It is not difficult to see how, thanks to the widespread use of storytelling (that is, telling stories to create trust in the brand and encourage users to try its products or services), content marketing has become a fundamental part of the digital marketing.
A recent HubSpot study confirms that content marketing can help you achieve impressive results. Companies with blogs have 55% more visitors and 97% more inbound links than those without, so it is not surprising that many professionals use content marketing as their main strategy.
In fact, they create content constantly!
However, the success of a content marketing campaign not only depends on the quality of the content, but also on how good the design of your website and your campaigns are.
Why content marketing defines the design of web pages
For any company it is essential to have a website. The main objectives of all commercial websites are to attract potential customers, carry out marketing actions and generate sales. But achieving any of these three things is much more difficult if your website design is rubbish, to put it mildly.
The reason why content marketers will want to add to your website design is obvious: no one is going to be interested in the content they create if the page looks horrible and navigation is not intuitive. It would be like asking a pastry chef to serve a beautiful cake on a dirty plate.
Probably the first example of the power of content marketing on web page design was the widespread appearance of “blog/news/resources” sections.
Currently, it is rare to find a website that does not have a section especially dedicated to publishing content, even for companies that only offer one product, as is the case with MySignature:
So it doesn’t matter if you are thinking about creating a website to sell services or opening an online store, probably one of your requirements will be to have a section where you can publish interesting content.
Having seen this, let’s explore other ways in which content marketing influences web design.
Prioritize readability
If you want your potential customers to stay on the page and read your content, it has to be easy to read and visually appealing.
Choosing the right fonts, style and spacing will go a long way in achieving this. Other essential things that make reading easier and that you can see on many well-known blogs are:
- Good color contrast (in most cases, dark text on a white background).
- Lots of white space.
- Correctly spaced paragraphs.
- Clearly identifiable titles and subtitles, making the text easier to follow.
The image above is a screenshot from the famous graphic design magazine Domestika. You can see that it has a large title separate from the body of the text, and that the summary is in bold. Additionally, they use images, subheadings, and bullet points to make it easier for their readers to absorb the content of the articles.
CoScheduled found that only 10-20% of visitors read the bottom of your website. On the Internet, people don’t always read line by line, but rather skim the page looking for the information they need. Therefore, having clear headings, separate paragraphs, space around elements, subheadings and images help you search articles more quickly.
That’s why you often see people with old WordPress themes spending time creating custom headers and making other small HTML and CSS modifications.
Use attractive visual elements
Visual elements captivate us and, if used correctly, allow us to better understand the message we want to convey.
It is no secret that including images in content helps us receive more visits. For this reason, images, personalized graphics, infographics and videos are essential pieces of content marketing, and therefore, of web page design.
In the image above, you can see how on the WebsiteToolTester home page there is an illustration made expressly to attract immediate attention.
Visual elements not only help you quickly capture the attention of visitors, but also help people remember the content you share and generate new leads.
A video presenting your product or service can dramatically increase the time people spend on your website, and with beautiful calls to action and graphics you can also get users to explore other parts of your website. This translates into lower bounce and abandonment rates and longer stay times on the website, which in turn benefits your SEO metrics.
So, if the first thing you see on a web page is an animated header or an explainer video, you can be almost certain that it has been put there with the clear goal of meeting content marketing needs.
Provide a seamless user experience
A good user experience, smart navigation and attractive design are very important. If any of these aspects are missing, it will be difficult for you to obtain contacts and close sales, since:
- People won’t spend enough time on the page to download your lead magnets.
- They won’t bother reading content intended to build trust in your brand.
- They will not have the patience to look up prices, book a demo, or navigate to other pages designed to generate money.
To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, content marketing forces you to manage all of your website space as efficiently as possible and put a lot of effort into improving the user experience and website navigation.
The best way to see this is in the design of the blog sections we talked about before.
In a world where people are annoyed by pop-ups, marketers have to look for other ways to get leads from potential customers.
In the example above, you can see that the right sidebar is not empty, nor does it contain generic social media links, nor lists of previous posts. Instead, the sidebar displays customer testimonials that link to their case study pages, and also offers the ability to start a live demo of your product.
It is an interesting design option, which surely would not have been chosen if the page had not been defined with a strategic content plan in mind.
Content marketing not only affects web design
Other areas of online marketing are also affected by content marketing. For example, when creating newsletters you must keep in mind aspects such as the subject of the message, that the content looks good and that the call to action buttons are visible.
As you can see, the previous Starbucks newsletter is designed with content marketing in mind. They insert images with illustrations to contextualize the product and have a perfectly visible call to action button.
Finally, some last thoughts
You’ve probably noticed that we haven’t even mentioned the requirements for search engine optimization. The main reason is that SEO optimization is widely covered on the Internet and usually deserves a complete article exclusively dedicated to this topic. So we leave that analysis for others.
At the end of the day, you can see this as a play, the web design is the stage and the content marketing is the play. When they are well combined, they will never leave your audience indifferent.