Website design and content marketing work together hand in hand. If one is strong and the other is weak, your message will not engage your audience and therefore will not bring in new business. Here is a guide to get your web design and content cohesive and the trends that your brand needs to work on for success in 2021.
What Is the Goal of Content Marketing?
Content marketing is about creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. Good content marketing will drive profitable customer action. Content drives brand awareness, demand, and revenue when it is done correctly.
Web Design
Web Design is the process of creating a website that gives the user a simple, clean, intuitive layout, that works hand in hand with the content to give the user a clear path to engage with your brand. Web design and content marketing work together to deliver your message and represent your brand.
First Impression
Web design can establish an initial impression with visitors before they even have time to read the content. If the website design is not good, then the visitor will leave the site within seconds. A visitor will make their decision about your website in less than 5 seconds. What does your website say about your brand?
The website must look professional and current an out-of-date looking website will be unappealing and not convey that your brand is reliable. Website design is about engaging your audience and speaking to who and what your brand is about.
The content allows for the visitor to trust and believe the advice and information is the right solution for them.
Navigation of a Website
Whether the website is content-heavy or light, the navigation needs to be built with the visitors in mind. A visitor should be able to navigate seamlessly through the website and find what they are looking for within seconds. Instead of tons of content on one page, create a drop-down menu for users to find the page with the information that they want to read. Complicated websites will only make visitors leave, thus affecting your bounce rate.
Content Readability
Great design will the visitor to stay and read however, if the content is not easy to read then you have lost them. The text needs to be eye-catching and consistent, breaking it into readable chunks with headers directing the visitor throughout the topic.
The content font should to be easy to read and big enough as well, having small content font will overwhelm. Keep the text size and font consistent with the brand font choices.
Content Marketing Trends for 2021
Every year content gets more important. 2021 will be more of the same. Do you know how to best use content marketing strategies to meet your prospects needs? The major trends for 2021 are in content depth, building thought leadership, personalization, and content atomization.
Give Value in Your Content
Value-driven content still remains important, and it will be an even bigger determining factor for consumers this year. With so much content out in the marketplace, people are becoming pickier about where they spend their time. Brands will need to focus on bringing value to the consumers in ways other than just speaking about just the product or service.
The focus of the content should be how the product or service solves specific pain points. Content should solve your prospects problems and lead them to further engage with you.
Expertise Will Prevail
Consumers want to hear from experts and because of this Google is placing more emphasis on finding and sharing websites with strong topical content in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages). Gone are the days of adding a backlink, keyword stuffing a short-form blog to get recognized as an expert.
The rewards are given to the content that not only has keywords but whose content fits into the context of the site. Brands will need to publish long-form content around pillar website pages. The goal in 2021 is to build content around specific topics and then expanding it from there.
Cater Content to Users Not Search Engines
In previous years you could get away with writing SEO content that catered to search engines and not users to get a better ranking. However, as algorithms are advancing search engines are looking to the user experience in 2021.
The best information will be given priority along with web design, user experience, and load time. The goal of this overall user experience is to move away from keyword stuffing and delivering it to the user in a more catered feel. Consumers want communication to be personal and on a one-to-one feel.
Content Atomization
Content atomization is about breaking down one broad-themed content into smaller content pieces. The best way to apply this technique is to take a massive e-book and turn each chapter or lesson into a blog. Consumers will be able to engage with smaller digestible pieces and get more out of it. The other bonus is that they will return to get the next snippet and engage with your site over and over.
While this concept of repurposing content is not new, it is a theme that will be relevant in 2021. Content atomization can also be applied to taking long videos of content and creating snippets for social media posts.