97% of consumers research their purchases online before they buy something.  This is evidence that today’s web visitors are more critical and savvier than ever. And, they’re only growing more so, as the generations who have grown up with smartphones and with internet access represent a larger percentage of the population.

Your brand’s reputation, your bottom line, and your future are dependent upon bleeding edge web design.

This article is written to highlight prevailing web design trends that we believe could be insightful to various businesses.

With that said, let’s explore some of today’s hot trends for website design, and which trends may support your business objectives.

Attention-Grabbing LARGE Titles

It’s well noted in today’s rushed and want it now culture, users seem to have less and less time to spend on websites. With this mind, design interface is adapting to include large, bolded titles and shortened messaging to capture their audiences fast with the objective of improved engagement leading towards more and faster conversions.

Here’s an example.

Himalaya

Himalaya uses a video background to accentuate the natural genesis of their products.

The use of color and a heavy font weight gets the job done. The headline and moving background work cohesively.

Flat Design

Flat Design is a minimalist design approach that features the use of clean and open space, bright colors, and simple two-dimensional illustrations.

The popularity of flat design can be attributed to the need for fast-loading websites that provide users with an enjoyable browsing experience on both mobile and desktop.

This style of design started off as just another trend, but over the years, it’s grown to become the standard for web design.

Flat design uses simple graphics and images.  This means an overall much quicker loading time.

This style of site is also preferred by many users from a user experience perspective.

Reducing the clutter and unnecessary decorative parts of a design helps users to focus on the important parts and make it easier to navigate.

Benefits of white space

Imagine walking into a house where each room is overflowing with high-end furniture, expensive knick-knacks, gaudy accouterments, and racks of couture fashion.

The feeling is chaotic with a sense of being lost.

Now, imagine walking into a home with wide open spaces, and warm, inviting light – a home with several tasteful pieces of furniture, and a few hand-selected knick-knacks on display. Perhaps more inviting?

Fresh, clean, minimalist design is in and visual clutter is out.

The reason is simple: designs with plenty of white space are easier to read and navigate.

Leaving lots of white space also makes it easier to direct focus on the most important elements on the page.

White space is the portion of a page that is left empty.

Technically, it doesn’t even have to be white – it just needs to be devoid of copy, graphics or photos.

Today’s website visitors are content-scanners. They scroll quickly, skim posts, and get distracted by busy layouts trying to accomplish too much. Effective use of whitespace is the key to getting your visitors’ full attention.

Intentionally blank areas aren’t just aesthetically pleasing — they actually have a big impact on how our brains take in and process new material. Too much information or visual data crammed into a small, busy space can cause cognitive fatigue. Essentially to our brains, it’s information overload, which results the inability to assimilate information.

Check out the example below from Digital Ink:

The layout on the left uses the vast majority of available space.

In contrast, the layout on the right uses wider columns and more distance between paragraphs. This simple design shift that has a major impact on making the article look more approachable and readable.

The continued push to create a better user experience and stronger conversions, white space will become even more important

Integrated video

People are in love with video! Right!?!

Video can capture our attention like no other form of media.

Additionally, video can boost your SEO ratings.

Google measures how much time viewers spend on your web page to help determine its value. The more time spent, the better the rating.

Videos increase engagement and encourage people to spend more time on your website.

This is why video is strategic web design tactic.

Curated short videos or animations are created and integrated design elements. These video elements engage viewers, enhancing the user experience for them and could yield higher SEO ranking for your business.

Robust User Interface (UI) /User Experience (UX) design

Today’s web users expect a impeccable online experience when visiting your website. And failure to meet that expectation can result in a lost opportunity business.

A recent study from Forrester Research reveals that proficient UI design could increase your web conversions by up to 200%. According to the study, a strong user experience can increase conversion rates up to 400%.

This means that poor UI/UX is turning away a lot of potential sales.

That’s why user interface and user experience design are vitally important.

Enhanced responsive design and mobile apps integration

Let’s consider how people search for something.

According to Google, over 48% of all users started their search for something on a mobile device.

Starting in 2016, more users access the internet from their mobile devices than from their laptops or PCs.

Mobile devices are the most popular way to access the internet and your web design needs to support mobile users.

According to research by ComScore, mobile users spend more than double the minutes online than desktop users.

Need another reason to go responsive?

