In these times, marketing techniques like SEO, PPC or blogging are very popular.
It's all about Online Marketing, creating informative content and so on.
But what about Content Design?
What if you create excellent content, but nobody wants to read it because your content design is just bad?
Well, then you've wasted all your time and effort and also, a lot of money.
You created a lot of informative content, put hours of work in it, and it was a total waste of your time.
This is simply a worst case scenario for profitable businesses.
But don't worry. These Quick Guide will show you how to design your content superclass and make it more engaging, get more readers, and also more customers.
You can even supercharge your Conversion Rate by taking your Content Design to the next level.
So, let's dive right in.
What Does Content Design Actually Mean?
In fact, Content Design means designing digital content. Digital Content could be plain text, pictures or videos. Basically everything you can find on the web.
If you have a good Content Design, you will also have a good user experience on your site. Good Content Design aims to achieve an emotional effect on the user at a specific moment.
The main reason for putting some effort in good Content Design is quite simple: Get more readers and more customers.
The Foundation Of A Good Conversion Rate: The Landing-Page
The Landing Page has the highest conversion rate and this has one simple reason.
Hick's law states that the more options available, the more time customers need to make a decision.
If you want to optimize your Conversion Rate, you will have to reduce the number of options on your site.
Let's take a closer look at Google. You ever noticed that the search engine has a very, very simple design?
There's just the search bar, where you can enter your search query, nothing else.
Of Course, also everybody is using Google because it's super easy to use.
Content Design Guidelines
It's not luck, where the eye of users move to, but rather the result of a targeted design. You can guide the user's attention by so-called Focus Points.
Focus Points are fields with more design aspects than other fields. There are several possibilities for the design of these so called Focus Points:
- Minimizing the design to a single element
- Placing elements in the “middle” of the golden-ratio (Ckeck out this article if you don’t know about the golden ration )https://apiumhub.com/tech-blog-barcelona/golden-ratio-in-web-design/)
- Eye-catching design of an element
- Use free space
- Strong contrasts in shape, color and size
- Well-defined lines that refer to an element
Using these guidelines, you can guide the user's eye in a targeted manner. As soon as you have done this, you need to trigger user interaction.
In most cases, bare content is not enough, rather you need to meet the emotional needs of users.
Meet User's Emotions
The user should enjoy your landing page. You can achieve this by designing it intuitive and personal.
For example, you can use Hero Shots. These aim to help the user identify with the product and encourage him to click on a CTA.
Also, you can use classic storytelling for most landing pages. By adding click elements to your content, the user is able to make some Micro-Conversions.
And finally, the user is more likable to make a real conversion and buy your product.
Easy, just put these things into your content, and you will notice your sales start growing.
Phenomenon of Emergence
Using this phenomenon, users can only discover an element's properties by interacting with it. For example, you can link certain shapes to information that appear in sequence. When you do that, users only can get information when interacting with these elements.
Here are some examples:
- Fixed images or elements
- 3D buttons instead of ghost buttons
- Hover Effects
- Animated quotations, statements or click elements in your content
- Scroll-effects
If you implement this super easy strategy, most users will feel more engaging and this means more sales for you.
Social Proof
When making purchasing decisions, we often rely on our instincts or listen to the advice of friends and colleagues. Nobody wants to sit in front of a computer for hours and weigh up the pros and cons of different products.
That is why we prefer to rely on the decisions of our friends. Therefore, your site must show some social proof.
You can use the following elements to do that:
- Success stories of customers
- Testimonials
- Customer Counters
- References to successful projects
- Awards
- Events
Social Proof is one of the important To Dos, when it comes to encourage people to buy your products.
Be sure to implement some of the strategies mentioned above, and you will be save.
Conclusion
That was a Quick Guide for creating good Content Design on your own website, blog, Online Shop or whatever.
Trust me, there is a lot of information out there about Content Design, designing CTAs, Landing Pages and so on.
I can only tell you that you have to focus on the main aspects, as long as you probably don’t have time to create a site which is totally perfect.
In this Quick Guide, you learned the basics. Implement what you’ve read and you will be good to go.
About the Author
Moritz Bauer studied Industrial Engineering at University of Constance in Germany and is passionate about ECommerce and Online Marketing. In these times he writes engaging articles about Amazon FBA on his blog smartminded.
