Add and edit a Call to Action
CTAs are a crucial part for the presence of your Web Stories.
What is a CTA?
Swipe Up vs custom CTA
Apply a CTA in a Web Story
Why using a CTA?
A call to action (CTA) is a marketing phrase that refers to the next step that a marketer would like its audience or reader to take. The CTA may be linked directly to sales. You have various audiences looking at your website – visitors, leads, customers, promoters, and so on – and you want each group to do something different. You want those visitors to become leads, leads to become customers, and customers to become promoters. A CTA is an interactive element that allows you to provide follow on information (i.e. next steps) to your user to drive them further down the funnel.
When you open the CTA menu in the toolbar, you will find two types of CTA:
Swipe Up: The Swipe Ups are great way to provide a similar user experience to social networks (such as Instagram). Using Swipe Ups gives your users the chance to open the link by either swiping up or by clicking the CTA directly. They are less flexible but provide the actual "swiping" experience and open the URL in the same browser tab.
⚠️Caution: Swipe Ups have a fixed size and position on the artboard, and there can only be one Swipe Up CTA per artboard.
Custom: A Custom CTA is a group of layers with a URL linked to it. Custom CTAs are highly customizable as you can freely add/remove, move, resize, and edit all the individual layers. When users click on a Custom CTA in your Story, a small tooltip will appear and clicking on it will open the destination page in a new browser tab. Please note that the link will get deleted, if you ungroup a linked group.
💡Tip: You can link any layer or group of layers to a URL - even images or videos - by using the "Link" option in the Inspector Sidebar
💡Tip: Swipe Up CTAs will only appear in Web Stories, not in Social Export videos.
You can add a CTA with Zazu as shown below in the gif:
Create an artboard
Click on the last icon in the toolbar
In the menu, select one of the presets
Add a URL, some actionable text and an icon (optional) in the Inspector Sidebar
You can test it out in the preview mode
⚠️Caution: If you put no URL in the Inspector Sidebar for your CTA, it will be automatically removed from the exported Web Story
1. Lead Generation: Calls-to-action are critical for generating leads. Because you're attempting to convert visitors into leads with these CTAs, you should create an interesting Story and a meaningful CTA text.
2. Form Submission: When your visitors arrive at your landing page, they must do two things before they can be registered as a lead: fill out a form and click a button to submit their information to your contacts database.
3. "Read more" Button: You probably don't want to put the entire piece on the main page in any area where you display a stream of material — your blog, your customer case study website, or even your press newsroom. Encourage visitors to click on specific posts on your site by displaying the opening few paragraphs of your content, followed by a "read more" CTA.
4. Product or Service Delivery: When someone visits your website to discover more about your business and what it has to offer, you want to make it as simple as possible for them to do so. After all, it is your products and services that keep your company viable. CTAs don't have to be beautiful pictures; basic text on a button will suffice as long as the button sticks out against the backdrop.
5. Social Sharing: One of the most basic sorts of CTAs is one that encourages you to share a piece of content with your friends.
6. Lead Nurturing: Consider offerings such as product demonstrations, free trials, or free quotations — this is the type of offer you want to advertise with a lead nurturing CTA. You want to put these CTAs in locations where you know a lot of leads will be.
7. Closing the Sale: And once you've completed all of your lead generation and lead nurturing, you'll want to get down to business and convert those leads into customers. This CTA will be highly sales-focused: you want potential consumers to want to buy your product or service right now, right here.
8. Event Promotion: Use an event promotion CTA to increase event awareness or possibly ticket sales. The nice part about this sort of CTA is that you can position it in a variety of places depending on which portion of your audience you want to attend. Consider putting this on your clients' login page, dashboard, or even the page where you provide them a receipt. For leads, you might include this CTA on your blog's sidebar. The options are limitless.
This will hopefully give you a good first overview over what CTAs are and how to use them.
Find out more about similar content:
Add and edit text
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Still have questions or other issues? Drop us a line in the chat! Here to help 🙌
Article essentials
What is a CTA?
