTA

Imagine this, you create an amazing personalized content experience—maybe a nurture destination or a collection of content intended for specific follow-up for a campaign. Your visitor clicks through, reads one asset, and then what? Remind them there’s more to discover in the stream experience by directing them back to the stream.

Simply use a Show Beside CTA like this one and place it next to every content item in the stream. That way no matter what they view, they’ll always be directed to view more, consume more, binge more, and nurture faster.

10. The personalized CTA

There’s a reason why using a first name in a subject line gets people to click. So why not apply the same logic to your calls to action? We tried this hack for personalized follow-up after a virtual event. Using query strings, we could ensure this CTA pulled in the first name of the recipient to personalize the CTA for them in the experience. So in the back-end the CTA looks like this:

But on the front-end, the recipient sees their first name in the CTA like this one created for me, below:

Full disclosure, this type of CTA only works for CTAs located in email-driven destinations. And while this isn't a feature of the Uberflip product, with a little coding, it's definitely something you can accomplish.

One final thought about CTAs

There are tons of other ways to use CTAs to direct visitor behavior and get potential buyers (and customers) to that next step. It’s our job as marketers to create engagement paths and find the ones that work best for our audience. It all starts with understanding what the desired action is and then, well, calling them to it!

My final call-to-action for you? Go forth and experiment!

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