The Impact of Design on Digital Marketing Success

Regardless of the industry and size of your business, your website is often the first contact point between a potential customer and your brand. For that reason, you need to effectively convey your message through user-friendly, professional web design.

But even though web design is a crucial component of a company’s promotional efforts, many business owners tend to forget that it is just a part of a broader digital marketing plan.

It should be consistent in purpose, look, and feel with your other marketing efforts like SEO and email marketing.

By carefully considering all the aspects of your overall marketing plan, you’ll be able to create an efficient design that serves as the heart of your marketing efforts and will help achieve your goals.

Illustration by Linn Fritz

Key Components of Effective Website Design

Here are four different marketing components that well-executed web design can help with the following aspects.

Consistent Branding

We, people, are visual beings, and, like it or not, first impressions are everything. Since our attention span is almost equal to that of a goldfish, you only have about 5-8 seconds to grab visitors’ attention and make them want to stick around.

Firstly, make sure that your website’s look and feel are consistent with all your other marketing materials, including product sheets, whitepapers, etc.

Secondly, ask yourself: “Is my branding communicating the right message about my business?”

Here are a few elements you need to pay attention to.

Logo

It’s safe to say that a logo is the face of a company. Just think of giants like Apple, McDonald’s, and Nike – you’re able to instantly identify them by just looking at their logos, even if their name isn’t a part of that logo.

Very often, your logo is the first thing that potential customers notice about your business. It’s not just an image; it’s a point of recognition for clients and an important foundation for the branding of your business.

As I mentioned earlier, customers form an opinion about a company in a matter of seconds. A well-designed logo is a great way to tell customers that your business is trustworthy, professional, and provides high-quality services. Luckily, creating an awesome logo is easier than ever. You don’t have to hire a fancy logo designer and break the bank; all you need to do is use a free custom logo maker.

Colors

Colors are very important in marketing and branding because it’s where first impressions of customers are based. In addition, colors are the secret ingredient in producing a solid visual identity for a company. In other words, choosing a certain color scheme can either make or break your business.

Colors are much more than just a visual aid because they convey experiences, emotions, and feelings. Psychologists have found that there’s a meaning behind each color.

For instance, blue is seen as a very positive color that invokes security and trust. It’s also associated with serenity and creation. So, no surprise, it’s the color of choice for many of the top 100 companies, including Facebook, Intel, Samsung, Twitter, etc.

Product page for the website on zero-waste lifestyle

Images

Images act as storytellers. By using high-quality, carefully-composed images, you can evoke an emotion, a vision, or a dream. Your website visitors will ‘read’ the images and make a decision whether or not they want to keep exploring in a split second. When used cleverly, images can help drive more traffic to your site, encourage brand interaction and social shares, and ultimately help you to achieve your business goals.

Dessert recipes blog

Fonts

How many times have you visited a brand’s website and immediately knew you wouldn’t like the company simply based on the fact that the design didn’t sit well with you? Well, chances are fonts have played an important role in your distaste.

Maybe there were too many of them, distracting your attention from the overall message. Or the company used generic fonts that you have already seen hundreds of times. Or they simply used a font that doesn’t match the type of company.

Fonts help you understand the message before even comprehending the words. Along with colors, fonts are the first impression for potential customers, so finding fonts that portray your company’s brand the right way is crucial.

Website design for GNO Blankets brand

Outstanding UX

The concept of “brand” is far more than what your website looks like. A brand is a sum of all customer’s interaction with your company. When it comes to brand image, user experience has a lasting impact. The overall experience your customers have on your site determines whether they’ll remain your customers or complete the purchase.

It is estimated that this year, overall customer experience will be the most important factor impacting which companies consumers choose to do business with, even more important than price and product!

If you create a better UX for your customers, they will have a better relationship with your brand. Here are several things you need to focus on in order to improve the UX for your website visitors:

Add intuitive navigation to your website. When visitors land on your page, they’ll look for markers to orient themselves. Make sure the navigation bar is located near the top of the page and easy to spot. It should also appear in the same location on all website pages.

Ensure your website is error-free. Even though a 100% error-free website is probably impossible to achieve, you should at least strive toward that goal.

Focus on social media integration. There are diverse ways to engage with customers on social media: answer complaints and questions, share content, or respond to mentions in order to provide an overall better UX.

Highlight your mobile-friendliness. Today, 2 out of every 3 minutes spent online are done via mobile devices. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, your brand image will most likely suffer.

Mobile-friendly website of a book festival by Tubik

Email Marketing

We’ve all come across emails that have swept us off our feet (in a good way) and those that we wish we would stop receiving because their design is simply…well, in most cases, there’s no design!

The content conveys the necessary information, but the design is what actually allows readers to navigate the content as the writer intended. In addition to this, great email design captures the reader’s attention and entices them to keep reading once they open the email.

For instance, InVision understands the importance of great visuals, so their weekly newsletter is a perfect mix of images and text. This makes it mobile-friendly but also very easy to read. They also make great use of animated GIFs in their emails, as well as a clever copy on their CTA buttons.

However, sending hundreds or even thousands of emails to potential customers every couple of days is a daunting task. That’s why you need a good automation tool. Outreach tools like GMass will handle numerous aspects of your email marketing campaign like sending personalized emails in bulk, mail merge to email addresses saved in Excel spreadsheets, sending follow-ups, campaign tracking, etc.

SEO & Content Planning

Designing a great looking website is not a guarantee that your website will get a high amount of traffic or that your customer base will grow. If you want to boost the organic traffic, you’ll need to rely on SEO. You can incorporate SEO tactics into more than just your copy. Here are simple tricks that can help you make your web design SEO-friendly too.

Use flash elements sparingly

If you use flash elements, it’ll be more difficult for search engine bots to rank your site. That’s because flash is often devalued or even ignored by search engines, so it won’t add anything to your SEO efforts.

Optimize images too

When choosing images for your site, ensure that they’re not too big. Images that are too large will make your website load slowly, and negatively impact SERP rankings. In addition, make sure to use a keyword in the alt text section of the image to further help with your website’s SEO.

Place your keywords everywhere

Most people concentrate on placing keywords throughout the copy and articles, but they can also be incorporated into the website’s design. Besides in images, keywords can be used in the website slogans, navigation, title tag, H1, H2, and H3 tags, URLs, meta keywords, meta descriptions, bullet points, breadcrumb trails, title attribute on links, internal links, footer links, folder names, and file names.

Integrate social media into your design

This will not only rank your site higher in SERPs, but it will also show potential customers that your company is personable.

Word Out

Effective web design brings together different components of your digital marketing plan and aids the improvement of UX in order to entice users to come back over and over again.

Author: this is the guest post by Hazel Pan, a copywriter whose expertise includes Funnel Copywriting & Inbound Marketing.