Swipe Up vs custom CTA
Apply a CTA in a Web Story
Why using a CTA?
What is a CTA?
A call to action (CTA) is a marketing phrase that refers to the next step that a marketer would like its audience or reader to take. The CTA may be linked directly to sales. You have various audiences looking at your website – visitors, leads, customers, promoters, and so on – and you want each group to do something different. You want those visitors to become leads, leads to become customers, and customers to become promoters. A CTA is an interactive element that allows you to provide follow on information (i.e. next steps) to your user to drive them further down the funnel.
Swipe Up CTA vs Custom CTA
When you open the CTA menu in the toolbar, you will find two types of CTA:
Swipe Up: The Swipe Ups are great way to provide a similar user experience to social networks (such as Instagram). Using Swipe Ups gives your users the chance to open the link by either swiping up or by clicking the CTA directly. They are less flexible but provide the actual "swiping" experience and open the URL in the same browser tab.
⚠️Caution: Swipe Ups have a fixed size and position on the artboard, and there can only be one Swipe Up CTA per artboard.
Custom: A Custom CTA is a group of layers with a URL linked to it. Custom CTAs are highly customizable as you can freely add/remove, move, resize, and edit all the individual layers. When users click on a Custom CTA in your Story, a small tooltip will appear and clicking on it will open the destination page in a new browser tab. Please note that the link will get deleted, if you ungroup a linked group.
💡Tip: You can link any layer or group of layers to a URL - even images or videos - by using the "Link" option in the Inspector Sidebar
Applying a CTA in a Web Story
💡Tip: Swipe Up CTAs will only appear in Web Stories, not in Social Export videos.
You can add a CTA with Zazu as shown below in the gif:
Create an artboard
Click on the last icon in the toolbar
In the menu, select one of the presets
Add a URL, some actionable text and an icon (optional) in the Inspector Sidebar
You can test it out in the preview mode
⚠️Caution: If you put no URL in the Inspector Sidebar for your CTA, it will be automatically removed from the exported Web Story
Why use a CTA?
1. Lead Generation: Calls-to-action are critical for generating leads. Because you're attempting to convert visitors into leads with these CTAs, you should create an interesting Story and a meaningful CTA text.
2. Form Submission: When your visitors arrive at your landing page, they must do two things before they can be registered as a lead: fill out a form and click a button to submit their information to your contacts database.
3. "Read more" Button: You probably don't want to put the entire piece on the main page in any area where you display a stream of material — your blog, your customer case study website, or even your press newsroom. Encourage visitors to click on specific posts on your site by displaying the opening few paragraphs of your content, followed by a "read more" CTA.
4. Product or Service Delivery: When someone visits your website to discover more about your business and what it has to offer, you want to make it as simple as possible for them to do so. After all, it is your products and services that keep your company viable. CTAs don't have to be beautiful pictures; basic text on a button will suffice as long as the button sticks out against the backdrop.
5. Social Sharing: One of the most basic sorts of CTAs is one that encourages you to share a piece of content with your friends.
6. Lead Nurturing: Consider offerings such as product demonstrations, free trials, or free quotations — this is the type of offer you want to advertise with a lead nurturing CTA. You want to put these CTAs in locations where you know a lot of leads will be.
7. Closing the Sale: And once you've completed all of your lead generation and lead nurturing, you'll want to get down to business and convert those leads into customers. This CTA will be highly sales-focused: you want potential consumers to want to buy your product or service right now, right here.
8. Event Promotion: Use an event promotion CTA to increase event awareness or possibly ticket sales. The nice part about this sort of CTA is that you can position it in a variety of places depending on which portion of your audience you want to attend. Consider putting this on your clients' login page, dashboard, or even the page where you provide them a receipt. For leads, you might include this CTA on your blog's sidebar. The options are limitless.
This will hopefully give you a good first overview over what CTAs are and how to use them.
Find out more about similar content:
Add and edit text
Add and edit media
Add and edit shapes
Create and add templates
Still have questions or other issues? Drop us a line in the chat! Here to help 🙌
Updated on: 18/07/2022
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