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A well-designed website is an incredibly important aspect of any business. Think of your website as your home base. It’s where most of your customers go to get information about your brand and what you offer. So if you don’t have a good website, it can deter customers and result in fewer conversions and sales. 

As the website is so critical, however, it can often become a point of frustration for many businesses. Getting your website just right can take time, and it can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to start or aren’t having any success. 

There are many aspects of web design, and knowing which areas to focus on throughout the process can be challenging, as there is no one right way to go about it. Is functionality more important? Aesthetics? User experience? Security?

These are all reasonable things to worry about when you are trying to design a new website. But the answer can vary depending on your brand and your company’s specific needs or goals. 

Below, we’ll explore the different elements of web design to help you understand what they are and which ones might be a priority over others, depending on your brand.  

The first step in deciding your web design priorities is to go through all the different elements and think about them in terms of your company’s specific needs and goals. The web design process can be different for every brand, so just because one company does it one way does not mean you should do the same. 

For some, the user experience might be the most important element of web design, for others, it might be cybersecurity. In the end, all of the below elements are important and should be included, but when you are just starting out, and perhaps don’t have the time or money to focus on them all, it’s helpful to identify each one to determine what is most important for your business’s specific needs. 

Brand Awareness

If you are a new business, brand awareness should be one of your top priorities. You need people to know about your brand in the first place before they will even go looking for your website. Once they do get to your website, your brand identity should be clear and easy to recognize. 

Focusing on establishing your brand identity through brand awareness will help you connect with people so they will remember you. In doing this, you will start to establish a new customer base, and those customers will become more loyal to your brand and recommend you to others. 

Think of brand identity as your first impression. If you leave a bad first impression, you aren’t going to attract any customers to your new business, but if you leave a good first impression, you will more quickly establish yourself as a brand to keep an eye on, which means you will grow your customer base and start making sales. 

So good branding is key when designing your website as a new business. This means having an appealing logo, a good brand story that tells customers who you are and what you value, and other memorable brand elements and aesthetics, such as appealing and recognizable color schemes and imagery. 

User Experience

If your company heavily relies on pleasing your customers, as most should, user experience should be one of your top priorities. Customer-focused businesses tend to have more success because they put the effort into prioritizing their customer’s wants and needs. The more you show your customers that you care about them and their experience, rather than seeing them as dollar signs, the more likely you are to have success growing your business. 

So, if you are a B2C business, user experience (UX) design is essential. B2B businesses should also have good UX design, but it is even more crucial when you are B2C and trying to appeal to large customer bases, as 50% of consumers believe that UX affects their opinion of a business. 

You can create a better user experience by following these steps: 

1. Understand who your target customer is — You can do this by creating a customer persona — essentially a description summary of most of your customer’s demographics. This can include their age, identity, experiences, and even their location. 
2. Identify the problem —  Listen to your customers. They may typically encounter a common problem among your site or other sites during their purchasing process. You can gain this data through surveys or other customer service queries.
3. Solve the problem — Once you find out what common issues your target customers experience, brainstorm ideas on how your business or your site’s features can solve that problem. 

All of this indicates that UX design is often primarily about function. It’s about designing a website that is providing the best experience possible for your customers by solving their problems and giving them what they need.

So, if you are an e-commerce business, for example, how easy and satisfactory your website’s shopping and checkout process plays a significant role in the overall customer experience. In this case, your UX design should focus on making it easy for your customers to find the products they are looking for and checkout without running into any major issues. 

SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is technically important for all businesses. Optimizing your content will ensure you rank higher in Google search results, which means you will drive more traffic to your website and, thus, be more likely to increase conversions and sales.

If you are a unique business that is offering something that most others are not, then you can likely get away with putting SEO on the back burner. However, if you have a lot of competitors that offer similar products or services, SEO should be a priority. 

If a customer is looking for lawnmowers, for example, and they do a simple Google search for lawnmowers, there are likely a ton of websites that will pop up in the search results. So if you sell lawnmowers, you want to prioritize SEO to make sure your website ranks higher in search results; otherwise, competitors might constantly beat you to the punch. 

If you sell something more unique, however, like knitted hats for dogs, there are potentially not as many other businesses that sell the same thing. So if someone is searching for dog hats or knitted dog hats, your website might automatically show up higher in search results without SEO because there aren’t many other options out there. 

