Strong writing is essential to be effective content marketing, you already know it. However, your target audience won’t read your content if it doesn’t look good.
Your presentation, or user experience (UX), is essential to ensure that the quality content you put so much work into is well received. Use the following tips to ensure the UX of your content meets the needs and wants of your audience.
Key takeaways:
- A simple layout with lots of white space and a consistent design lowers your bounce rate.
- A fast site with user-friendly navigation keeps your audience on site longer.
- Use more compelling visuals than stock photos and differentiate calls to action (CTAs) and hyperlinks for better click-through rates and conversions.
- Fix or remove broken links and make signups as easy as possible.
- Always check that your content is mobile-friendly.
1. Simplicity of layout
These days, everyone suffers from information overload. You already struggle with a short attention span by using shorter, simpler sentences. A web page with a clean, open layout with abundant white space will also grab people’s attention. Clutter creates a bad user experience and alienates your audience.
Of course, you want to provide value, include images, and capture every conversion opportunity, but your pages shouldn’t be overwhelming. Conduct a design audit to ensure your site has a crisp, clean feel, with large margins and ample spacing.
2. A fast site
While it was true years ago that people decided whether or not to stay on your site in a matter of seconds, this premise is even more applicable today. Spend time on your site’s technical capabilities to ensure pages flow smoothly and charge quickly.
If a page doesn’t load in a second or two at most, expect visitors to quickly jump ship. Use technical SEO tools from your martech stack to increase your site speed.
3. Easy navigation
When you become a thought leader, you get the added bonus of having people visit your site and read even more material. This extra time on site means more time to view your CTAs and increase potential conversions.
However, if users have difficulty finding additional information as they move through the sales funnel, they will look elsewhere.
One of the ways we have increased time on site with our web pages is by using large headers and simple footers that make it easier for users to navigate. Additionally, we always highlight related articles for further reading on a topic and highlight popular articles.
Dig Deeper: The Art of the Natural Funnel: How to Direct Your Readers Without Forced CTAs
4. Design Consistency
You probably know how essential it is to maintain consistency with your brand’s tone and personality. The appearance of your website should also remain consistent.
Don’t make your audience think they’ve suddenly moved to a different area with drastic changes between pages. Use consistent colors, spacing, illustration styles, titles, and fonts to create a sense of comfort and familiarity with your brand.
5. Attractive visuals
While graphics are a key part of content, too many stock photographs can be distracting. It is not difficult to find the same photos in commercial articles on the web.
Establish your brand personality with images that match your personality. When using stock images, choose those that match your style.
On our agency website, we like to use humorous and sarcastic images to open many of our articles because they fit our brand voice. We’re also not against adding a funny GIF or two when tweaking.
6. Differentiation of links and CTAs
You need to measure clicks and conversions to determine success. However, you’ll have a hard time getting people to click on it if they can’t clearly see where a hyperlink is.
I’m shocked how many sites don’t do this, because most word processors automatically underline and change hyperlinks to blue text. However, formatting may change when sharing or downloading articles, so check that articles display correctly after publishing.
We also found that putting the link on a few words is more effective than just one word. This suggestion goes double for calls to action. Adding an attention-grabbing button or image will increase clicks on your all-important CTAs.
Dig Deeper: 5 Tips for Balancing Push and Pull in Content Marketing
7. Easy Registrations
One of your best pre-sales conversions is getting signups from lead generators. However, you will find that the number of registrations drops significantly when you request multiple lines of contact information.
Do you really need a phone number and company name? Often, if you just ask for a name and email address, you have enough to contact a qualified lead and develop that connection.
Also configure your forms so that the user’s browser can automatically fill out information quickly. A Effortless form filling process increases your chances of registration.
8. Mobile Friendliness
This point should be obvious by now, but it’s easy to forget when you’re trying to do everything. Make sure your site looks as good on mobile as it does on desktop, or even better.
The problem is that most site building is done on a desktop computer. Make sure you have made your pages smooth and pretty for smartphones and tablets.
9. No Broken Links
Broken links to third-party sites may seem small, but they can quickly destroy UX and SEO. These links demonstrate the credibility and authority of the algorithms and your readers.
Clicking on a link to a great reference and getting a 404 is frustrating. Even worse, heading to a spammy or unsecure site.
During the editing phase, make sure the links you include in your articles work properly. When you update the content (which you should do regularly), check that the hyperlinks still work and navigate to the correct pages.
Quality UX makes your content shine
Good UX ensures your audience understands the point of your content and avoids the distraction of poor presentation. Use these tips to improve your UX and start getting higher conversions.
Dig Deeper: Do More with Less: How Marketers Can Make Content Go Further
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily of MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.
