One of the cornerstones of any effective online marketing strategy is content experience, and there is a good reason for this. Your website is your customer service representative and the face of your company in an online landscape, and its usability has a direct impact on customer satisfaction and conversion.
A poorly designed website is not only frustrating to navigate but could easily be doing you even more harm than you realize. Factors such as load time, mobile friendliness, and page formatting all paint an image of your business that can send customers running in the other direction if implemented badly.
According to data from Google, slow load times result in 53 percent of visitors returning to the search engine page before they even see the content on your site. These are customers who will never consider buying your products or engaging with your brand in other positive ways because they left due to frustration with technical issues.
This is only one of the potential negative issues your website could have, however. The vast majority of web traffic now comes from mobile sources like smartphones and tablets. While this allows your brand to connect with customers more effectively and easier than ever before, it also highlights just how important it is to design your content around these platforms and their respective quirks.
The difference in screen sizes is the most significant problem faced in mobile web design. A layout that looks good on one screen size usually won’t work on a screen that is much bigger or smaller. Luckily, responsive design practices alleviate this kind of issue, but it’s surprising how so many businesses neglect basic principles of this or implement it haphazardly.
Despite the mobile web being prominent for years now, it’s still common for website layouts to malfunction when a phone is in landscape orientation, or for the layout to not factor in the reduced screen space that is available when a visitor is typing into an input field. This results in the screen shifting and making it impossible to see what is being typed. The way your page elements load can even cause the layout to shift vertically as a visitor is attempting to interact with the site, leading to mispresses and annoyance.
Determined visitors will tolerate this, but do you really want to make it difficult for your most devoted customers to interact with your site whenever they want to buy prednisone without prescription, let alone alienating your new customers? The content experience should always be at the forefront of your design because it is one of the most crucial factors in converting new, potential customers into return business for many years to come.
It’s not usually enough to just create a beautiful and practical website though. While these are very important factors in the content experience that you never want to neglect, the most success comes from taking this mindset a step further. Think not just about how to avoid your customers being frustrated when using your website, but how to make every interaction with your site feel more joyful than your competitor’s.
Anticipating the needs of your customers is core to this. If your staff receive a lot of questions from new customers, for example, consider creating a page devoted to the most frequent questions and answers to speed up that interaction for your visitors, or even use artificial intelligence in the form of a chatbot that can answer simple questions in a more timely manner than would be possible through email or other mechanisms.
If you pinpoint what your customer needs and make that a core part of your content experience, your business will not only convert more of its online visitors but also create an environment where your existing customers continue to feel deeply valued. This is why the content experience you create is paramount to your success online.
If you’d like a hand building your customer experience contact us today and a member of our team will take a look at your current website and media assets and come up with a plan to better optimize based on your customer’s needs.
– Rob Wright, Owner Small Talk Media
