Blogs are an excellent channel through which to convey thought leadership, boost brand visibility, and improve SEO. But many businesses fail to take advantage of blogs as a vehicle for lead generation—and they’re missing out. Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy a positive ROI, and that could very well be because blog posts are a great place to inspire and drive action from readers.
Successful blogs feature a variety of different effective calls to action (CTAs)—or an image or line of text that promotes visitors or potential customers to take action—each with the goal of getting the reader to take the next step and convert into a lead or customer. Below, we share the four CTAs you need on your blog to attract clicks and entice conversions from your audience.
4 Effective Calls to Action (CTAs) You Need on Your Business Blog
1. Bottom-of-the-Post CTA
As we’ve established, the point of your blog is to drive action from readers, so it’s crucial to include a CTA at the end of each blog post. We’ve shown an example of one of our own bottom-of-the-post CTAs here:
We figure that people reading our blog posts are looking to improve or enhance their marketing, and would benefit from a free consultation with our expert team. That’s why at the end of many of our blog posts we invite readers to request a free consultation with us via submitting their name and email address. Inviting your blog post readers to take an obvious next step based on the needs or challenges they may be experiencing will benefit you both: they’ll be one step closer to solving their problem and you’ll generate a new lead and potential customer for your business.
2. Subscribe CTA
If you have a blog, it’s natural that you’ll want to keep increasing the number of people who see your content regularly. A blog subscription CTA is a great way to provide readers the option to receive updates about your blog without harassing them.
3. Sidebar CTA
Sidebar CTAs are great for offers that may not be entirely relevant to your blog post topic but will likely still benefit the reader.
These CTAs are effective because they are eye-catching enough to attract attention from the side of a reader’s screen, but they don’t distract entirely from the content of the blog post.
4. Engagement CTAs
CTAs aren’t all flashy images. A simple but engaging CTA to add to your blog posts is an invitation for readers to comment. This invitation for interaction fosters a sense of community and consider this: the conversation that arises from a blog post comment could turn into a sale! Below is a great example from HubSpot:
