If you haven’t learned by now, calls to action (CTAs) are extremely important for any website, especially for small business. They drive users to the next step – to, you know, take action. If you’re stumped on what action they should take, we’ve talked about it a lot over here and here.
Not every small business will want a call to action to be “Buy this thing right now.” You may want it to be a free consultation or simply your phone number somewhere on the page.
But where do we put these invaluable CTAs?
To the right, to the left?
Take it back now y’all. One hop this time.
I digress. But one thing DJ Casper can teach us is to “get funky with it.”
There’s no rule of thumb when it comes to where to place a call to action. There are some theories – above the fold, below the fold, smack dab in the center. All these theories don’t take into consideration key marketing points and content.
The true place for a call to action is after a sufficient amount of content. The real debate then becomes: What amount is sufficient?
David Ogilvy back in the 60s discovered that 20% of people don’t read past the headline. That’s why you’ll see a many articles or websites really trying to sell you on some mouthwatering headlines. And, depending on your goal, that might be enough. Here’s a great example from Square:
The true gem of the research was written well past this token information that (I’m guessing) only 20% of people read. What’s really interesting is that readership “drops very little between 50 and 500 words.”
That means that the people reading past 50 words are ENGAGED. There’s that magic word that we see everywhere. Small business should take into consideration that these are the people who are interested. They are reading for a reason – first to self-educate and second to see if you are the right person or business to work with or to buy from.
Therefore the first step of placing your CTA is to read through your content to see if it is interesting to your target audience, then decide at what point to place your CTA. It may even be a simple text link. Or perhaps, highlighting that free consultation at the bottom of your homepage might be the sweet spot for your small business.
Test it out different placements. See what works and let us know your results.