Google Adwords, social marketing, creative landing pages–it sounds like the must-have digital marketing mix, right? But there’s one additional factor that will render all your other efforts useless if you don’t have it: optimized design.
Are you blowing your marketing budget on digital marketing and SEO and still not seeing enough conversions? If so, the good news is it may have nothing to do with your products or services.
Rather, the issue may lie in how you present your best selling points.
Let’s explore what optimized design entails and how you can put it to work for your website.
What is Optimized Design?
Simply put, optimized design is the process of crafting your website to achieve certain objectives.
For some businesses, this could mean having visitors sign up for a newsletter or other program. For others, this might mean making a purchase.
Regardless of what you want your website to do, the right optimized design can help you earn more conversions.
Usability plays a large role in optimized design, but it’s not the only consideration. To truly optimize your website, you’ll also need to consider visual elements, text, images, and other content and how these pieces will work together to up the conversion rate.
4 Pro Tips for a Powerful Optimized Design
Optimizing for SEO is just the beginning. Without an optimized design, your digital marketing will never achieve its highest capacity, no matter how much money you spend.
Before you invest another cent on ads or content, follow these four pro tips for a supercharged website design:
Tip #1 – Make the End Your Beginning
Optimized design isn’t something you should invest in because someone told you to. Rather, think of what specifically you want your website to achieve and work from there.
These goals should go beyond making sales. Depending on your business, you’ll need to complete an entire buyer journey before a buyer is ready to purchase. This may take the form of explaining more about your business, or showing how your products and services can help others.
Asides from purchases, what do you want your audience to do after they visit your website?
Enter their email address?
Build loyalty?
Request more information?
Websites can achieve a variety of goals, so think carefully about yours and how you can craft your website to reach your end result.
Tip #2 – Avoid the ‘Information Only’ Objective
Information can be a powerful lead magnet, but it’s not always enough to create conversions. If you’re offering valuable insights, you also need a way to monetize those insights.
Start by including calls-to-action with your blog posts or data. These CTAs are often helpful to people looking to learn more about what you’ve given them. It provides them with the next step, an answer to the “So what?” question they may have after reading your content.
CTAs encourage a reader to take action on your website. Whether they request information to learn more or sign up for a weekly newsletter, you earn the opportunity to engage with them and move them to the next phase of the funnel.
When crafting your CTAs, try to avoid the generic “Learn More.” This rarely does more than sending them in a linear direction rather than the next stage of the buying process.
A better CTA could be to encourage the reader to fill out your contact form or schedule a call with one of your sales reps.
Tip #3 – Keep it Simple
No one wants to crack a code to find out what you can do for them.
Make sure your website text gets to the point quickly. When your audience is able to easily scan your content, they’re more likely to understand your objectives.
To do this, break up your content with headers. Limit paragraphs to a few sentences to avoid large blocks of text. Separate subjects into different web pages or areas to make it easier to find specific information.
Limiting your message may sound counterproductive, but it’s not. When you give your reader bite-sized pieces of information, they’re better able to digest what you’re saying. This can go a long way in boosting data retention and reducing bounce rate.
Tip #4 – Optimize for All Stages of the Buyer Journey
Your website isn’t just a lead generation tool. It should cater visitors at every stage of the buying journey.
There are three core stages of the customer journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. If you want to move newcomers in the Awareness phase to the Decision step, you’ll need to fill your website with the right content to help make those transitions.
First, consider how you’re presenting your homepage. This main webpage is likely the first impression someone has with your company (aside from landing pages).
On your homepage, you’ll want to communicate clearly what your company offers and why it should matter to the viewer.
In addition, you should offer additional resources that contribute to the Consideration stage. This might include blog articles that talk about your services or position you as the industry expert. Or, you might have other resources, like an e-book or white paper that provides helpful information.
Finally, you need to ask for the conversion. Sign-up forms, checkout pages, and buying buttons can help you move a prospect into paying customer status.
It’s important not to assume that each person who lands on your website is ready to convert. Oftentimes, people want to know more about your brand and why they should do business with you.
By using this type of design for each portion of the buying journey, you’re better able to cater to all audience members regardless of when they’re ready to make a decision.
In Closing
It’s important to know that this design isn’t an end goal, but rather an ongoing project. You need to put a lot of work into your website, but ultimately your website should work for you, not the other way around.
If you’re investing in digital marketing to drive website traffic, use the above tips for optimized design before you sink another dollar of your budget.
Visit our blog for more ways you can tweak your website for healthier profits.