Here’s one: Google penalizes sites that are not mobile-friendly in its search results. As the company stated:

“…we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact on our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high-quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

Every business needs to optimize their website for mobile devices.

Businesses will lose prospective customers unless they are providing a strong mobile user experience.

This is why responsive design and mobile apps are hot items when it comes to website design.

Responsive Design

Responsive web design adapts to the size and shape of the device screen used to view your site.

a great user experience for everyone who visits your website is provided by well-executed responsive design.

Mobile Apps

Mobile apps (short for “applications”) are programs designed specifically to be used on mobile devices.

They started as stand-alone applications for mobile devices. But, today, businesses are working hard to integrate the user experience on their mobile apps with their primary websites. Customers have come to expect this sort of seamless integration.

Some businesses rely on their website as their primary service. These web applications aren’t just a hub for information or even just an online store. They are complex websites with layers of user interface.

Websites this complex may be difficult to translate effectively for mobile devices with only responsive design. That’s where a dedicated mobile app can save the day.

You can also expect to see more and more businesses launching apps that allow users to move easily from app to website and back while maintaining the user’s account information and (of course) consistent visual brand design.

Animated GIFs

Today’s consumer is in an “instant gratification” mindset when it comes to finding the information they’re looking for.

We only have a small opportunity to capture their attention and provide them with what they’re looking for.

This is where animated GIFs can be beneficial.

While being engaging and entertaining, GIFs can convey complex ideas in a short period of time. Additionally, they also work on most browsers and mobile devices, making them accessible to everyone.

In the example below CarLens, a car identification app uses an animated GIF in its hero section. The GIF is engaging, quickly shows the type of information you can find about a car and makes users interested to learn more.

Automated Bots & Machine Learning

Over the past year chatting with bots and machine learning on websites has evolved. We’ve seen significant advancements in artificial intelligence and the capabilities of bots.

For example, think about when Google gives us auto-suggestions or when Facebook asks us if we would like to be tagged in a photo.

Many companies are seeing the benefits bots can bring to their organization including:

• Greater convenience by giving users instant responses and filtering them to the appropriate contact based on their issues
• Greater conversions for sales related activities
• Improved efficiency by allowing for easier and time-saving transitions between cases.

In Summary

Your website is a critical element of your brand, and as your brand and marketing strategy evolves, your site should as well.

Aesthetically websites, in general, will continue to move towards the clean and practical style of flat design. Companies will make a push to make their sites accessible for everyone and employing more conversational bots to give users a quicker response time

Your website and your brand should work in unison. A misalignment can damage not only your brand but also your customer’s trust.

There are many millions of websites online. The only way to stand out is to create a website that’s unique, different, mobile friendly and efficient.

Part 1 of 2

If you’ve noticed that almost every post on Facebook is now video, you wouldn’t be wrong and you’re certainly not imagining it, Facebook, among other social networks such as the Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter have all taken huge steps forward to dominate in this space in the past year alone.

In fact, did you know that 80% of the world’s internet traffic is video and viewers are 85% more likely to buy a product or service after watching a video.  Additionally conversion rates on landing pages that feature video increase by upwards of 80%!

How you actually create a direct sales video that converts?

Think about the myriad of infomercials. They’re on air because they make millions of dollars. And when you apply a similar format online, you can achieve a similar result, without a TV advertising budget required to get started.

Creating a video script that converts – Key Initial Steps

What are your prospects struggling with?

What pain does your product or service solve?

Highlight current struggles being faced

First sentence of script in the form of a question

The first thing you want to do is explain the problem that your product or service is trying to solve for your customers or prospects.  Then, identify the pain that your product aims to solve.

Follow this by highlighting the current struggles that they’re facing within the very first sentence of your script in the form of a question. Now, this question sets the entire framework for the rest of the script and it immediately grabs their attention.

This can then be followed up by asking two other key questions around the core challenge they’re facing.

So now you have three questions.  But why three questions in total?  Well, it’s the rule of three – it’s more psychologically pleasing to the brain, and you have three distinct opportunities that you can address the core challenge that you’re trying to solve with your product or service.

This is crucial for the setup for the rest of your script step, which aims to validate the immediate need of your product or service here.

Build the need with your customer to take action now for your product or service by illustrating:

How your product make a difference in their life

Why it’s crucial for them to address and solve their problem now

Why is it absolutely crucial for your customer to take action to solve their current problem?

