As the process of building a website evolves and more technology becomes available, so does the importance of keeping up with the functionality of a modern website.
For most, the style or creativity a company uses on their website, heavily influences the way in which visitors interact with the brand.
However, style isn’t everything when it comes to having a modern website. Oftentimes, the elements you provide on your website will make or break the user experience. If you are looking to provide clarity, insight, product information, and a look into your brand’s culture, you have to choose your modern web design elements wisely. And the best way to accomplish this is by reaching out to your audience.
With that said, understand the value of building a well-planned and properly developed website with interactive marketing through the three following solutions.
Engage with your audience through Modern Website Design
Though relevant content is top dog, and content management system-based websites are now appearing more minimalistic due to easy-to-manage solutions, the website of today should focus on the following components:
- User Experience: Your user’s experience is the foundation of your website’s success. Build a website with your customers in mind. They drive your sales. They drive your brand. Let them drive your website as well.
- Responsive Design: Websites need to be responsive. From tablets to mobile phones, make sure that your website reaches your audience in every avenue that they go online, especially when 27% of consumers will leave a site if it is not mobile-optimized.
- Interactive Marketing: Marketing should not just be focused on your goals. In fact, interactive marketing is based on the actions of your customers. This means you have to interact with your audience to learn what problems and needs they have which can be addressed on your website. This helps to hit right on the mark with your audience—guiding them through a unique user experience personalized for your audience.
- Growth-Driven Design: This is a newer concept, yet effective in its discipline. By creating a launch pad website utilizing the principles of growth-driven design, you can build your website and go live with it quickly in order to learn how your audience is interacting with your website. Don’t allow your website to become stagnant. Take out the guesswork and enforce a continuous redesign process that targets problem areas more efficiently through current user data.
Explore further how to tap out of traditional website design and rise to marketing success by reading this article here.
People ignore design that ignores people.—Frank Chimero
Get noticed with Search Engine Optimization
Because marketers and business owners alike are reliant on how Google and other search engines index the content they produce, it is important to know and understand how they read your website. A strong, well-planned SEO strategy is imperative to the success of your business website. For example, creating an in-depth and current keyword list based on your buyer personas makes the marketing process that much easier on every level. From content creation to website design, knowing your buyer personas’ needs and what types of content they are interested in will help you create an effective buyer’s journey from first interaction to the closing of the sale. Search Engine Watch does an exceptional job in explaining the importance of usability to successful modern web design as well as these following articles on search engine optimization best practices to get you noticed locally and beyond:
- How to Crush Your Local SEO Marketing
- SEO Best Practices for Successful Video Distribution
- Content Marketing SEO for your Business Blog
- Deploy a Winning Keyword Strategy to Please Website Visitors & Boost SEO
PRO TIP: Tough Love Marketing Tip. Different audiences respond in different ways. What works for one industry won’t work for yours.
Attract, Convert, Close and Delight your customers with Inbound Website Design
When you are looking to develop a modern website that captures and captivates an audience, you have to understand that audience. To get the most out of a business website, you should make sure it is sales-ready. With the recent breakthroughs in collaboration of marketing, sales, and advertising, it is now more important than ever for your website to be the hardest working employee on your payroll. To see the results you are looking for, you should think about the following elements of an inbound website:
- Calls To Action (CTAs): Cultivate action and drive traffic to your lead generating landing pages by offering relevant and valuable content to your audience.
- Landing page & forms: Every campaign you run should be tied to a custom-landing page—not just another homepage where visitors have to guess where to go next. Create a landing page with a form to gather the necessary information that you need from your audience—allowing them to unlock your offer while you benefit from this transaction by acquiring their email and other additional information for future encounters and campaigns.
- Personalization: People are more than anonymous page views. Smart content is a feature that enables you to personalize your content to different visitors. Make your audience’s buyer experience memorable by creating a personalized experience especially with marketing tools like marketing segmentation and marketing automation.
- Integration with Marketing Channels: Every marketing tool from content tools, social media, marketing automation and analytics are all deeply cooperative and connected to a marketer’s contact database. This allows for a complete history of your lead’s interests and interactions, enabling personalization throughout your marketing.
The ambiguity that is running rampant in the digital world is a reaction to creating the perfect user experience. However, don’t get weighed down by all of the options available. Rather, take a good look at your customer base, your potential customers, and the way they engage and interact with your website. From there, build a website that suits their needs and interests. Build a website that fits best with your community through learning more from the following articles:
- Thought Hive: Growth-Driven Design Priorities and Challenges
- “Must Have” Characteristics of a Growth-Driven Website
- FAQ Friday: Interactive Marketing and Growth-Driven Design
Your customers: They drive your sales. They drive your brand. Let them drive your website as well.
Don’t Be Afraid of Trial and Error
It is no secret that video is ruling the digital world right now. Strategically placing video throughout the content on your website will dramatically increase the ease with which you communicate with your website visitors. It can allow you to quickly and clearly communicate marketing messages, product demos, interviews, and reviews in a way that is informative and bite-sized. Don’t be afraid to get hands-on and experimental with your marketing. Learn how to build a website that increases your digital presence with an improved user experience by watching this In-Sites video:
Your customers are not you. They don’t look like you, they don’t think like you, they don’t do the things that you do and they don’t have your expectations or assumptions. If they did, they wouldn’t be your customers; they’d be your competitors.—Mike Kuniavsky
Decide what is best for your audience and run with it. Keeping up with the latest modern web design trends may be keeping you down. Remember, you have to know what your website design does for your visitors, not the trendsetting general public. Be interactive. Be engaging and build a website with interactive marketing.
To see examples of interactive video and to read more about how it can help you, explore here or watch a replay of our live streaming event about interactive video by clicking the banner below.
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