3 Ways To Call Your Audience To Action

By Cesar Cervantes & Steve Hayward

For the purposes of this blog post, when we say "call to action," we don't necessarily mean a call to purchase a program or sign up for your newsletter (though if you haven't please do sign up for mine!)😁. There certainly is a time and place for that call to action, but what we mean here is a call for your audience to take your message forward. At its core, your call to action needs to say very clearly how your audience can be part of solving the problem you started with. But there's a deeper way to think about this: What's the gift you want to leave your audience with? What's that one thing you want them to take away?

Here are three ways to deliver your call to action:

Full Circle

Go back to that first question we asked you, what gift do you want to give your audience? Now answer these questions:

1. When I first started working on this problem/idea, what I wished I knew was …
2. If I could go back and tell my earlier self one thing about this, it would be ...

Your call to action might be hiding in the gap between what you needed to know then and what you know now. That's the gift. That’s what you’re leaving with your audience, the one thing they’ll take with them from your talk. 

The Legacy Question

Another way to arrive at your call to action is to ask yourself what part of your talk you want to stick to those who hear it. Imagine it's ten years from now. Someone who watched your speech runs into you and remembers one thing from it—what would you want it to be?

1. The action they took? 
2. The change this created in their life?
3. A single sentence that changed their perspective? 

The most vivid and specific answer might be your "one thing"—the heart of your call to action.

Permission

Many really transformative and compelling calls to action involve giving the audience some form of permission—whether it’s to change something in their life or the way they think, to get out of a relationship (or into one), to move from knowing that they need to do something and actually doing it. Find out if your talk is one of those by seeing if you can answer these questions:

1. What belief is holding them back? 
2. What are they afraid of? 

Whether you're giving a keynote or a TEDx talk, your call to action should feel like a treasure, not a demand. It's the moment when you take everything you've shared—your expertise, your story, your solutions—and transform it into an invitation. It's where you say, "Here's what I want to leave you with ..." and offer them the very thing you wished someone had given you when you first started this journey. 

If you're ready to write, land and deliver your TEDx talk or keynote speech, schedule a call with Cesar here!