Marketers use the phrase ‘call to action’ for the prompt that you see on advertising or marketing that triggers you to respond or tells you what to do next. But how are these prompts changing?
In my first agency job, I sometimes got to help out as a Mac operator. My graphic designer friends are probably shuddering at the thought of this, but the studio got busy and they sent me on a quick course to be able to do some basics. Very basic!
Close to the city in London, we had lots of financial services clients and I spent hours resizing newspaper ads that were selling things like insurance policies. But in those days the internet was only a baby (yes, showing my age again!) the ads didn’t send you to a website for more information, or even offer an email address. You filled in a form, cut it out and sent off for a brochure – it was the good old days of ‘coupon response advertising’.
You certainly don’t see this anymore as we’re given much easier options. In fact, the list of options for us to choose from has grown like billy-o. Ring an 0800 number, email, browse the website, send a Facebook message, and Instagram message, a Snapchat message, a WhatsApp message, scan a QR code, have an overly polite conversation with a ChatBot…it’s bordering on confronting sometimes, isn’t it, and we can safely resign ourselves to the fact that the list is only going to get longer.
The world of websites, apps and digital marketing has, of course, got all sorts of complex dos and don’ts as to how to grab our attention, make us click for more, but the fundamentals are still the same. The next step is always ours and every advertiser has to feel assured that they have done enough to seduce us into action.
But we’re used to it all now, aren’t we? How prescriptive do we need them to be these days?
I remember when we first started putting website addresses on advertising, we used to put the full address, usually the ‘www’ and even, for those who might be new to and less au fait with the ‘interweb’, we might even have put the ‘https’ in too, even though we didn’t technically need to.
A few years later, I recall a friendly debate with a client about whether we needed to include the ‘www’ because people would understand what we were getting at without it. By then we were used to the fact that something ending in .co.nz was a website address and we didn’t need to teach anyone how to suck eggs, even grandma.
And if you’re giving me an email address, do you really need to put ‘Email us at’ in front of it? As an advertiser, you now have to find a respectful balance between making it clear to your customers how they can reach you but without insulting their intelligence.
Now, we often see ads that don’t even have a website address, phone number or anything. Particularly where the ads are about positioning a brand, making an emotive connection, a bigger-picture message, we see a direct call to action less and less. It now seems to be just as acceptable to trust us to Google the brand to find more. (And you can pretty much guarantee that our social media feeds will then be filled with their ads after we’ve Googled them anyway!)
It feels that it used to be that brands who had already invested heavily in getting our attention were the only ones with the strength to stand alone without a clear call to action. The confidence to go naked of obvious prompts was the domain of household brands, those with deep pockets for advertising spend, the ones that have been highly visible and built-up awareness in our minds. But now, it’s common even for the newest and smallest of advertisers.
When it comes down to it, advertisers are naturally going to be a bit FOMO (fear of missing out) and for some it may be too brave a move to be less than blatantly obvious. And, as more advertising moves to platforms where contact is merely a click or two away, the need for a foolproof pathway will be less of an issue.
But in the meantime, perhaps, as marketers, we need to ask ourselves ‘is our patronisingly obvious instruction really necessary?’