After asking, three key questions, you then segue into briefly, introducing who you are, why you’re credible and precisely why you developed your product or service.  All of this is within the context of the first question.

Now that you’ve got their attention, the next step is to present your product or service in a manner to create a sense of urgency motivating your customer to take action now. The notion is reiterate the link between your product and service with a solution to an urgent need. It’s important to be specific and detail outcomes that the purchase of your product or service will provide.

While using specific language to help induce the sale, offer a direct call to action and a clear way to purchase. This is where you direct them to a link, a sign up button, or a purchase now button on your landing page.

Everything about this script should make the purchase sound easy. For Part 2 we will go over some of items on the landing page.

Please feel free to contact us should you have any questions!

Communication is changing so fast, perhaps too fast? It seems like we live in a second-to-second news cycle from media, to business communication, to social interaction. From a business standpoint, communication planning, as well as, reactive task management is a 24/7 job.

Where should the focus be in order to continue to scale and stand apart from competitors.

Here are some items to pay close attention to:

Marketing Automation Through AI

AI-based technologies have slowly proliferated the mainstream. In terms of advertising, what AI brings to the table is smart automation. As marketing is becoming more data-driven, there is a rise in demand for systems that can process massive quantities of information in real-time, and then act on the results without needing additional assistance. Since AIs are better equipped than humans to handle these tasks by design, marketing agencies are starting to make more use of them in their day to day operations.

Some of the examples of AI-driven marketing automation include:

• Chatbots, which are a powerful tool for customer engagement
• Customer profiling, whereby customer activity is being tracked across multiple channels and networks, allowing marketers to have an accurate, up-to-date picture of their target audience at all times
• Advanced performance tracking for advertising campaigns, which is essential for making adjustments real-time

The emphasis on trusting in reputable content, others they know, and in peers

A Nielsen study from 2015 showed that the top four most-trusted sources of advertising were: people you know, branded sites, editorial sites, and reviews. Ads are near the bottom of that list, and that fact hasn’t really changed.

So, does this mean marketers should abandon ads completely? Absolutely not!

There’s still a place for ads, but they have to be more significant and valuable to the consumer. However, across the board there’s increased budgets have been going to  content marketing, referral partnerships, influencer marketing, and other methods that are designed to bring actual value to audiences.

Engaging content prevails

The need is to create engaging content rather than just advertisements. This engaging content doesn’t just help marketing. It can enable your sales team and be beneficial to recruiting,  internal training, and just about every other area of your business, too.

Mobile first designed content adapted for Voice-Search

Browsing the web on a portable device while on the move has led hardware designers and software developers to explore user interfaces, and voice-based ones have proven to be one of the more convenient options.

What voice-search brings to the table in terms of marketing, is a new paradigm for content creation. Presently, digital advertising content relies on phrases and keywords that target written search queries. Such queries are expressed in a particular kind of vernacular, which differs from the one we use in everyday speech. Since voice-search queries are more likely to be phrased in the latter, creating content that matches the tone, grammar, and vocabulary of an everyday spoken language is set to become a priority in 2019.

Adapting marketing content for voice-search involves:

• Using long tail keywords, phrases, and sentences, instead of abstract arrays of words which are better suited for written search queries
• Optimizing for local SEO, as voice-search queries usually have immediate practical significance for the consumer
• Anticipating the specific questions consumers are making, and creating content that has the form of an answer you would get in conversation

Creativity, not conformity, will set successful marketers apart

Everybody else had gone digital, businesses and brands should consider integrated campaigns and creative distribution tactics that focus on ways to engage audience members that differentiate from industry competitors.

Combining Video and Native Marketing

Video content has skyrocketed in popularity in recent decades thanks to platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Netflix, and Vine. Video advertising quickly followed suit, as evidenced by the plethora of ads that you can see running before, after, or during videos hosted on these services. More recently, video advertising has begun to transition into a new phase, one that is marked by the ample use of principles of native marketing.

Instead of creating a video with the specific intent to promote a service or product, marketers are now attempting to blur the line between advertising and regular video content, as per the principles of native marketing. This simply means that the ad part of the video is no longer separated from the content. In other words, video ads no longer have a recognizable form that can be used to identify them, allowing them to bypass consumer resistance to ads.

