Web Design’s Impact On Marketing Strategy

Your website’s design plays a pivotal role in digital influence. As part of this, a smart digital marketing strategy would direct your audience from any digital channel to your website one way or another.

Contrary to other media channels, your website is completely under your control.

From there your acquisition and nurturing activities could be directed as fits your needs.

You could distinguish yourself and present a unique value proposition (UVP).

You could provide a great user experience (UX).

You could produce content that’s favored by search engines, and design and implement funnels that improve conversions.

And eventually, you could provide a point of contact for tackling any customer issues, pre- and post-purchase.

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Let’s dive deeper and see how your web design impacts your marketing strategy.

Why is Web Design Important in Marketing Strategy?

Your website is equivalent to your store in the physical world. And just like your physical store, you need to attract customers and provide a great experience for them on your website.

You should see web design as creating the digital environment where you host your customers. Designing your website is the most important pillar of your marketing strategy.

Your ultimate goal is to direct customers and prospects to your website. It’s where the magic happens.

The first page a visitor lands on determines whether you’re making a first good impression. And the time they spend on your site shapes their perception of your brand, products, and services.

That’s why a well-designed website is a powerful tool in lead generation and brand building. Let’s see how web design impacts marketing strategy.

1. Branding and Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

The web design elements that form your website should serve your marketing strategy and the purpose of your website.

For example, you could build a real estate website and use the wrong web-building template, and now it conflicts with your strategy, so it’s harder to make a profit with it.

The most prominent way to do so is how these elements represent your branding and unique value proposition (UVP). Take Drift’s website, for instance.

Drift is a conversational marketing software or a conversation cloud. The design of this site centers around the value of conversations. It’s in what they say, and also how they say it.

When you land on this page, you almost feel like someone is saying those words out loud. It resembles a slogan, rather than a conversation.

Slogans and taglines are very effective in encouraging people to take action. Consider Nike’s ‘Just do it’, for example.

And Drift is very open about its motto. Everything starts with a conversation. That’s the first thing that you see on their main page in all caps and bold.

Also, the Let’s Talk call-to-action draws you into a casual conversation. It leads you to a demo form disguised as a chatbot conversation.

You know that it’s not a person you’re having a conversation with. Yet it still feels less artificial than filling in a form. And the navigation menu is very explanatory too.

They’ve placed a sentence-long description for every landing page on the menu. Even for the obvious ones like the ‘About Us, or the ‘Careers’ pages.

They don’t even exist in most businesses’ navigation menus. These are usually placed in the footer section of a website.

Some marketers assume they might divert the visitor’s attention from purchasing. But for the Drift team, it’s all about conversations.

Drift is a brand promoting conversations, and it’s a consistent feeling on this site. The design elements mirror their unique value proposition and brand identity.

This level of consistency would do wonders for you too. Think of your brand values and how your brand stands out from the competition.

Make sure your website design aligns with your brand’s identity and marketing goals. Analyzing your new product development process could help you a lot with finding branding ideas.

2. User Experience (UX)

One of the reasons web design is important in marketing is that it shapes the user experience. In the ideal scenario, the experience leads to a positive interaction. After a few meaningful interactions, you expect prospects to turn into customers.

Understanding the principles of UX design can help you go beyond customer expectations.

It’s safe to say that an intuitive design comes before anything else. Users should have smooth navigation throughout your website. The navigation menu, layouts, grids, and other design elements should form a well-structured website.

Balenciaga, the fashion giant, for instance, falls short of creating a seamless environment.

This is only a tab in the navigation menu, and many recurring items appear here and there on the menu. It’s overcrowded and confusing, to say the least.

Next comes the interaction design.

Interaction design is about how users will interact with an environment. In this case, it’s your website.

What you say with your words and visual elements is only a dimension of interactive design. You have to consider the medium through which users engage with your website.

Their device, for instance, determines visitors’ screen size. It’s critical information if you want to offer a pleasing visual experience.

And there’s time as the 4th dimension. Some elements change form and shape with time, such as animations, video content, or sound.

It’s important how the systems and the informational architecture of your website respond to interactions. This is where web designers scrutinize user data to create a seamless experience.

