What’s Your Call to Action?

Too often when I get involved on a marketing campaign I’m met with people who believe passionately in what they do but aren’t sure how best communicate it. They tell me their goal is to communicate information. If you flood the market with information, you’ll reach your customers right? Wrong.
Information blindness happens when there’s so much information, you shut it all out. This shouldn’t be your goal. You need a call to action. You want people to do something with that information.
Example calls to action include:

• Adopt a new system or product. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office promoting a new user-centered personalizable homepage for inventors to manage their intellectual property portfolio.
• Change an opinion. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) demonstrating how useful they are by putting pictures of what they’ve confiscated on their Instagram account. The end goal with this marketing effort is by changing people’s attitude toward the TSA, it makes them easier to work with and people are less likely to think they can sneak things through.
• Change a behavior. The Environmental Protection Agency providing 25 easy steps you can do to protect the climate, reduce greenhouse gas pollution, and save money.

Your goal is never to just communicate with the public what you are doing. If there isn’t an immediate action, like with TSA’s brand management, you’re putting in a long term strategy that will pay out in actions later.

How do you find your call to action? Ask questions:

• What do I want this program to look like in a year?
• Why am I sharing this information?
• What can people do with this information?
• How can people interact with this program?
• What do I want people to feel when they read or engage with the information I’m sharing?

The next time you’re working on a communication plan, always come back to your call to action, your program will be far more successful.

Kirsten O’Nell is part of the GovLoop Featured Blogger program, where we feature blog posts by government voices from all across the country (and world!). To see more Featured Blogger posts, click here.