Digital marketing has become the epicentre of many businesses. No matter the trade you’re in or the content you share, your digital impression has a lasting effect on your business.
It sounds like a bold statement to make, but if you consider the times you’ve searched for a company website only for the results to turn up empty, you’ll be able to appreciate the impact that has on consumers. A lack of digital presence has a negative impact on businesses whether we like it or not, and while consumers can forgive a minimal social media presence, they don’t easily forgive a poorly designed website.
The scary truth is that all it takes is 0.5 seconds for your online audience to determine if they like or dislike your website. Moreover, with up to 38% of consumers stating that they turn off from a website if the design is too boring or difficult to use, it becomes increasingly obvious that website design is a big deal.
If, prior to reading this, you believed your website to be the best it can be, then perhaps this article isn’t of use to you. However, before you completely dismiss it, ask yourself if your business is doing as well as it can — are your conversion rates good? Do you have regular returning customers? If you’re unable to answer these questions, then you likely need help with your website after all.
Below are four ways in which you can improve your website, turning it from drab and boring into something exciting and engaging.
- View the Competition
Business intrigue is part of the game, so it makes sense for you to take the time and look to your main competitors to see what they’re doing. Visit their website and make a note of all the elements on the site that you think work well, followed by a list of all the areas they could improve on. By taking the time to address both sides of their web design, you can see where you can take inspiration from, as well as identifying what mistakes to avoid. For example, if your competitor fails to include social media buttons, you’ll know to include that when you overhaul your website. It’s a small observation, but it’ll have a large impact.
- Create a Plan
Now that you know the sort of features to implement and avoid, it’s time for you to create a thorough plan of how to introduce these elements into your website design and branding. For those of you who only need to make minimal adjustments, carrying out this work by yourself shouldn’t prove too taxing. However, if there’s a lot of work to be done, it may pay for you to utilise the expertise of website design specialists. Although it’ll come at a cost, by introducing an experienced eye into the mix, you’ll likely make back what you spend in sales from your newly designed website. It’s important to think of the long term benefits of planning and any investments you make.
- Streamline Content
Your customers want relevant information, but they also crave easy to digest content. As a result, it’s worth you editing your content into a more concise, easy to read format; your audience has a short attention span, so keep that in mind as you edit. In addition to this, you also want to rid your site of overused, tired buzzwords, like “next generation” and/or “innovative”. Such phrases have been so over utilised that they lack any real impact on consumers.In fact, they can turn them off to your brand altogether because of how unoriginal your content feels. Your content needs to say something about your brand, not merely regurgitate what every other brand is saying.
- Include Calls to Action
Calls to action, or CTAs, are a vital element of web design that can be overlooked. Businesses can feel that they’re being too pushy or brazen by asking their visitors to engage with certain features, e.g. “like this” or “click here”. However, it’s been proven that well-executed CTAs can greatly improve engagement because they invoke a response from your audience. To ensure you get that response, make sure to use verbs that emphasise carrying out an action. Similar to when you learned English in school, these action verbs create this sense of movement, of doing, which is what CTAs are all about.
Keeping the above steps in mind, we want to go into detail about how such changes translate into better engagement.
There’s plenty of benefits to web design, but we want to highlight a select few to really emphasise the impact you can have. After all, as rewarding as it is to simply give your website a refresh, you want to have peace of mind that what you’re spending your time and money on is useful.
- Returning Customers
We’ve already touched a little before, but it’s worth going into greater detail about your target audience. When a business creates an aesthetically pleasing, easy to navigate website, they immediately invoke a sense of trust from those visiting the site. This, in turn, can lead to an increase in sales because of how credible your brand looks and feels. However, another way you can gain returning customers is by word of mouth, which again comes down to generating trust. If someone purchases from your website and has a good experience, they’ll share that information with their peers, which in turn leads to more interest in your business overall.
- More Sales
Connected to the return of custom comes an increase in sales; you convert visitors into ecommerce and therefore improve your conversion rates. Although this is helped along by more potential customers visiting the site, increased sales also come from having more easy to understand and informative content available. This is why streamlining your content to make it more enticing to the reader is so important — if you don’t give information, people don’t know what the brand or products are about, and they ultimately don’t purchase anything.
- Increased Online Presence
Online presence is everything in today’s society, meaning that those who fail to make themselves known on the internet (and for the right reasons), end up quickly being forgotten. By improving your web design and forming a distinct brand image, you become an authority within your industry. What is more, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience, which then feeds back into the earlier mentioned returning customers. As you can see, one benefit tends to impact another, thus creating a sort of domino effect.
- Easier to Launch Marketing Campaigns
This point isn’t to try and say that marketing suddenly becomes easy just because you have a well-designed website, but rather that it becomes more seamless. When you have a website, you have a central hub with which to launch your marketing campaigns — you can add a blog to your site, you can include affiliate marketing, you can upload videos, you can share industry-focused content, and so on. By doing this, your social media channels become a means of getting the message out there rather than being the only way to deliver the message.
As previously discussed, these are by no means the only advantages of an exciting, revamped website. However, what this article does is to help highlight how taking the time to work on your brand can benefit your business in multiple ways.
