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class is in session for calls to action one to one, we're we're going to break down this important piece of our social media marketing. So you can feel confident every post you create will help get you closer to your goals. So teacher authors, go ahead and reheat that cup of coffee, because I'm your host, Cassandra Foster. And we're about to get schooled in socials. Welcome back to school and socials. In the last few episodes, we discussed different types of marketing strategies. And today, we're tackling one thing they all have in common, the use of calls to action. So whether you're working on brand awareness, or you're ready to shift your focus more to conversion marketing, you're going to be wanting to use call to actions. Okay, let's start at the beginning. What is a call to action, a call to action, or you'll sometimes hear referred to as a CTA is a prompt, that explicitly tell someone the action they should take after seeing or reading your content. This prompt is what helps you reach your goals using the content you've created, whether that's gaining more community members conducting market research or getting people to buy your resources. My guess is that you probably use these sometimes, hopefully, all the time. And my guess is that you've seen these a lot as you scroll and interact with social media yourself. Things like dropping an emoji in the comments to react to a post things like heading to a Lincoln bio to grab a freebie. Things like sharing to your stories, if you agree with what the post is talking about. These are all types of calls to action, things you do with that information that you just read. Now, because you know me and you know, I love me some data, we're going to take a second to talk about a little social media study that actually analyzed calls to action. So according to a study done by track Maven, where they analyzed over 1.5 million posts across 5000 Facebook pages to find trends, they discovered that a post with a CTA versus a post without a CTA performed almost 50%. Better, on average, when it came to interactions for that post. That means that on average post with effective calls to action, thought almost twice the number of interactions, that's mind blowing. PS, if you're a data nerd like me, I've linked the complete study PDF in the show notes for you. So you can go and take a peek whenever you want. Back to the real reason that we're talking about this study. I mean, that stat speaks for itself. But let's dive a little deeper. So why is it that calls to action can boost post performance so much? Here's my take. We are constantly competing for our audience members attention on social media, we live in an age where so much information is thrown at us throughout our day. And we have to decide what to act on and what to just scroll by. And guess what, if we aren't telling people exactly what they should be doing when they see our posts, or land on our account, the likelihood that they will take their own independent action is very small, it just takes more effort. We have short attention spans, and they are becoming shorter all the time with technological advances. So including a call to action makes it easier for our community to act, they don't have to use as much brain power to decide what they should do with that information you just provided them. And that can lead to more interactions. To help your brand new awareness or more, click throughs to boost your conversion calls to action are our friend. Now if you create any form of long form content, like blogs, or podcasts or YouTube videos, this concept of calls to action is probably fairly familiar to you. You know, you need to include them in your long form content for people to click through to that freebie or paid resource. You probably include subtle calls to action throughout your long form content, and then a more explicit call to action at the end. Right. So how does this translate to the social media content we are creating? Where should we be using calls to action on socials? The first place you want to make sure you have a call to action is in your bio on Instagram. If you're using an Instagram account, if you haven't already listened to Episode Four where we tackle optimizing your Instagram bio together. That's a great place to go back into start to understand the importance of calls to action, we want a call to action in the last line of our bio, so that people will click on our Lincoln bio and take that specific action, like signing up for our lead magnet, or joining our Facebook community. Without that call to action, people don't know what they're getting when they click on that link. And if you have multiple links for them to choose from when they click through, if you aren't clear where you want them to navigate to, it's very likely and there might be some analysis paralysis, and they might just click out instead of choosing a link to explore. The next place we want to make sure we have calls to action are in our captions, we want to be clear on what we want our community members to do once they read the information in that caption, that could be going to the link in your bio to access the resource that could be commenting with their ideas. It could be saving or sharing the post or even just dropping an emoji. Either way, we want them to do something with each of our posts, because what they do is going to help us reach our goals. So whether we want to grow our email list, or we want to reach more people on socials, those interactions that people do with our posts help us reach those goals. Now, there are a few other places where you want to make sure you have a clear call to action that not everyone always takes advantage of. And those are at the end of carousel posts and as texts on your reels. carousel posts typically