Real-time and historical data analysis will reveal how users interact with your website. A/B testing will show you how well your website guides them through their buying journey. Some UI/UX design tools offer handy A/B testing features.

Web design services offer great analytics modules that reveal such data. They even create A/B testing scenarios for you. Using one will make a great difference in improving the experience you offer.

3. Search Engine Optimization

Web design and SEO converge in many ways. Mobile-friendliness, page speed, and the quality of the links are ranking signals. They are all a part of web design.

Layouts, grid systems, and other design elements should form a well-structured website. Otherwise, search engines can’t crawl your pages with accuracy.

If a page doesn’t load fast and Google can’t crawl it in time, the Google Index will leave it out.

This means that not all the SEO-friendly content you’ve published will rank. And even if search engines index your SEO-friendly content while it’s not user-friendly, people would bounce right away.

Get rid of unnecessary plugins that slow down page speed. Make sure to optimize all the visual elements and content.

Google announced this year that businesses should create people-first content. The content must be consumable, insightful, and structured.

The blocks of content on your pages should not have a random placement, for instance. They should form a meaningful outline that visitors can follow through.

And they must include well-placed hyperlinks that encourage the reader to learn more. Also, create a sitemap that would help search engines not miss any page.

Startups don’t have the necessary resources to build a data-informed SEO strategy. Nor do they have the capacity to execute. So it’s logical to use SEO services for a comprehensive strategic approach.

4. Conversion

A good web design can increase lead generation and sales. The web design elements and strategies mentioned so far affect your conversion rates.

Loading speed, responsiveness, ease of use, level of accessibility, quality of content, and aesthetics.  These determine how well you are at turning simple interest into action.

Keep in mind, your target audience includes people at different stages of awareness. Build a dynamic structure that understands search intent and caters to audience segments.

Online retailers, marketplaces, and streaming services have mastered this art before others. They’ve been offering hyperlocal marketing and personalized offers and content for years. And it works.

McKinsey’s Next in Personalization revealed 71% of consumers expect personalized interactions.

But building and maintaining an internal engine like the giants have is costly. The alternatives are using a functional web development service or hiring a dedicated web development team.

5. Customer Support

First, customer support should be openly accessible. Users shouldn’t have to look for it – it must be within their reach. And these are only the basics.

A problem customer support teams often experience is the inefficient use of time. Customer requests are endless, yet not always worthy of an agent’s time.

Also, it’s important to reduce the chance of users’ need for support and make the website well-functioned, user-friendly, and safe. To reduce security risks, ensure that all users’ information is operated via encrypted password managers.

Consider a simple password change request for instance. Reading a help center article would resolve the issue.

You know that it’s a help center matter. But you can’t assume that customers would bother themselves with the process.

A cleverly designed website structure can get rid of the efficiency loss for you. It can direct the customers to the right channels and take the burden off your team’s shoulders.

Zapier does it very well.

The tool offers several types of resources that could be helpful to customers. It suggests easy solutions that customers can try on their own. If none works, then they still have more options.

Once you click Get Help, you see this:

This level of categorization might be too much for you if you don’t receive too many customer requests. Yet it’s still beneficial to ask a few questions from the customers before your agents take in the request.

Your teammates have different skill sets. If you know what the request is about, you can match the problem and the problem solver. And your agents will prepare themselves too.

Of course, an intuitive website is inherently an element of proactive customer support. If your pages are explanatory and easy to use, you’ll reduce the number of requests.

Finally

Web design plays an important role in your digital marketing strategy. A website gives your brand authenticity and makes you more trustworthy.

People would have a trusted point of reference to check your products and get help when needed. A well-designed website has some more benefits:

• It represents your branding and clearly states your unique value proposition (UPV). This could show itself throughout all the web design elements such as menus, CTAs, color, etc.
• It provides a great customer experience and increases the likelihood of purchase.
• A clean and intuitive web design is one of the ranking factors in SEO. Some of the important design elements that help with SEO include loading speed, well-structured sitemaps, mobile usability (e.g. responsive design), copy readability, alt tags, navigation, etc.
• It improves conversions. Tweaking the elements on a website through A/B testing could show the sweet spot for optimal conversion.
• A well-structured website prioritizes ease of access for customer support. Customers should not waste their time looking for help on your website.