Creativity is at the heart of design-led content marketing. A design offers the first impression of your brand to a company’s customer base. Your web design has an impact on various aspects of a brand’s online presence. From web page layout to color palettes, everything needs careful consideration.
To grab a potential customer’s attention, a business needs to use various marketing strategies. But if you want to inform your customers about your brand while also promoting your business, content marketing is the way to go. Not only does content marketing pique customer interest, but it also informs them of the nitty-gritty details of your brand.
What is Included in Content Marketing?
To build a strong relationship with prospective and existing customers, it’s essential to develop and distribute information to help boost trust among them. Hence, content marketing holds a competitive advantage over other brands, as it has proven to work time and time again. For example, over 68% of customers read about brands that interest them.
Marketing content could include the following:
- How-to guides
- Blogs
- Testimonials and reviews
- Newsletters
- White paper
- Videos
- Social media posts
- eBooks
- Infographics
- Checklists
And more.
No matter which form of content marketing you choose, it is important that it highlights and promotes the products you currently sell.
Let’s suppose you are a carpet cleaning company that also sells high-power vacuum cleaners. To promote your brand, you can share how-to guides about how to clean carpets at home and include your vacuum cleaners in the content. And customers would most likely want to buy the required equipment from your business.
How can Content Marketers Help?
Content marketing is easier said than done. Aside from providing you with well-researched content and editorial calendars, content marketing agencies like Digital Silk specialize in all aspects of your brand’s image as portrayed throughout your platforms.
Having experience with multiple industries and business niches, a content marketing agency holds in-depth knowledge and understanding to aid brands with their content marketing needs. They use their expertise to help companies to move forward in the best way that they know to help them grow. It also enables you to optimize your web design to convert potential customers into paying ones.
How a Website Design Impacts Content Marketing
When customers visit your website, they want to think they are making a well-informed decision about purchasing your business, which is why user-friendliness and excellent web design go hand in hand.
There are a few critical aspects of web design that impact your content marketing strategy. Once customers are driven to the website, you want them to make a purchase. The best way to make that possible is to ensure that your site’s navigation is swift and easy and that their experience is smooth and pleasant. You may also get repeat customers as a result of this.
Another way to look at it is that your web design should be flexible and easy to use to meet the needs of your customers and give your content marketing a boost.
Let’s break it down.
Following are some ways your web design can help augment your content marketing strategy:
Provide Accessibility
Your published content is only helpful if viewers can easily access it. For a website that focuses on publishing a plethora of content, such as how-to guides and info blogs, it is essential that customers are not only able to find it but also read it.
An intuitive design would display related content within reach of the same web page instead of them having to look for it, saving them time and mental bandwidth. It is like providing them with breadcrumbs to follow and to land on a page that may entice them to make a purchase.
With exceptional navigation, customers can land on valuable data without much effort. Customers will likely switch to a competitor if your website is difficult to understand or navigate.
Drop-down menus are another way to provide accessibility, as well as adding options for the back page. Make sure your customers can go back to where they came from to avoid any confusion or frustration.
E-commerce websites often place product displays within an article if a customer wants to make a purchase. Alternatively, you could include a link to another related to the original one so that the reader is directed to that information.
For instance, if you write an article about “how to take care of your new pet,” you can add another relatable article about “10 must-have pet grooming gadgets” within the article. But placement is essential, and content marketing agencies help with these delicate details.
Give First Impression
To keep it simple, your web design should appear professional and aesthetic. You need to keep these two words in mind when considering your website’s first look. Visitors build an impression as soon as they click on your websites. If they don’t find it visually appealing, it doesn’t matter if your content is good enough because they might bounce back.
An unattractive layout and no sense of a color scheme would not make a customer want to keep scrolling through the website. So, to ensure a customer stays and doesn’t leave, you have to be careful of your website’s curb appeal.
To give you an idea, you should focus on making your webpage intuitive and straightforward. Don’t overcomplicate things.
Say you have a blog site with lots of new, old, and popular posts. What can you do to make your visitors see all the popular topics yet find the latest ones?
Here’s one way:
- The frequently looked-for topics should appear at the top.
- The search bar should also be visible to visitors so they can look for unlisted topics.
While you want your visitors to have a view of everything, make sure to avoid clutter and not display everything. A cluttered web page makes a visitor indecisive. Plus, with their eyes exerting so much pressure, they would take one look and want to head back.
Stay consistent with the overall look of the webpage. All of the following aspects need to be cohesive and neat.
- Colors
- Fonts
- Alignment
- Consistency
Efficient use of white space creates balance, which helps to avoid the cluttered look. Remember, simple is always better.
Enhance Reading Experience
An idealistic web design helps enhance the reading experience of users. This could be done by making the right choice of graphics, fonts, spacing, colors, and more. Readability helps with website engagement as well, leading to growth in conversion rates.
Web design software may offer you various fonts to select from. This does not mean that you use all of them. The best way to choose fonts is to pick one for the headings and another for the paragraphs and stick to that. This makes the page look professionally formatted and consistent throughout all web pages.
Using multiple fonts can appear messy and incoherent. Moreover, your primary focus should be on ensuring that users get what they are coming for, i.e., information.
Moving forward, don’t use a font color that blends into the background or clashes with it violently. It’s most likely customers won’t strain their eyes to read it.
Hence, keep in mind the following:
- The font should be large enough to read.
- The font type should be plain and not cursive.
- Eye-appealing, contrasting colors should be used for the background.
- Avoid interfering with visual elements.
Other than that, not only do readers want to find content quickly, they want to be able to go through it as soon as possible. This means you need to structure your content so that all points are shared with the reader quickly.
A web design template that helps you with that content placement is essential to helping you achieve your content marketing goals. Content alignment with web design is vital to enhance brand visibility.
A good-quality piece of content also offers a higher readability rate. This includes service pages, web pages, blog posts, landing pages, and prices. Grammarly and Hemingway Editors are good sources where you can run your content to help you test the readability of your content.
Emotions and Understanding
To have higher user engagement in your content, you need it to evoke emotions and show understanding. Not only should your readers feel understood, but they should also receive the message you are trying to send across.
Along with written content, it’s ideal for providing customers with snippets of your brand through social media posts, quick tutorials, short videos, GIFS, animations, infographics, etc.
For example, if you have pictures on your website, it should include all the intuitive features you can think of. You can use Amazon as an example, and they make sure that customers don’t only read about the product but also get a good look at it. Hence, users can zoom in and out on pictures. Plus, they share multiple product images rather than just one to provide a complete experience.
Furthermore, they also allow customers to share reviews and images to build trust—this is all part of web design and content marketing strategies.
Wrapping Up
Lastly, your web design should be personal yet functional across all devices, such as phones and laptops.
We hope you understand how web design can enhance your content marketing efforts. Simply put, it is like inviting customers to your shop and making sure that they feel comfortable and have access to all products, along with information.
