Destination Digital

Why Your Website Should Be At The Centre Of Your Marketing Strategy

No matter what size of business, or the industry you operate in, your website and how it projects itself is often one of the first points of contact between a potential customer and your brand. Therefore, it is vital that you convey your brand’s message through user-friendly, professional website design with a consistency of look-and-feel that makes your potential client feel at ease and comfortable taking a look around.

Being a digital marketing agency, we believe that a website is the beating heart of any brand’s digital presence. Whilst you might have a really healthy email marketing list, or you do really well at engaging with customers on Instagram, it is the website where many brands should be sending customers to take action and it is often the place people end up when they want to find out more about you.

Website design is a crucial component of a company’s promotional material, but many business owners tend to forget that it is a marketing channel that plays its part in a broader digital marketing plan.  As such, brand consistency across all your ‘offline’ marketing materials need to match up with your website and other online channels. This will help you nurture along your prospective clients who will feel more assured when they experience your brand in a consistent fashion regardless of how they find you.

 

Make a good first impression

There is a lot of truth in the phrase ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression’. So, you want to grab the visitors’ attention and make them want to click through on your website’s Google link more than anyone else’s website on that page on Google. You then want them to stick around once you’ve won that click.

To attract that click in the first place, you need to craft a winning <title> tag and meta description, and pay close attention to the keywords you use in your web page’s web address. Some of the first rules of search optimisation are to focus on these parts of every single page of your website, and every single blog post you put out. The first impression your brand makes is the one on Google.co.uk *before* they have even clicked through to your website, so make every character count.

You have just a few seconds of your website visitor’s attention span once they have clicked through and so once you have got them there, you need to keep their attention. How you present your website visually is really important. When leading teams of designers in the corporate world in the past, one of the oft-repeated pieces of advice I would dispense to designers lamenting lack of recognition for their efforts was that good design is often ‘invisible’ to the end user, whereas *everyone* notices bad design.

Inherent in bad design is of course the look-and-feel, which is an entirely subjective issue. However a website that has inconsistent hierarchical structure, differing tones of voice, bad links, poor use of photography or graphics that look like they have been put together on Microsoft Word and is slow to load are all more tangible elements of bad design that need to be fixed.

So, even though labouring the importance of visual presentation doesn’t appeal to everyone, it’s a key element in the psychology of getting your potential customer to trust your brand. Trust us on this one.

Make sure every web page has a call-to-action

Equally important to the visual experience you immerse your website user in, is the information you present to them. People searching on Google are action orientated and want to ‘do something’ which is why they have come to visit your website. So make the information you present match the journey the person making the search has followed so far to keep their attention. You should also make sure that you give them ‘something to do’ after they have read what you have to say.

An easily identifiable call to action (CTA) is a necessary element to every piece of copy you put out, so make sure you include one as a matter of course. A good yard-stick by which to measure ‘the point’ of a news item you have put together is to ask yourself at the end, ‘So what?’

You might have put together a great news piece talking about a new commission, installation or partnership, but ask yourself from the reader’s point of view ‘So what?’. What are they now supposed to do now they have read your news piece? Was it a great story that ended with no further action for the reader to take? This is where a CTA comes into play to encourage the reader to be in touch to talk about a similar project, or sign up for your newsletter. If you are an ecommerce website this is the perfect opportunity to point them directly at the product page in question. Maximise on the attention you have already secured from your new prospective client and encourage them to do more.

And so, now you have reached the end of this article… here comes our CTA in the next paragraph. We hope you think we are clever enough about marketing matters to want to be in touch with us to discuss further, so that’s what’s coming up below!

 

Contact us

If you’d like help with website design or content management, branding or marketing strategy, please email us on info@destination-digital.co.uk or give us a call on 01629 810199

We’ll Be Supporting Mr Fothergill’s and Griffin Glasshouses at RHS Chelsea 2024

Posted 22.04.2024

Our Friends Arts Derbyshire Present A Fundraising Evening Filled With Creativity & Fun!

Posted 15.04.2024

Debbie is Back in the Judge’s Seat at This Year’s UK StartUp Awards

Posted 08.04.2024
contact us

If you’d like help with digital marketing, ads management, SEO, copywriting, websites, branding or social media management… or anything else related to the internet and digital, then get in touch with us. We’re a friendly bunch.

You can email us on info@destination-digital.co.uk or give us a call on 01629 810199 or you can use the contact form at the bottom of this page.