6 Influential Ways Web Development Impacts Your Marketing Strategy
Web design is at the heart of marketing strategy. Your website is the first interaction with your business for most customers looking to find out more about your products and services, check your opening hours, or make a purchase.
Your website design directly impacts how potential customers perceive your business and make purchasing decisions. If your website doesn’t look good, is hard to use, or fails to inspire trust, you’ll struggle to get positive ROI from your marketing initiatives.
Here are 6 ways that web development influences your marketing strategy and why it is integral to the long-term success of your business.
1. The First Impression
It takes less than 1/10th of a second for a visitor to form an impression of your website and decide whether to stick around or bounce. It’s not your content, your products, or your pricing that influences this vital first impression. For over 90% of people, first impressions of a website are related to web design.
If your website design looks unattractive, outdated, or confusing, potential customers will have a negative first impression of your business. They won’t engage with your content, view your products and services, or click on your CTAs. They’ll go back to Google and find one of your competitors.
For paid traffic, your website landing pages influence your cost-per-click and conversion rates. Even if you have a well-targeted PPC or paid social campaign, customers will turn away and won’t engage with your business if your website makes a bad first impression.
2. Website Design Is the Backbone of the Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is a visualization of the buyer’s journey at your business. It maps out the different stages your customers go through on the path to purchase and helps you identify opportunities to attract prospects and guide them towards a sale.
You can use a variety of marketing tactics to attract and nurture prospects through your sales funnel, including:
- Pay-per-click
- Search engine optimization
- Paid social
- Sponsored content
- Email marketing
The goal of all of these marketing activities is to drive traffic to your website. A well-designed website is vital for converting visitors and making the most of the traffic you generate. If your website development is poor, your marketing spend will be wasted.
3. Your Website Inspires Trust
As emphasised by Magicdust, a web developer Sydney wide, if your potential customers don’t trust you, they won’t buy your products and services. Establishing trust is key to marketing and sales performance and one of the best ways to establish trust is through your website design.
When a potential customer is close to making a purchase or deciding between two companies, they seek advice and recommendations from people who have already purchased the product or service. They seek social proof to validate their purchasing decision.
You can implement social proof in your website design by displaying customer reviews, testimonials, and user ratings on your sales and product pages. On average, adding testimonials to a sales page will increase conversions by over 30%.
Ask satisfied customers for testimonials, and use authentic images of the customer if possible. You can also boost customer trust by displaying your star ratings and reviews from Google, social media, and review aggregators like TrustPilot.
4. Build Your Brand Identity
Your website design is the most critical aspect of your online brand identity. If you’re in a competitive market, other businesses will sell similar products and services at an equal or lower price point. Without solid branding to differentiate your company, consumer purchasing decisions typically come down to cost, and the lowest-priced product wins.
A strong brand identity makes your business memorable and different from your competitors. It influences how your customers perceive your brand and your products.
Web design is a powerful tool to help you stand out from your competitors and build your brand identity. Your logo, images, and other design elements are an opportunity to set your company apart and showcase your unique selling proposition (USP).
For example, businesses that sell high-end products often incorporate a black color scheme that connotes power and sophistication. If your USP is eco-friendly and sustainable products and services, light green and white color schemes connote simplicity, nature, and cleanliness.
5. Search Engine Optimization
Web development has a significant impact on SEO. Your design choices influence how Google and other search engines crawl and index your website. If you want to rank high in search results and drive more organic traffic to your website, your website needs to be SEO optimized.
Web development influences SEO in several ways, including:
Mobile-Friendliness
If your website design isn’t responsive or optimized for mobile users, you could be ignoring the needs of over 50% of your visitors. When your visitors bounce due to poor mobile experience, it sends a negative signal back to Google, and you could drop down the rankings.
Content Readability
Poor web development choices can make it difficult for your visitors to read your content and explore your website. A stylish font might look good, but if it makes it difficult to read your content, it could cause your visitors to bounce and damage your SEO.
Website Speed
Slow loading pages cause visitors to bounce before they engage with your website. If you’re struggling to rank high in search results, it could be because your website speed is too slow. For the vast majority of website speed problems, a web development issue will be the cause.
6. Enhances Customer Experience
Customer experience is the sum total of all the interactions that a customer has with your business throughout the buyer’s journey. It covers every touchpoint, from PPC ads and content to product packaging and customer service.
Focusing on your customers’ needs throughout the buyer’s journey can significantly impact your bottom line. Companies that prioritize customer experience are on average 60% more profitable than companies that don’t.
Web development plays a vital role in customer experience. When your website navigation is intuitive and makes it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for, it makes a positive contribution to the experience of buying from your company.
A user-friendly website design makes it easy for people to find the information they need. According to a report by KO Marketing, when people land on a business website, 86% want to find information about products and services, and 64% want to see contact information. If your website is challenging to use, visitors will get frustrated, and customer experience will suffer.
Conclusion
Website design is integral to marketing strategy. Your website is where you send your paid and organic traffic. If it fails to make a good impression, inspire trust, or generate conversions, your marketing activities will be wasted.
If you’re not getting the results you think your marketing campaigns deserve, web design could be the issue holding you back. Taking time to make your website user-friendly and conversion-focused will help you maximize marketing ROI and fuel the growth of your business.
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