To capitalize on the new wave of video advertising, marketers should consider:

• Working with influencers and other independent video creators. The indie scene has traditionally been the source of some of the best video designs in the recent years
• Optimizing video for viewing on portable devices, in order to capitalize on the growing mobile audience
• Integrating video content into websites and social media profiles, to ensure maximum possible exposure

Understanding how your customers communicate is vital

Technology has evolved tremendously over the last several years. Customers expect that companies will communicate with them in the ways they like. That’s why it’s so important for marketers to be aware of their customers’ communication preferences.

New technologies are being introduced, old strategies are being updated, and the industry as a whole is growing. Keeping an eye on trends is the essential part of future-proofing. Remember, there’s not a single “right way” to build a marketing strategy.  A full stack of tools must be aligned to work together. Digital marketing is an umbrella that encompasses many activities which drive attention to, and defines your brand!

Businesses are built upon the premise to provide consumers better experiences, better products and services, and better solutions. But how do they convince their audience that their brand has all the answers they’re looking for? How does their mission resonate and connect with potential customers?

The answer is intuitive and simple: Create compelling content that their customers can relate to; more specifically, create a story that the business and consumers can both benefit from.

Since your brand lives and inspires customers as a part of a fundamental relationship that shapes today’s social story, powerful storytelling matters to the success of a brand in a highly competitive market.

Storytelling is a potent content marketing strategy that helps you establish relationships. If you share a story consumers can instantly relate to, they will take the time to listen to your message and learn about the benefits of using your brand.  You’re creating a content marketing power tool you can use to convey and amplify your company message.

Take a moment and review the past week in your life. Most likely, it’s been filled with stories. When humans interact, we may share a few facts and data points, but more often than not, stories are at the center of how we communicate, relate to one another, share and process information.

Adding storytelling to your marketing helps to refine and humanize your brand. Your mission is to connect authentically with your customers. As a business, you can never underestimate the power of building conversation and connection with your audience.

While storytelling is core to human behavior, are stories impactful when used in a business context? Absolutely! But only if they’re used strategically.

Humans have told stories since the dawn of time, and powerful brand storytelling is still the key to communication, conversion, and loyalty.

Whether you’re just starting your business and you want your voice to be heard, or have developed a seasoned path, then storytelling is your content format of choice.

Let us help you tell your story!

How Do I Show Up In Google Maps? Brick & Mortar & Service Based Businesses.

GMB or your Google My Business listing which is found at business.google.com is where you as a business owner, or your digital marketing agency will manage your local map listings. Proper On Page Optimization of your Google My Business is absolutely paramount.

From selecting proper categories to defining service areas, optimizing images, service offers, business descriptions to content marketing within the GMB platform- there are more opportunities than ever to give Google and it’s users what they want most.

So what does Google and users want? Glad you asked. They want to display and find the most relevant business to the searchers question. Gone are the days where they showed 7 map listings, or even just three. No Map or SERP is the same for every user. Proximity, to a business, the users geo location and more all effect what Google displays as the most relevant business to solve the search.

Who needs Google Maps or Google My Business Marketing?

If you operate a brick and mortar business or a service based business and draw customers from a defined geographic area and are searching for answers on “how to I get more customers from local marketing” GMB or Google My Business marketing services might be for you.

Why do I need to optimize my Map Listing if i want to get more phone calls or walk in traffic?

With the majority of searches happening on mobile devices, optimizing for local intent is more important than ever. Hyper local relevance is a huge indicator for why some businesses seem to get more phone calls and business and others seem to barely treat water.

What Types of Business Should Market on Google My Business?

Any business that has local intent. Doctors, Lawyers, Plumbers, Car Dealers and more all serve a relatively defined geographic area, where it’s potential customers would call from or travel to their actual physical listing.

How Do Business Owners Measure Success in Google Maps Marketing?

If you want more phone calls, and sales, or walk in traffic, then Google Maps marketing is for you. There are a variety of ways to track success. Analyzing the increasing phone calls, website visitors and more are all solid indicators that GMB marketing is paying off.

Why Mission To Market For GMB Local Marketing?

Mission To Market has developed our own proprietary Google My Business platform for local marketing. Our platform allows our clients to increase metrics and scale campaigns with greater ease, than can be done by utilizing business.google.com

Contact Us for a Free Evaluation!

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