When coming up with marketing strategies for your business, it’s essential to take web design into account. Web design is important for your marketing strategy more than ever. Your website is no longer just there so you can have something of an online presence; it’s a key component of how people discover you and decide whether or not to work with you. Here’s what you need to know about why web design is important for your marketing strategy and how to achieve success with your website’s design.
Web Design Is More Important Than Ever Before
Marketing is shifting more and more online. When you want to know about restaurants or businesses nearby, you turn to search engines. When you want to check the reputability of a business or a product, you look up online reviews and ratings. When you want to see what services a business offers, you want to be able to click through their website and have all the information you need at your fingertips.
As such, a beautiful, functional web design is important for your marketing strategy more than ever, and will likely only get more and more important as time goes by.
It’s About More Than Looks
You need your website to look good in order for people to want to spend time on it. But web design is important for your marketing strategy in more ways than just being aesthetically pleasing. A beautiful website that isn’t functional or designed well beyond presenting a pretty picture won’t help your marketing strategy much. In addition to being attractive, web design needs to take several other factors into consideration in order to be effective for your marketing strategy. Some of these factors are as follows:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is essential to a functional web design. While traditionally, SEO and web design have been pitted against each other, the truth is that you need both in order for your website to benefit your business. SEO increases your website’s visibility in search results by using keywords your target audience searched for, using correct links, positioning content in a way to increase visibility, and by making it easier for users to interact with your website.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Your CRO measures how your website performs in order to make for a better user experience. How your website looks affects how effective it is, so you want a good balance between functional and simple. Too complex, and your website will slow down, which will drive potential customers away. Too simple, and your potential customers will be bored and leave to find another site that is more engaging.
User Experience (UX)
The user experience is one reason why web design is important for your marketing strategy. A good experience, and people are more likely to use your services than that of your competitors’, because they like your site. You want your website to be easy to navigate, load quickly, and to be attractive, crisp, and clean.
Analytics
You may have had a fantastic web design a few years ago, but times are constantly changing. Analytics is a key part of having a good website that helps your business. As times change, so too does your website need to change. Analytics will help you see how your website is performing, so you can make any necessary changes.
Branding
Web design is important for your marketing strategy in regards to your branding, too. You need it to be consistent with your brand across other platforms, on and off-line. Your website should reflect your brand positively, so that when people click on it, they get a good impression of you. A bad web design can destroy your chances of this.
Marketing Success With Web Design
As you see, having a good web design is important for your marketing strategy in a number of ways. When you’re coming up with your strategy, don’t forget about your website. Your website should be a priority when it comes to marketing. It’s how people will discover you, learn about you, form impressions of you. It’s important that it’s designed well and reflects you. Many businesses spend a good portion of their marketing budget on their website, precisely because of how vital it is.
Professional Web Design And Marketing
Performance Driven Marketing offers professional web design and marketing services for all your needs. We have a free website SEO audit so that you can see how well your website is performing. If you need help with your website or your marketing strategy, schedule a consultation today! We’re happy to help however we can.
Every year, content and how it intersects with web design changes. Content is king, and with how much content is out there, yours needs to be top tier in order to lure people to spend more time on your site. Web design impacts content marketing significantly, heightening the importance of truly stellar web design for an effective content marketing strategy. For the best results, you need your content and your design to work in tandem. Here’s what you need to know about some of the ways in which web design impacts content marketing.
#1. Makes Content More Accessible
It doesn’t matter how well-written and engaging your content is if your web design makes it hard to access. Web design impacts content marketing through making said content easily accessible with the implementation of intuitive navigation, so that people can easily click through your site without having to put in a lot of effort to try to find the pages that they’re looking for. If your users have to click through pages that have nothing to do with the information they want in order to get to said information, they’ll likely abandon your site out of frustration and irritation.
There are more and more websites being created every day – people don’t have the patience to deal with an inaccessible site. Luckily, web design impacts content marketing positively when it works with a sitemap, to make finding what you’re looking for a breeze. When web designers ensure there are menus, such as drop-down menus and hamburger menus, and search bars at the top of the site, it makes it so much easier for people to navigate through your site, causing people to spend more time on your site and be more likely to use your services.
The user experience, as always, is key. If someone finds your site through one of the pages that popped up in their Google search, you want them to be able to navigate through your site with ease from any page that they’re on, not simply the home page. Web design impacts content marketing through ensuring this.
#2. Enhances Content’s Aesthetic Appeal
Have you ever clicked onto a site just to see a massive block of text and clicked right out to find another site with similar content arranged in a more aesthetically pleasing way? Looks matter a lot, which is a key way web design impacts content marketing. Content needs to be neatly spaced and presented in a tidy, easily readable manner that is consistently placed throughout the website.
A page that is well designed, with a nice font, colors that work with your brand and on the eyes, that uses white space well, that is aligned neatly – these are all ways that content’s made easier to read. The simpler the better. People don’t want to have to scroll and scroll and scroll to try to find the information they want. Web design impacts content marketing by designing pages that are cohesive, neat, and organized clearly, so people can instantly find the information they’re looking for.