Cybersecurity

Ensuring the data on your website is secure is always a wise decision if you want to avoid cyber attacks — but some businesses should worry about this more than others. FinTech companies, for example, that deal with a lot of sensitive data should make cybersecurity a priority. 

B2B companies, as well, that deal with major clients that expect them to keep their information private and secure should also focus on quality website security. Essentially any company that keeps a lot of sensitive data on their website, or asks for client information through online forms, should be prioritizing the safety and security of their clients and their company. 

Wrapping Up

There are numerous other things that your business might want to consider when building a new website, but brand awareness and design, UX design, SEO, and cybersecurity are four of the primary elements of web design that tend to matter most. So it’s important to take a close look at these four things to determine which ones should be a priority. Once you get the most important elements out of the way, you can start to work on the rest of your web design as time and budget allows. 

The post Deciding Your Web Design Priorities appeared first on noupe.

Increased awareness of social issues means that accessible marketing is more important today than ever before. Without accessible marketing, your company will lose out on engagement and will seem out of touch compared to more accessible competitors. 

But creating accessible marketing can be confusing at first. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools and resources to ensure that your next marketing campaign is accessible to everybody, regardless of their particular way of experiencing the world and your marketing content. 

What is Accessible Marketing?

Accessible marketing ensures that everyone can interact with your content and learn about your product or service without undue strain or effort on their part. 

According to the National Center for Deaf-Blindness, accessibility ensures “all people can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with electronic information and be active, contributing members of the digital world.” This means your digital content should be tailored to serve everyone, regardless of “visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, and neurological disabilities.”

Being accessible sounds straightforward, but many businesses run into issues when creating accessible content. Few marketers have received formal training in accessibility, even though it is a key feature in good customer experience (CX) and e-commerce marketing. This is a major issue as e-commerce marketing should promote greater traffic, drive a higher conversion rate, and give all existing customers a great CX.

If your marketing content or website is inaccessible, folks will turn to competitors who offer a better experience and account for differences in sight, hearing, physical abilities, or cognitive and neurological disabilities.  

Fortunately, there are plenty of examples to follow when attempting to improve the accessibility of your own company marketing materials. These include things like: 

• Ensuring content is formatted so screen readers can turn all text to speech without issues
• Using descriptions for all anchor text to improve the effectiveness of braille readers
• Ensuring there is enough contrast between text and background color
• Including relevant alt-text for all images you use
• Supporting keyboard navigation to help users who cannot use a mouse

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to accessible marketing. However, taking a few simple steps can lead to far greater reach and engagement with your digital content. 

Benefits of Accessible Marketing

Accessibility has been an afterthought in marketing for years. Most designers and web engineers favor flashy design over usability and disregard the experience that folks with a disability have when interacting with their marketing materials. 

Fortunately, this paradigm is starting to change as marketing managers realize they are losing out on revenue and harming their brand image with inaccessible content. 

Reach and Engagement 

According to data collected by the World Health Organization, 15% of the world’s population live with a disability of some kind. While some disabilities do not require reasonable accommodations for online users, many do. By accounting for these users, you can expect to gain greater reach and engagement. 

Gaining reach and engagement is particularly important if you are targeting growth in a sector that caters to folks with a disability. 

For example, if you are running a campaign for a new range of low-intensity lighting for neurodivergent people, then you absolutely must account for differences in experience between folks who live with things like dyslexia, autism, or ADHD. Folks who are neurodivergent process information and interact with the world differently from neurotypical people. This means your marketing content needs to account for differences in experience to foster greater engagement with your audience. 

Feedback

Receiving feedback from folks who live with a disability is important for your business’s long-term success. However, gathering feedback from folks with a disability is typically challenging as physical and digital infrastructure prevents their voice from being heard. 

You can gather much-needed feedback from folks with disabilities by tailoring all of your marketing to accessibility. This might include specific redirects to accessible surveys for folks who live with visual impairments or improved navigation options on your “contact us” forms. 

Gaining feedback from folks who have disabilities ensures that your brand moves in the right direction while avoiding accidental exclusions on your website. 

Brand Image

Running accessible marketing campaigns is the right thing to do — it also boosts your brand image. 

Consumers today are savvier and more socially conscious than ever before. This means that many users can spot inaccessible content and won’t be shy about their criticism. You can preempt this by actively creating branded content that is outwardly accessible and cherishes a range of user experiences. 

