Honestly, the first couple of articles about this year’s biggest marketing trends really is about how we can be better at creating a stellar user experience. By being more personal and living out our brand’s values we create connections and by using data, we can be better about tweaking that personalization over time. In this article, however, we’re going to talk more about aesthetics in the experience.
Less is More
No, this isn’t just about simplifying your website copy and creating more minimalistic designs. This is about your energy level and what truly matters. In the past decade, we’ve been trained that our brand has to be EV-ERY-WHERE. That’s not true, because when we try to be a master of all, we actually become a master of none. This year, marketers should focus on dominating one or two channels. And pick those channels based on where your customers are.
For Bondfire, we put more energy toward Instagram and LinkedIn. Why? Because that’s where our engagement is and it’s where our referrals are.
Now we will say that this strategy really only works when you’ve got your basics covered. Start with a great online landing spot, aka your website. Optimize that baby to truly speak to what you do best. Then identify two channels that you a) love to use and b) your customers love to use, too. Research the heck out of them and activate your content marketing strategy around those.
Integrated SEO
There’s that word again, SEO. In our previous article, we talked about how voice-activated search is becoming a much bigger deal. And for those of us struggling to understand where we stand in the rankings, this might have us stressed out.
We’re going to let you in on a little secret. SEO only works through good content and good user experience. You create good content by understanding what your customers want and writing to that. Think questions, helpful tips, tricks, things of that nature. Give to receive. Then, make sure that when you deliver that content it’s easy to read, easy to engage with and for the love of God, make sure your site loads quickly. Next item please….
Websites Get Faster
Have ya heard? Google’s Core Web Vitals are shaking up the search world and we’re here for it. The core web vitals essentially say that if your site is easy to use and quick to load, you’re going to be in favor of the Google Gods.
From a design perspective, this goes back to less is more and when it comes to web design, atomic principles should really matter here. Simplify your style guides, stick to just a couple of fonts and utilize content delivery networks (CDNs) to handle some of the load. By simplifying our designs, we’ll likely simplify our developers’ lives too because they need to focus on minifying their code and creating seamless actions and user experience – not coding a million templates.
Where To Go From Here?
If you’ve made it here, you might have a checklist. It’s time for us to get personal in our marketing. Think more strategically using first-party data. And streamlining our user experience by having more of a minimalist mentality. We’d suggest starting with a review of your content marketing approach and minimizing the channels you’re activating to truly master your outreach. From there…it’s up to your strategy as to what will truly drive the business.