#3. Engages Readers
This way web design impacts content marketing goes hand in hand with the above point. It’s fine to read a page that is organized well, and that’s it. But a well-designed page that makes use of visual elements such as pictures and videos and graphs and the like? That makes the content more interesting and gives readers something to engage with. It’s all well and good to talk about how to fix a plumbing problem, but when you include images and videos, it makes that information really sink in and makes it so much easier to understand.
The more engaged your reader is with your content, the more effective your content marketing will be. Web design allows you to work with visual elements to enhance your content, break complex information down further into something easy to understand by someone who has no knowledge of your industry, and increases the likelihood that someone will work with your business.
#4. Enriches The Reading Experience
Web design impacts content marketing too, with how it enriches the overall reading experience, both through the ways listed above, and through the colors and fonts used on the site. If your fonts and colors are all over the place, it makes your site look jumbled and disorganized and unprofessional.
Colors and fonts that are consistent across your site and that fit with your brand and your industry can make your site that much more readable. You want your font color to complement your background color. A good contrasting color, plain and easy to read fonts, and consistency across your site will make your site that much more professional and easy to navigate.
These are but a few of the ways in which web design impacts content marketing. As you can see, it’s vital to have a good web design in order to ensure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. Performance Driven Marketing has several professional web designers in house who can create a beautiful, functional website for your business that will take your content marketing to the next level. Contact us today for more information!
If you hear the term “environmental graphic design”, your mind might take that to mean “environmentally-friendly graphic design”, leading you to wonder how something that involves designing logos and the layout of promotional products impacts the environment. While understandable that your mind would go that route, environmental graphic design actually refers to the usage of graphic design elements such as typography and imagery to provide visual cues that inform people about how to navigate through a space.
Environmental graphic design is a key part of the interior design of a building, way-finding, and more. It does indeed impact the environment, but not in the kind of environment you may initially think. The goal of environmental graphic design is to implement graphics that ensure it’s easy for people to make their way around a facility, be it a stadium, museum, conference space, public transportation, and more.
Factors Involved In Environmental Graphic Design
It’s one thing to know the purpose of environmental graphic design, it’s another entirely to make effective ones. There are several essential factors involved in this type of graphic design that go hand-in-hand with traditional graphic design. You need to understand the intention of the people who will visit that environment, and what their experience there should be. A person’s experience in a place will be dictated by whether they are there to complete a task, to be social, to explore, to be entertained, or to learn.
Once you understand the purpose of your intended audience, you’ll be able to create a design that both speaks to their purpose, and yours. This includes:
Your unique brand personality
What sets you apart from the competition
Designs that create value for your customers
Environmental graphic design is more than just imagery that speaks to your brand identity, but that also conveys your values, your purpose, your vision. Good designs combine the customer experience of those who experience your environment with your brand, why people should do business with you, and garner an idea of what working with you will be like.
The Different Types Of Environmental Graphic Design
As you can see, environmental graphic design is incredibly broad, so we’re going to break it down to some of the most common types that you’ll encounter.
Way-finding
As the name suggests, this refers to designs that make a path throughout an environment that help people navigate an unfamiliar space. Way-finding utilizes icons, aspects of interior design, such as arrows, and placement of branding elements that both guide customers throughout your space and are consistent with your brand.
Environmental Branding
Plain walls and blank environments work in some cases to cultivate a minimal atmosphere, but they likely won’t help people move through your space. Environmental branding refers to utilizing graphics, such as your logo, to bring your space to life and set the tone for your space and your business. This gives people a sense of your brand while helping them navigate the space.
Signage
This works in tandem with way-finding, but can be set apart. Way-finding can use signage to assist people in finding their way, but signage not only identifies a place, but delivers information, and can be found on company vehicles, temporary mounted signs, and more.
How Environmental Graphic Design Helps Your Business
Just like the user experience is one of the most essential components of website design, environmental graphic design works in a similar way, through making the customer experience walking through a space more positive and higher quality. Architecture influences human behavior in curating specific environments and atmospheres that tell people how they are expected to behave in a space; environmental graphic design influences people in how they think of your brand, how it makes them feel, and whether or not they’re inclined to want to work with you.
Good environmental graphic design will create a positive experience that both informs and guides people in a way that remains true to your company brand, values, and mission. With how vital it is, it’s essential to ensure that the designs you have are high quality and professional, which one of the expert graphic designers at Performance Driven Marketing can make for you.
Do You Need Environmental Graphic Designs?
Performance Driven Marketing has several experienced graphic designers in house who can both help you come up with a brand identity and come up with designs for your website, promotional materials, environment, and more that help generate you more business. We also offer digital marketing services such as SEO and web development. To learn more about how we can help you, don’t hesitate to contact us today!
