Wouldn’t it be nice if your website’s design is a medium of marketing in and of itself? Small and medium business (SMB) owners know everything about their product, service, or brand, but most of the time they have a lot to learn about everything else. In Internet marketing, unfortunately, there is a ton of potentially very technical stuff every SMB entrepreneur needs to face, like webmaster essentials to search engine optimization (SEO) to actual marketing concepts.
Don’t furrow your brows in apprehension just yet, however, as sometimes it’s all about figuring out what you’re doing – or not doing – to practice practical marketing through website design. Here are a few things you can look into:
Prominent USP
Is your business or brand unique? The notion of uniqueness is so significant that often entrepreneurs are at a loss on how to make their unique selling proposition (USP) – their uniqueness – stand out. A tenet for fiction writers can help: show, don’t tell.
Though it’s more like “show, not just tell.” In your website’s design, make sure your USP tagline or pitch is prominent and present in almost every facet. It’s almost certain you’ll put it below the website banner name, but will you also place it in your site’s meta data for search engine results pages (SERPs) to pick it up? Don’t stop there – make your uniqueness show in your checkout cart or in your product category pages. Keep reminding your audience what your USP is and what your website or brand is about and make it stick.
Simple, Effective Call to Action
Ever hear your math teachers back in school say that the straightest way from point A to B is a straight line? This simplicity is easily lost in the midst of technological and Web-based marketing innovations these days. If you’re going to commit to a call to action, make it simple and effective.
For instance, you make a call to action footer in blog posts simple by keeping it short and straightforward. You make these footers effective by tailoring what they say to the blog post they appear in. Some information stay the same, but to actually call your readers to action, subtle changes in some points are necessary.
To put this in perspective, say you wrote a blog post about how mosquito repellants work. In your blog footer-slash-call to action, if you place links to related articles or recommended product reviews, your readers are more likely to take action and click on these links. The “add to cart” and “buy now” buttons in your front-end, point-of-sale websites is another example. Keep them simple – no flamboyant circles or colors. Make them effective – making use of color schemes that blandly blend into the scheme of your website will have them be ignored. You also might want to put them where they can easily be accessed if in case a visitor is interested in a particular product. When it comes to colors, you also want to know what works well with what in terms of appeal and effect on consumers.
For instance, blue is generally unappetizing so it might not be the best color to use on a recipe website or blog about cuisine, and choosing the positive green over the alarming red gives off a better feel for websites about finance or financial advice.
Site Structure in a Marketing Perspective
If you know a bit about SEO then you should also know that search engines give more authority to sites that are structured well. If your website’s page structure – and keyword structure – is a mess, that website’s authority and SERP ranking will decrease. This is not just an arbitrary technicality, it also has to do with how easier search engine spiders can crawl your website’s structure to find relevant keywords.
Your site structure is also pertinent in a marketing perspective. Structuring your website’s pages to properly reflect marketing strategy, or at the very least product and service breakdowns, give you an organizational boost in terms of logistics and appeals well to search engines.
Target Marketing + Neuro Marketing
Does your plethora of product choices prevent your customers from purchasing any single one? It’s called choice paralysis, a phenomenon where an abundance of choices of one particular product causes confusion in potential customers and leads to them not making a choice at all. If you consider this in your website design, then you’re doing a bit of neuro marketing.
You are probably already practicing target marketing from the get-go, but you also need to go deeper into the psychology of marketing and consumer behavior to avoid pitfalls like choice paralysis. What typically happens in that kind of situation is that the businessman thinks people don’t buy anything because of lack of options. He then increases the number of options which make the chances of triggering choice paralysis that much higher.
Even in social media a bit of psychological analysis makes significant impacts. Did you know that people click links on Twitter posts more often if they are placed near the beginning or at the very end of a tweet?
Then there is also conforming to your target market’s lifestyle. Lifestyle marketing is a higher level of target marketing, where you not only take your target market’s demographics into consideration, but also factor in their lifestyles. Obviously, this is a much more important consideration for lifestyle services and products, but its effective use is invaluable. One way to perform lifestyle marketing is by providing mass customization options for your product or service, where consumers can customize facets of it to conform to their Internet shopping lifestyle.
Marketing Through Design
Advertising is the art of persuasion and the science of consumer psychology combined. Luckily, as an online entrepreneur you don’t have to be a persuasive artist or a doctor of psychology or expert of market analysis. You just need to figure out which facets of your SMB websites are contradicting your marketing goals, and tweak your design to advertise. That is practical marketing through website design.
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