Inter Studio

It is important to know how web design figures into your broader marketing, and ultimately business, strategy. While online marketing is fast catching up with traditional offline marketing all over the world, even businesses that are not primarily online are jumping on to the bandwagon. Quite so often, marketers parade their statistical achievements in this context, in terms of having achieved an astronomical number of hits. The hits in question stand for the number of visits that a website gets on the World Wide Web. However, the question is, do they stay long enough to become customers? Getting the surfers to reach your website is success for the marketing side of the business; it is optimal web design, however, that will play a huge role in retaining their attention.

Web Design to Keep the Customer Glued

The question that begs asking, of course, is what ‘hits’ do to help your business: left to themselves, nothing. It is somewhat akin to being excited about the number of people who throng to your shop because you put up a nice poster somewhere: unless you have the wares to interest people to an extent that leads to purchase activity, this crowd won’t translate into money for you. Similarly, no matter how much vanity online marketing professionals may attach to ‘hits’, merely succeeding in getting people to visit your site shall not enable you to get them to loosen their purse strings. The crux of any business venture is to create, deliver and capture value, and the only way for website hits to figure into this cycle is by focusing on website design that makes those visitors stay on the site, and actually read what’s there. Admittedly, that still doesn’t convert into revenue, but it does expose the target audience to the brand, product or business model and engages their interest, bringing them closer to being paying customers.

Your website design strategy must be streamlined towards providing a web experience that:
• Caters to inbound traffic (from various sources such as social media networks, PR coverage, networking efforts, affiliate links, word-of-mouth, employee networking profiles, product write-ups, etc.)

• Shapes perception independent of the messaging of those external sources, in line with business strategy.

• Offers a meaningful, rich customer experience to site visitors

While the endless ways of communication can provide you with the best way to attract attention and get people to visit your website, that’s not where it ends. That’s because once you get people to come to your website, the content has to keep them glued and coming for more.
The vastness and the endless options offered by the web also mean that your average site visitor has an extremely low attention span. Creating a buzz about your website and products by using various online tools and sites is a good start, but achieving hits is not an end in itself. Only by creating rich experiences—in the form of content, features, interactivity, and the like—can businesses convert visitors into more than just passing window shoppers. That is where good website design makes a difference.
There’s nothing novel to the concept of brands/businesses needing to entertain, engage, or educate their audiences to elicit certain actions or behaviors. That notion actually lies at the foundation of the “content marketing revolution” and has dynamically revolutionized the way marketers devise their advertising strategy. It’s also what savvy shop and business owners have been doing offline for years.

Take the example of successful brick and mortar business as a case in point. Your favorite restaurant or walk-in music store creates a trust-invoking environment through any combination of carefully crafted ambience (furnishing, lighting, music, aromas etc), friendly staff, insightful expertise, good service and so on. That is because such businesses know the importance of ushering in a buying mood to convert visitors into buyers. They do so by creating feel-good or trust-invoking environments through any combination of the above mentioned factors. Your ultimate objective might be to drive sales, brand communication, spread the word about your services, or (most likely) a combination of all these, as per your marketing strategy. In any case, you need to create an atmosphere that inspires and persuades, but more importantly, engages. That in turn increases the amount of time they spend thinking about whatever it is you want them to think about when they see your website.
Creating a website that both lures visitors and gets them to stick around for a while requires applying the basic tenets of a well-run physical operation to your website design. And that means great content. The content must give the visitor a great experience, something that can be achieved by catering to some core necessities. Good reading material, though the most apparent factor (and also what engages readers to begin with), is not even half of the content puzzle; the material must be bolstered by customer service, well organized site design and an innate understanding of client/ customer sensibilities.

Customizing Your Content to Fulfill Your Online Marketing Objectives

Your content has to follow the scope of your business and be tailored to your needs, which are basically an extension of the needs of your customers and what you need to do in order to fulfill them. Your online marketing communication efforts have to be molded by the needs of your business, delivered though the vehicle of web design. These are the questions you need to ask yourself in order to know how to best go about streamlining your website design in terms content.
• What are your end objectives?

• What must you make your visitors experience in order to make the maximum positive impact, and what do they expect from your website in design terms?

• What is the value proposition of your company/ business/ product?

Know your end objectives when you start off
You can start off with three rules of thumb and build on them:
1. For most B2B companies’ primary objectives to achieve through website design are (1) attracting prospects and (2) nurturing client.

2. B2C brands are generally trying to either achieve onsite retail sales or to simply raise brand awareness to increase retail demand and market share.

3. Generally, both B2B and B2C companies are interested in increasing their customer databases for future marketing opportunities.

Depending on how you’ve decided the segment to target for your product/ service, it makes sense to say things in different ways, which might mean using a variety of literary devices, and might involve a decision between formal/ casual lingo and so on. With the knowledge that different people consume information differently, you’ll need to figure out how to achieve your business goals while giving your audience the best experience possible, with the most optimal approach to web design.