Digital marketing enables more businesses to reach their target customers, even when they have a relatively limited budget. There are a lot of advantages offered by digital marketing. Aside from being highly targeted, digital marketing is also highly optimisable, which means you can set specific goals and fine-tune your digital marketing campaigns for them.
Digital marketing lets you aim for exposure or reach, conversion, and even lead generation and sales with the help of different instruments. However, an effective website sits at the heart of every successful digital marketing campaign. There are reasons why a well-designed website plays an important role in your digital marketing campaigns, and we are going to review them in this article.
User Experience Matters
One thing that separates a well-designed website from the rest is the user experience it delivers. You can’t expect a poorly planned website to offer the same customer experience as a website designed by experts and based on good understanding of the target audience. Good web design simply takes user experience to the next level.
In this respect, working with professional web designers is the way to go. Professionals and experienced designers have the experience and expertise to attend to every detail and fine-tune different web elements for a seamless user experience. For example, Pelling Marketing by Design, a leading web design agency based in Farnham, takes this approach to the next level and really aims for great designs rather than just good ones. They understand the importance of an easy-to-use website which means functionality and reliability – so if you’re not sure how to achieve that you may be better off speaking to a professional.
Great user experience will also affect other parts of your digital marketing campaigns. For starters, websites that deliver good and consistent user experience are ranked higher by search engines. Emphasis on mobile user experience will get your site’s SEO performance even higher, even before you optimise the site further.
Search Engine Optimization
Speaking of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, good web design has a big role in determining your site’s overall SEO performance. For starters, the web elements used to construct the site and the way they are structured really affect how search engine crawlers see and understand your site. The use of meta tags and alt tags to make the entire site more readable to crawlers can take your site’s SEO performance to the next level.
The site can also be optimised for faster loading and better user-friendliness. Site performance is an important metric tracked by search engines since it is part of the overall user experience. A site with optimised images, minimised CSS and JavaScript files, and other optimisations implemented properly at the design stage will perform much better.
User-friendliness involves ensuring consistent UX across all browsers and devices. Today, good web design means mobile-friendliness and relying on optimised responsive design to deliver good user experience on mobile devices. The ‘optimised’ part is important because simply having a responsive site is not enough. Images and other web elements need to be tuned for mobile devices – which now have higher screen density – to achieve the right level of consistency.
Optimized for Conversion
The last and most prominent way good web design can affect your digital marketing campaigns is conversion optimisation. Yes, the design of your site and the user experience it delivers will determine your conversion rate in more ways than you realise. A small disruption to the customer journey because of one misplaced web element can increase the rate of dropped carts by a whopping 40%.
Once again, there is a lot to gain from working with professional web designers and top web design agencies. Experienced designers don’t just design for the sake of creating a good-looking site. They dig deep into the target audience early in the process. They think about what the target viewers really want and the kind of user experience they expect. These details help shape the overall design of the site.
For example, good design can help simplify the checkout process. Instead of asking potential customers to go through five steps to complete their purchase (checkout > enter customer details > enter shipping details > payment > confirmation), the entire flow can be altered for a simpler, more streamlined shopping experience. The best sites now require only two steps and utilise interactive elements to revolutionise the checkout completely.
It Starts with Good Design
It is important to note that your website acts as the anchor of all your digital marketing activities. Social media posts come and go, but your site will always be there for the customers. Investing in good website design isn’t just a way to elevate your brand, create authority, and deliver good customer experience, but also a way to boost the impact of your digital marketing campaign.
It all starts with good design. Find a team of designers who truly understand your needs and the audience you want to reach. The website that team produces will do wonders for your business and its future success.
