Digital Strategy: Web Design & Social Media

Digital Marketing should be treated with as much care as any other function supporting a business. It is more than updating social media occasionally or simply having a website. Having a digital marketing strategy is necessary for a strong online presence. A business strategy needs to be tailored to the business. This means having a brand guide that includes a business logo, preferred colors, fonts used across social media/the web, and anything design-wise that could be tied back to the business. It means knowing what a business audience is for the correct messaging to be used on the proper platforms. Digital marketing should streamline leads to follow a call to action that the business has set its goals for, with as little interruption as possible. Links from social media to the website should be working, calls to action should be clear, and all information on a website should be reflected through social media. Of Course, there is more to a digital marketing strategy, but I will explore more on these topics through a series of blogs. As for now, this blog will be a feature on web design, social media marketing, and a piece of strategy that I would love to improve, video editing.  

Web Design

A good website should be designed and organized with user experience (UX) in mind. All information should be on the correct page of a website and should be organized so that the ordinary user would know how to access what they need. According to sproutsocial.com, “51.2% of people research brands online before making a purchase”. This information could include business hours, location, sales, products/services, a blog, contact information, social media, and business hours. In addition to a clean and easy UX, accessibility is essential for a website's success. This is for people who may have trouble viewing websites, such as adding image descriptions, creating a hierarchy for a site with headings, using easy-to-read fonts, and even using software to crawl the site for accessibility improvements. It is easy to miss when a site needs improvements, that is why it is important to pay attention to website analytics.

Website analytics could be a lot to take in. To start, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as comments, shares, likes, and other types of engagement should be considered when creating goals. Analytics will help track these goals and make it easier to know what actions need to be made. Anyone looking over analytics should be checking over the KPI, if there is any drop-off during a new campaign or when a new site is introduced. Some of these issues could include UI issues such as broken links, missing website copy, missing images, or a slow page load time. It may take up to a few months to see any change in analytics but pay close attention when starting a new campaign or creating a new page. If there is a high bounce rate (percentage of users who leave the site after viewing one page), then the site should be reviewed and improvements should be made upon discovering what the issue is.

Overall, understanding analytics is a skill that should assist in improving a website's Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a strategy that assists in improving a website's chance of showing up higher on search results on sites like Google or Bing. Most websites get buried in Google search results and most people will only look on the first page of Google search results. Using the proper keywords for their website, updating websites to improve user experience, and having many relevant pages on the site. Another way to increase engagement on a business site would be to use pay-per-click (PPC) ads. With PPC ads, keywords are placed under auction and users will be bidding for keywords based on a budget determined by the user. In addition to web design with accessibility in mind, SEO, or PPC ads, Social Media is an important tool for strategy.

Social Media Management

A good website without proper social media management could turn people away from a business. Social media should be a tool to draw leads into a business website to convert them into customers. This means that the social media manager should have branding, information about the business, products/services, and know what makes their business stand out in mind when creating content. The most important part of social media management is having fun. Content needs to be relatable, entertaining, emotional, and even shocking (sometimes) but most importantly it needs to relate and resonate enough with the target audience to convert them into customers.

Just like with website analytics, social media analytics makes it easier to understand who your social media platform has reached. It breaks down the same information as website analytics would but it would do this by posts and by tracking set calls to actions. Social media analytics is helpful by making some content stats stand out. If one post is outperforming another, then the underperforming posts should be reviewed to compare to the higher-performing posts and figure out what could be improved for future postings. For example, if you notice that carousel posts are outperforming single picture posts, then maybe more carousel posts should be featured. There may be more to it than just being a carousel post too, it could be the design, the type of content the post features, and even the time of the post. Posting on social media is experimenting to see what works best with your audience and future audiences. 

A business may have a strong call to action or important messaging or the right keywords but people will lose interest if there are bland images or videos to go with it. Good graphic design adds credibility to a business, 94% of users will reject a website based on poor design elements. Good graphic design can make a company recognizable, even to the point of knowing the design elements of a company. As mentioned before, businesses should have some form of brand guide to keep their familiarity. It adds another layer of professionalism to the business. Graphic design also doesn’t need to be too complicated either. Canva is a great resource for novice and even expert graphic designers to create great social media posts.

Personal Improvements: Video

One skill that I would love more opportunities to practice is video and animation. Animation is a fun way to show off a brand with a commercial through an animated logo or even short-form content like Instagram reels. Animated or not Video is becoming one of the most important forms of web content. According to wyzowl, “44% of people prefer to learn about a new product or service via short video content”. Knowing this means that video content would need to be clear with messaging while keeping the viewer entertained. Instagram reels and TikTok have shown how popular short-form content can get. YouTube has even adopted its form of short-form content. So much information can be packed into these videos and the way their algorithm works, a video will show up on a user's page that shares interests with the subject of the content.

Closing

Web design and Social Media Management tend to be the focal point of digital strategy with most goals being to gain followers or convert users to customers. Having a digital strategy is important to make a business stand out in the sea of competition. There are many components to a digital strategy but one of the most important is improving SEO. This could come by organic means such as using keywords and having relevant information shared on the website, or it could be improved through pay-per-click ads. Social media is an important tool to lead users to a website and use can be improved through the use of analytics as well. I will be making this a series of blogs breaking down digital strategy, leave your contact info if you would like to be updated with future blog releases.