For the sake of your customers, prospects, and all of the people who are checking out your business, your digital marketing should be simple. Visiting your website and interacting with your brand should be a straightforward and easy process. Thomas Young, CEO of Intuitive Websites and author of Winning the Website War, thinks there is a connection between simplicity and success. Take Google, for example. As a mere search bar, Google was able to become the most popular search engine of all time. Search engines were complicated and difficult to use before the days of Google. Today — thanks to simplicity — 2018 Google is responsible for 80 to 90 percent of search engine market share. So one of your goals in the online world is to keep your digital marketing simple and direct.
Strategize Your Simplicity
Simplicity can be approached strategically. There’s always a million approaches that one can take in designing their website and coordinating their digital strategy, so keep in mind that making things work simply can take some courage. We usually want to put more content and more options on our digital platform. Usually, in digital marketing, less is more. Quality over quantity is the golden rule when it comes to online content. So as you think about how you can be simple in your strategy, you will start to discover how your online approach can be simplified.
Simplicity is all about ease of access. All of the information on your site can and should be accessed intuitively. People tend to engage with information that comes to them easily. So even if you are a high-tech company (who provides incredibly complex software and hardware to military contractors, for instance) your website still needs to be simple, and making your website simple is actually a simple process.
You will want to simplify the design elements of your website, your messaging, your content, and your navigational structure. Simply put, your website needs to be easily accessible. This is especially true for your website’s mobile format. When people are checking out your website on a mobile phone, they should be able to easily read and navigate through your content. So organization is critical, but everything needs to be organized simply.
Simple Organization
When you are thinking about your content strategy, and how to organize content on your website, there are a few key pointers which Young urges you to keep in mind. First of all, a long page of content is better than having to click through multiple pages of content. This is important because people like to scroll through content on their mobile devices rather than navigate through pages. So when you have a really focused content strategy on blogs and social media, make sure to keep everything within one click.
Next, it’s important to keep everything organized in a qualitative way. All the content that pertains to one topic or area of interest should be kept together in a section of your website. It should also be easy to search through your website in order to find specific information. The best websites provide ways in which this can be done with or without a search bar. It is important to remember that your content is worth finding, so it needs to be easy to find.
It’s possible to see how people are using your website in Google Analytics. If people aren’t engaged with your website and they are leaving quickly, then you can be sure that your website is not easy to use. Complicated websites complicate the lives of consumers. This kind of problem can cause your target market to make the poor decision of ignoring your products and services.
Action Items
Here are some of Thomas Young’s action items for keeping it simple when it comes to digital marketing:
- Only have four key areas in the navigation structure of your website. The easiest way to do this is to have separate sections for products (or services), about, resources, and contact information. If you absolutely need to have another section, that’s fine, but there should be no more than five sections. If you can do this, your website will be easy to navigate, especially on mobile devices.
- On your homepage, feature three aspects of your business. Users will get confused if they see too much information on the homepage, so keep it simple! Bring attention to the highlights of what your business is, and what your business does.
- Organize your content in a layers, like a pyramid. So from your navigation tabs — products, about, resources, and contact us — users will be able to access tabs that will lead them increasing amounts of information. These tabs are also called thumbnails, and users should be able to scroll through them to find whatever it is that they are interested in. This provides you as a business with the opportunity to decide what you want people to see, and where you want them to see it.
- If you have large blocks of text, use headers on your paragraphs. The headers summarize your paragraphs, and they are also great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as title tags. If you set up your content this way, whether it is for a blog post, email newsletter, or social media, then people will get your message and interact with your brand.
As you make interacting with your brand easier for users, you will begin to attract more leads and sales. It’s pretty straightforward. So keep it simple!
Intuitive Websites are experts in digital marketing. Our team gives you peace of mind by handling all that for you so you can focus on your core business. After all, your time is precious and your team is busy – so let us give your digital marketing the attention it deserves. It’s what we do. Contact us today!
