Comment by matsz
3 days ago
Arguably CTA isn't exactly an obscure acronym. It's multi-disciplinary - quite common in UI/UX design and marketing; and also decently common in any branched of software engineering that interact with these topics, like... web development.
CTA is very obscure. As a mobile dev I refuse to call CTA as anything other than click or tap to action in which case it should be TPA. Also many folks (esp. PMs confuse CTAs with button clicks). Anyway, CTA in this context didn’t even ring a distant bell either for call or click and I am glad it didn’t.
I think in UI design it usually is intended to refer to the main thing you want/expect a user to do in any given situation, i.e. having multiple CTAs is a bit of an oxymoron while having multiple buttons is not.
Wait, the acronym for "Tap To Action" is "TPA"?
Nah, I meant to type TTA but now that I have mistyped TPA I should make that Tap Pour Action - Tap for Action (I am not trying the double meaning here, just to clarify).
I’ve worked with marketer types for over a decade and had them use the initialism “CTA” hundreds of times, understood it, and yet still in this comment I had no idea that they were referencing that term. If this was a UI diagram I’d have had no problem. This seems to me like a case where using an initialism in a different context than it usually appears confuses readers. It would kind of be like saying “I plan to GTM for a few things after work today.” You may recognize that as Go-To-Market if I said “the GTM team” at work, but it is strange outside that context. Outside a marketing or UI context I don’t think people usually initialize “CTA.”
What the hell does GTM even mean?
How many industries can prosper by defining what the customer should get and have an endless stream of demand in response?
Isn’t GTM just “business 101”? I really don’t understand how people can use the term and not realize they are screaming “we’re going to do the basics of what we should have been doing all along”.
Imagine if software developers championed a “logic” based approach.
In a B2B company context, the Go-To-Market or GTM team means the whole sales team, plus everybody else who manages customer accounts. Customer Success, etc. as opposed to the product parts of the company.
If said like "let's GTM" it usually means getting on a call. Stands for Go-To-Meeting, the main business videoconference software before Zoom took over.
It's specific to marketing and it's a term I've only seen used when you are trying to sell a product. In my mind, CTA means "the button we are trying to make you click on by any means necessary because we make money when you click on it"
I've worked in software engineering on Internet things for decades and I have not once heard or seen this abbreviated before.
“Call to Action” is common. CTA instead of call to action is not common.
It might not be obscure in an environment that lives on 'social activity', but I can assure you -- and I am saying this as a person, who survives daily barrages of acronyms, CTA is not common.