Creating intentionally accessible marketing materials is something that major brands already do well. Brands like Apple have championed accessibility for years, and actively promote usability with features like VoiceOver and their Braille display. This lends major credibility to CEO Tim Cook’s statement “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”

You can make an equally strong statement with your own marketing materials and create a brand image that promotes inclusion and accessibility. 

Accessible Marketing Plans

The benefits of creating accessible marketing content far outweigh the potential challenges. However, creating accessible content takes more than goodwill and some elbow grease. You need to complete a full accessibility audit and change the way you operate to ensure that accessibility is a foundational element of your marketing plan. 

You can complete an accessibility audit by tweaking design thinking in data-driven marketing. Design thinking forces you to imagine your user from a range of perspectives. This requires you to educate yourself and use empathy to consider the changes you want to make. You can experiment by simulating users who may face particular challenges like low-vision or neurodivergence when using your site. 

Once you’ve identified and implemented areas for improvement, you should open up a space for accessibility-specific queries and complaints. Accessibility-related queries and complaints should be easily located on your site map and provide a range of user-friendly data collection methods. Collecting data in this way will help identify further areas for improvement and ensure that you stay up to date with new technology and best practices.   

Conclusion

Taking a progressive approach to accessible marketing is the right thing to do. It ensures that everyone has an equitable experience while surfing the web and engaging with branded content. Accessible marketing also gives you greater reach and engagement, as previously excluded audiences can now provide feedback and spread the word about your business online.

The post How Accessible Marketing Benefits Your Company appeared first on noupe.

In design thinking, there is one principle more vital to success than any others. That is creative problem solving centered around improving the human experience. Fortunately, data provides a means to access and improve upon this principle for businesses that apply it. 

As companies strive to incorporate more data-driven decisions into their operations, the role of design thinking should not be neglected. Data as a means of understanding user experience enables businesses to streamline their marketing strategies. Where design thinking and data analysis intersect, the results are actionable insights. Data-driven marketing is about using these insights to form a more relevant and impactful platform for your business. 

But what exactly does design thinking entail? How can you use these concepts in data-driven marketing? And how can your business grow as a result?

Here, you can explore these questions and more as you learn how design thinking powers data-driven marketing. From principles to potential, these insights can elevate your marketing for greater success. 

What is Design Thinking?

Let’s start by defining what design thinking is and how it can relate to data-driven analysis procedures. This ideology informs your ability to solve problems in terms of your audience, helping you to frame solutions around real and impactful strategies. In marketing, it can be the most effective tool in your toolkit. 

In short, design thinking is a multi-stage set of tools and principles that puts a target audience at its forefront. It assesses who you’re designing for and centers actionable solutions around real needs and problems. Attributed to former Boeing engineer David Kelley, this philosophy/toolkit is your key to better marketing strategies. 

Design thinking makes this possible through its unique principles. These include

• Empathy. Because real people are at the center of all business, design thinking places the user’s or customer’s needs at the center of the work.

• Collaboration. You need the input and opinions of customers and partners to build an effective and empathetic design.

• Innovation. Solutions and scalability require thinking outside the box.

• Experimentation. Trying out new ideas alongside your target users is key to generating greater success.

• Actionability. The design thinking process focuses on hands-on strategies for improvement and innovation, actions you can take to explore business improvements. 

Central to all these principles is empathy. Design thinking is all about putting yourself in the place of your users and customers to better provide solutions. Through it, you make it easier to experiment and innovate in ways that can make a real difference. In marketing, this often revolves around content and messaging that is especially relevant to your audience.

Big data, or information sets too vast to be analyzed by a human being, can be an effective means of supplementing user-focused design thinking for even more powerful results. That’s because data itself can be a source of ideas and actionable strategies. 

Where Design Thinking and Data Analysis Meet

The data you gather (big or small) represents information. As a result, you can plug that information into the stages of design thinking to help you identify areas of improvement. From here, an empathetic approach to problem-solving elevates your ability to derive actionable insights. 

The intersections between design thinking and data analysis are many. These are the situations you’ll need to focus on as you look to improve your marketing and grow your business. From making your marketing data more palatable to enhancing overall visibility, the combination of data analysis and design thinking makes it easier to avoid analysis paralysis and come away with real-world improvement strategies. 

