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Why Your Video Needs a Call to Action

When making videos for marketing your brand or business, you have a purpose in mind. Or at least you should. This might be something like getting more people to know about your business, or showing why your product is worth buying, or teaching your audience how to do something related to your products and services. And sometimes, the only goal is to entertain people. The point is, your video has an objective. But does it have a call to action for people to take after the video is complete? 

Now that they’ve learned about your company, or you’ve taught them how to do something, the last thing you want to do is lose that momentum. Instead, what you need is a call to action to capitalize on the goodwill and appreciation your video generated. 

A call to action is a message that urges the viewer to do something. The “something” depends on the marketing objective of the content – it might be to buy a product, call the company, sign up for an email list, or subscribe to a social channel. The CTA doesn’t have to be directly tied to the content of the video to be effective. 

There are several ways to include a CTA in your video. Because a lot of people watch videos on mute, especially on social media, it’s a good idea to make your call to action visual. 

You could add a slide into the video with your call to action in it. If doing this, it’s best to keep the design simple so that it’s easy to read. Solid color and big blocky text would work. Generally, the CTA is placed at the end of a video, but that might not be the best place for it. Check your video analytics to see when most people stop watching your videos, then place your CTA before that point. 

An analysis of 56,000 videos found that, on average, people stopped watching about halfway through the video. So if having people act on your CTA is especially important, it’s best to place the CTA before this halfway point. 

Another effective form of a call to action is to bake it right into the video by having the on-screen person tell the audience what action should be taken. The most popular form of this, on YouTube at least, is the host reminding people to subscribe to the channel. 

Whether you insert a slide or make the CTA part of the video, the important part is that you include it in the video. You can also write that call to action in the caption or description part of your post to reinforce the message and provide a clickable link they can follow. 

How to write an effective call to action

For a button-type call to action, you generally only have a couple of words. Buy Now, Sign Up, Learn More, and Try for Free are all popular. You can use more words in a video, but you still want to keep it short and snappy. 

Whichever form you’re using, include strong action verbs – words that encourage the viewer to do something. You also want to be direct. Ask them to do exactly what you want – Subscribe to our newsletter, buy this product, Subscribe to our channel, download our app. 

For an added boost, you can incentivize the call to action by giving something away. For a subscription service app, it could be something like “Sign up now for a free month,” or it could be that their action earns them a giveaway entry. 

And the age-old sales trick of adding a sense of urgency works here, to – get a free thing when you sign up today is a common one, with the “thing” being whatever you decide. 

Ready to make a video but need some help with it? Get in touch to find out how Dream It Reel can bring your project to life. 

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