If you were to sit down and ask a successful entrepreneur today, “What is the biggest reason for your business’ success?” Most would probably give you an answer that would involve great business development and a strong sales team, or a well thought out marketing strategy and knowing their target audience in and out. While these are valid and often strong arguments for entrepreneurial success, I can garuntee that few of them would consider great design as a strong attribute to growing a small business faster.
While considered by many business owners as something that’s nice to have rather than a crucial part of their marketing and sales strategies, great design matters now more than ever. Whether your sales are actively lagging or just okay, if your business is like most, you want to grow your revenue faster. And, here, great design is one of the most effective growth tools you can put to work.
How can you define great design? If your visual voice aligns with your brand’s values properly it will thrive consistently through every aspect of your company’s external elements. From your logo design, to your website’s apperance, to your marketing brochures, and to the user experiences itself: Poor design will undermine your business.
So, now that (hopefully) you’re convinced that strong, smart design is for you, here’s how design can directly influence your business’ growth and improve or damage your bottom line.
First Impressions Are Never Forgotten
Given the state of today’s web-driven world, most of us look for or research nearly everything we need online. Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, your consumers will do some online research before committing to your product or service, giving a chance for companies to make a great first impression.
Therefore, your business is only as strong as your website. If visitors are met with inefficient design and slow load speeds, they’re going to leave before you’ve had a chance to engage them, much less make a sale. Research from Stanford reveals that about 75% of digital consumers surveyed will make judgments about a business’s credibility based solely on how its website looks.
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Now I know that all you marketers out there know that a 75% conversion rate is like squaring a circle. But, it’s important to remember that design has a tremendeous impact on the actions of your online consumers.
Thus it’s fairly clear to conclude that a well-designed website can have a rapid impact on how users perceive your brand and what actions they will take once they land on your pages. In a world where many business interactions happen online, first impressions will dominate the public’s perception of not just your brand but it’s core values. However, it is wise to note that design is not a silver bullet that will solve all of your marketing issues. But that it is the driving force behind quickly resolving them.
Design = User Experience
Great design means a lot more than a pretty website. If you’re serious about achieving rapid growth with your business, you need to embrace a layout that is easy to navigate. This means creating pages that are laser-focused on a single call to action and intentionally designed to convert.
If there’s one thing you don’t want happening, it’s people leaving your website, and user experience is one of the main culprits. According to research, if your users can’t find what they were looking for on your site, 79% of visitors will go back to search and visit a competitor’s website. Even if your site does offer what they were looking for, if it’s hidden behind poor design, three layers of popups, social media plugins or an unreadable font, you can expect a bounce.
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So, if you truly want to take the simplest route when building your company site, it’s wise to optimize it for mobile users. Otherwise, the site will be behind the times and lose you business. I can’t stress it enough! Mobile is no longer an option when it comes to design and user experience, it’s a necessity.
If you’re not mobile-friendly, you won’t be visible in search engines either. Google has recently rolled out an addition to their algorithm which penalizes websites that are not optimized for mobile. So not only will you be losing customers from poor SEO, but you will lose the few who do end up finding your site to a lack of responsivness. After all, there are few things more frustrating than trying to navigate a traditional, desktop website from your smartphone.
Design Can Define Your SEO
No matter what your brand’s niche is, you probably know that SEO should play a large role in your company’s digital marketing strategy. While there are a range of factors like content, links, anchors, site structure and mobile optimization, the design is also a significant factor in your search engine ranking.
Sure, search engines can’t tell whether your site is cleverly simple and define your rank on page 1 based purely on the account of great design. However, they can get lots of insight from things that directly stem from the effect of your great design.
First and foremost, the page load speed is one of the greatest ranking factors on most search engines. If the average visitor will spend about 15 seconds on your website, and if the majority of that time is spent loading. Not only will they leave your site, but search engines will knock down your website’s ranking. To avoid this you can use more streamlined design elements, optimized images, and less sliders to decrease your site’s load speed and have lower bounce rates.
Second, search intent is a major element in deciding your ranking when it comes to SEO. Or put more simply, if a visitor is looking for something on Google; how easily will they find it on your website? For example, someone Googling “B2B sales cycle length“ will want to find exactly how long a typical sales cycle is in B2B sales. Great design can help place this information somewhere that’s easy to find. So if your page matches the visitors’ search intent – it will ultimately helping you rank higher.
Finally, there are popups. Love them or hate them, they’re a tried and true method to increasing conversions. However, not all popups are created equally, and some may actually hurt your SEO more than they help. Even if they are beautifully designed, intrusive pop ups can increase your bounce rates and decrease time spent on page, ultimately hurting your SEO. So tread carefully, and use chat functions as much as possible here. A touch of humanity never hurt anybody, and will say to your customers that you care about their experience while working with you.
Final Thoughts
Great design is more than an afterthought – it’s a key element of a company’s online presence and marketing. A well-designed website can attract more visitors to your site, encourage them to stay longer, make your brand more trustworthy and convert those visitors into customers.