Businesses in all kinds of industries have made use of these intersection points to great success. For example, Airbnb transformed itself into a household name by applying design thinking, experimenting, and analyzing the data. The vacation rental platform found itself stuck at a flat revenue of $200 a month, but by exploring non-scalable solutions to the problems it found itself in, it was able to turn things around. 

This was a risk that gave the company the resources it needed to derive more scalable features and design a user-focused platform that grew with time. Similarly, PillPak went from a start-up to a $1 billion Amazon acquisition with design-thinking innovations applied to data from the pharmaceutical industry. 

With growth potential like this, applying design thinking to customer-centric marketing is one of the best things you can do for long-term business success. But how can you use design thinking in data analysis to produce the kinds of results Airbnb or PillPak did?

How you can use Design Thinking in Data Analysis

To understand the applications of design thinking in marketing, it helps to understand data analysis. This is a multi-step process that requires first specifying data collection requirements and then cleaning and organizing that data for assessment. Ultimately, you’ll have to effectively communicate your data-driven insights to your marketing team and even your customers if you hope to maximize the potential of data-driven design thinking. 

You can even pair the data analysis process with the stages of design thinking to inform a customer-centric experience from the start. Through the intersection points of these ideologies, it’s easier to identify real customer pain points and problems.

These are a few of the ways you can go about applying design thinking in data analysis for better, data-driven marketing:

Framing your analysis questions

To start, design thinking should frame the questions you ask of your marketing campaign. These should be questions you can answer with data, complete with built-in indicators of success. You want your approach to data to be targeted and focused on real solutions.

That’s why even the data requirements you specify for your marketing campaigns should be tied to design thinking. You want to evaluate which data informs customer outreach, success, loyalty, and more to ensure you maintain relevant messaging.

Then, the areas of improvement identified by the data you collect frame the ways you proceed with innovation. Examples of effective analysis questions that result might include

• How can customer engagement be improved by at least 5%?
• What ad strategies can we employ to boost conversion rates by 2%
• What UX improvements can be made to reduce landing page bounce rates by 3%?

These and many more analysis questions like them combine the power of data with the empathy of design thinking. Above all, improvements in customer engagement come from adding value to the experience. Assisted by data, you can see the monetary implications of these improvements as well. 

Creating a data-driven workflow

Similarly, design thinking and data analysis can be combined to produce a more efficient workflow. This is because more convenient and collaborative ways to work give employees more time to focus on the customer and evaluate issues. 

This is why Agile development has taken off in the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry. Agile development (like design thinking) is all about collaboration and empathy, allowing developers to focus on the end-user experience throughout the process. A reported 41% of marketers already employ this flexible and customer-centric framework, with another 42% of marketers looking to implement it. 

Design thinking in data-driven marketing can offer similar flexibility in an empathetic context. By collaborating with employees, customers, and clients, you can generate higher-quality data directly from your most important sources. 

From here, your marketing approach can cater to actionable and highly relevant strategies. 

Targeting marketing success

Data analysis is also an essential method of segmenting your marketing audience to focus more specifically on niche marketing or certain demographic pain points. Any marketing strategy worth its salt includes customer personas. Each of these entails its unique data points.

From here, design thinking can be applied to each targeted group to help form narratives around needs and challenges. The metrics you evaluate through the data analysis process reveal your audience and the ways your marketing is or isn’t meeting their needs. 

For example, higher rates of abandoned carts for a certain demographic could indicate that your marketing to this group is misleading in some fashion. The data allows you to go back, reassess, and reevaluate. 

The focus, no matter what the application, is to take the collaborative and customer-focused aspects of design thinking and apply them wherever the data indicates a need. Whether this data comes from page analytics, customer surveys, or a healthy combination, its potential can mean more effective marketing strategies. 

The Potential of Design Thinking in Data-Drive Marketing

Design thinking is vital to every element of business success. That’s because it combines a customer-focused approach to business with innovation, collaboration, and data analysis to create the most relevant solutions to any given problem.

McKinsey research even found that high design scores correlated with higher revenue growth. The top quartile of these businesses experienced an average revenue that was 10% higher than their competitors. 

The key is empathy. Data helps us understand and collaborate. By applying these concepts to a marketing strategy, you stand to elevate your business as a whole. Indirect results may also include a better brand perception overall, a feature you can’t put a price on. 

Explore the potential of design thinking in your data-driven marketing campaigns and reap the rewards of a customer-centric business model.

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