How to Create Better Calls to Actions from Your Instagram Posts

If you are an Instagram creator, you have been learning for years now how to create better content – yet, something most creators are still not familiar with is how to create posts that encourage their followers to take a specific action, whatever that may be.

That is something that, as a marketer of 10 years, I have learned way back then. Having people take a specific action after you market them with your content is key to the effectiveness of any marketing campaign.  

Without taking action, there is real conversion, and without conversions, there will be no growth. Whenever you are looking at your content calendar (if you do not have one yet, you can find a handy template here), you need to be able to spot what action you want your followers to take.

Whether you are planning a big event, a product launch, a new service or even a whole new brand announcement, asking people to do something and getting them to follow through is going to be incredibly effective in a variety of ways. 

First and foremost, you’ll be more appetising for potential partners. Secondly, you’ll have a tribe of active, engaged and loyal fans at your disposal, rather than a passive audience.

This process is called CTA (or call to action). Before we get into how to can create compelling calls to action on your Instagram, let me explain what a CTA is.

A CTA is an invitation for your audience to take some desired action. You often see a call to action examples in persuasive writing and imagery – what you’ll do through your posts is to ask your followers to take action based on what they’ve experienced.

You can spot a  call to action as the part of your content where you’re going to ask the individual to do something. When it comes to Instagram, this includes a variety of activities such as liking, saving, commenting, sharing and even asking people to head to your link in bio to check a link you have mentioned in your caption.

Stories have an intuitive built-in call to action options, including stickers (which increase engagement) and swipe for accounts ith over 10,000 followers.

CTAs are the bread and butter of an effective marketing strategy – however, most people do not venture there. Why? What I hear a lot is something along the lines of…“I don’t want to turn people off by asking them for something”

Lack of confidence is what puts a lot of people off. I believe in the power of persuasion over anything else, and persuasion is nothing more than giving your followers a great reason to be proactive instead of passive. 

If you want to create an effective call to action, it should come from a place of knowing that you are truly engaging emotionally with your followers. You are sharing something with that that is valuable, useful, and helpful. If you can’t honestly say that, work on improving your content first.

How do you do that?

I always say people will follow you mainly because of one of four things:

To really create an emotional connection, make sure from time to time you’re offering followers is a better version of themselves and make them feel more empowered. 

Social media content is based on an exchange of value. Likes, comments, saves or clicks to your link in bio are a way from people to show they value your content. This is why I always recommend creators getting used to with guiding their followers to be more proactive.

Make sure that every post has a call to action, even if it’s something such as “let me know your thoughts in the comments” , as you can see from this example on my personal account, @fabgiovanetti

It’s essential to make sure that your followers are getting used to stepping away from being passive and turning them into ACTIVE followers. 

Make it a natural conclusion of the journey, and after you provide the value in your caption make sure you prompt followers to get involved.

As I mentioned, basic calls to action include:

Ideally, your calls to action are preparing your audience to head to your link in bio and taking further action, which may include

Here’s an example of a very clear link-in-bio call to action we used for @creativeimpactco

Make sure you taker the time to understand what your Instagram goals are, and what actions do your followers need to take in order to get there. Understanding your goals, profile and followers is key when it comes to getting better results on your Instagram strategy (this means running an audit for yourself – something we help our creatives do through our free class).

If you only do one thing today, make sure you align your actions with the end goal in mind, and start adding at least one call to action to each and every one of your posts.

Active followers will become better and more loyal fans, great source of feedback and potentially even customers in the future. To quote Jay Baer from Convince & Convert “Activate your fans, don’t just collect them like baseball cards.”