outline a series of information for our audience, such as how to use a specific resource in their classroom, they have spent time swiping through the carousel. And it's likely we have a used a lot of their attention span going through those slides. So instead of crossing our fingers and hoping that they also read the full caption, we want that last slide to include our call to action to make it easier for them to act on it. The other spot we want to explicitly share a call to action is as text on our reels videos. Again, someone has watched your reel, read the text descriptions on the video, and it is likely that their attention span has been reached. And they may not click to read that caption, especially if they're scrolling that reels page. So adding our call to action as text on the video ensures that more people see it. And thus, more people will potentially act on it. There's so much pressure this time of the year to buy more stuff from Black Friday sales to Christmas ads. But I don't want you to buy more stuff, I want you to get the right things you need to uplevel your business in this season. So that's why I've opened up my mini Social Media Console scheduled for the next three months. So that we can make resources that are going to get stuck in your downloads and courses that are going to go immediately to your desktop graveyard, a thing of the past. Instead, you're going to get my brain and your business for a focus 30 minutes so that you can make sure you have a solid plan moving forward. And you know, your social media will help you reach your business goals. This is not a one size fits all solution. Instead, you're going to get targeted advice that is focused on you and your business. And for Black Friday. And until these spots sell out, you're going to be able to get it for $47 which is the lowest price point these mini consults have ever Ben, we're talking transformational advice that will make your social media work harder for you. For less than a night out. This isn't stuff. It's the thing you need to get clarity and move forward with your social media marketing, you can grab your discounted spot right now in the shownotes. But hurry, because once these spots that I've opened up for the next few months are gone, this price point will be gone too. I can't wait to make 2020 for the year that your social media marketing helps you reach all of your big business goals.
Okay, by now, I hope you were on the call to action train if you weren't already before, but we can't wrap up calls to action 101. Without talking about what kinds of calls to action you can use. It's important to know that the kind of call to action you use on your posts should be connected to your goal for that post and your overall strategy. For example, CTAs aren't always about selling. When we are nurturing our audience and working on our brand awareness. We want our community members to take specific actions as well. So if you're focusing on brand awareness, some calls to action you might consider are having people share your educational content, or your relatable content or even your inspirational posts so that others who might not know who you are are or how you can help them are exposed to your content? Or you might have them simply like the post or drop an emoji in the comments or answer a simple question in the comments. Each of these actions can help boost your reach. Again, getting more eyes on your content, which is your goal when you're thinking about brand awareness. If you're focusing more on nurturing your audience, which you should always be doing, by the way, you might have them save your educational content so they can access it later and put it into practice. You might have them comment with their ideas on a topic so you can do some market research and decide what kind of content your community actually needs. You might have them navigate to your Lincoln bio to grab a freebie and get on that email list. You might even ask them to DM you so you can have a more in depth conversation with them and build those relationships. And finally, if you're working more on conversion marketing, getting people to head to your store and purchase your resources. Again, you might tell them to navigate to your Lincoln bio, or you can have them comment or drop an emoji in the comments to show interest. This allows you to reach out in a DM to provide them the link and start a more in depth conversation to build those relationships that are so important to our success on social media. Honestly, I could go on and on with ideas for calls to action. You know, maybe I'll create a list of call to action ideas for all of you. Would that be something you'd find helpful? If so, pop over to Instagram and send me a DM to let me know. PS, that's a call to action for you. Okay, that's calls to action 101. We don't want to sleep on the power of these prompts to help us reach our goals. Remember, including a CTA can help boost interactions on a post by 50%. So make sure you include them in your bio captions, carousels and reels. And you assess your goal for each piece of content to decide on an effective call to action that will help you reach the bigger goals in your business. Now before you turn off this podcast, I've got one more CTA for you. I want you to go create a post for your page. Identify what you want people to do with that information and write a strong call to action. Then share it with me on Instagram. I'd be happy to give you feedback so you can get your CTA game in tip top shape. All right, cool coffee friends. Thanks so much for listening. If you're loving getting schooled in socials, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Also, I would love it if you left a review so that other teacher authors like you can start getting schooled in socials too. All right, I'll see you in the next episode.