Beauty Basics

From websites selling products or services to those sharing a portfolio of work with potential employers, it’s vital to remember that as many of 38% of people will click off if they deem the site unattractive.

You’re not a professional web designer? Not a problem. Let’s take a look at some tips and tricks you can use when creating a beautiful website.

Four Web Design Do’s

1. Do Use Cohesive Colours and Fonts

Some psychologists suggest that whether a user either accepts or rejects a website is 60% down to colour. Try to stick to two or three carefully colour-guide chosen fonts throughout the site. Remember, even seemingly subtle changes can have a large impact. Let’s take the company ‘Performable’ as an example. By simply changing its call-to-action button from green to red, it saw a 21% increase in sales.

2. Do Use Simple Navigation

Always keep the following statistics in your mind when designing your site:

• 86% of visitors are immediately looking for information about your products.
• 60% of visitors want to find your contact information.

Increasing website sales comes down to ensuring a quick and easy user experience. A clear and concise navigation and search bar towards the top of the page will help to guide your customers to what they’re looking for and what you want to sell.

3. Do Use Certifications and Testimonials

With 85% of users trusting testimonials and product reviews in the same light as personal recommendations, ignore including customer testimonials at your peril. For example, five-starred ratings can increase your conversion rate by as much as 28%. For an added touch, why not try something similar to what the online restaurant ordering system ChowNow have done? Here, customers upload a short video of themselves actually speaking.

Crucially, would you expect your customers to share their financial information on a website without a seemingly flawless level of security? For this reason, make sure to add often overlooked certification logos such as security badges or third-party reviews of your business, proving to new customers the legitimacy of your business. 

4. Do Use Infographics

With people being 80% more likely to respond and interact with visual content, it’s certainly worth considering the general amount of text on your website. Some site content leads itself naturally away from text, such as statistic-driven content which is instead best displayed though the use of an infographic – as much as thirty times more likely to be read in its entirety than a wall of text.

Four Web Design Don’ts

Let’s now take a look at some pitfalls to avoid when constructing a beautiful, sales-increasing website.

1. Don’t Use Too Many Elements

The old adage of less is more applies in abundance here, so be careful with the GIFS, text, videos, pop-up ads and the like, which can quickly become distracting, lowering both time spent on your site and the all-important conversion rates. 

2. Don’t Use Jarring Colour Schemes

As mentioned above, your website’s chosen colour palette is of huge importance. Stay away from bold, headache-inducing colours that don’t complement each other. That’s no way to encourage a customer to stick around long enough to make a purchase.

3. Don’t Use Cluttered Navigation

Another way to boot the customers off your site without lifting a finger is to make things confusing and cluttered. No transactions are made when scrolling through a string of pointless nebulous web pages.

4. Don’t Use Loud Multimedia Set to AutoPay

A loud unexpected burst of audio and video can often do more harm than good. Sure, it’s good to grab your customer’s attention, but in this instance, it’s not the way to go.

In Design They Trust

When people arrive at your website, make sure you’ve got them on your side from the first click. A mixture of cohesive colours and fonts, five-star testimonials, along with a simple layout and uncluttered navigation should not only do that but also keep them coming back again and again.

As always from the Byter Team,

Good luck!

www.byter.com

Whether you opt for bubble graphs, bar charts, heat maps or treemaps, you can rest assured in the knowledge that scientific research is on your side. Of course, the text has its inescapable time and place, but when we consider that as much as 90% of information transferred to the human brain is visual, with images being processed 60,000 times faster than text, good data visualisation is a must for businesses wanting to deliver an easily digestible story to their audience.

A content strategist’s hunt for new and innovative ways to present data in visually appealing ways is never-ending. With that being said, let’s take a look at some effective data visualisation techniques that are worth bearing in mind during your next big campaign.

1. Inspiration: You Are Not Alone

So, some good news… sourcing data and creating an effective piece of data visualisation (data vis) to go with it doesn’t necessarily require suffering in silence. The website informationisbeautiful.net is one fantastic Pinterest-esque tool at your fingertips, filled with creative data vis inspiration and guidance.

2. Data Visualisation Tools

In a similar vein, be sure to explore the available online tools which are there to help you visualise your data in minutes. Such examples include:

DataWrapper

· Allows you to copy and paste from Google Sheets, Excel, CSV files.

· Allows you to link to URLs to create customisable charts.

· Allows you to preview the chart before you go ahead and publish it.

RawGraphs

· Allows you to copy and paste the relevant data directly from your spreadsheet.

· Allows you to choose a data vis type, with adjustable metrics.

Tableau

· Includes a blog full of useful tips well worth checking out.

3. Don’t Overcomplicate Things

Good data vis should simplify a message, making things easier to understand. Despite this, it’s incredibly common for people to associate increasingly complex graphs with higher quality. After wading through numerous eyesores on the ‘ugly charts’ section of the highly recommended website flowingdata.com I stumbled across this example highlighting why, in fact, the reality is often the exact opposite.

1. Mobile Friendly

Designing for mobile phones is a great opportunity to present data in new interesting ways.

You could:

· Stack your data vertically rather than horizontally and introduce a zoomable visual.

· Scale down the graphic.

· Create an entirely new graphic, focusing only on the critical insights (with the desktop version providing more context).

2. Choose Wisely

The type of data vis you choose is certainly no stab in the dark. Of course, a specific data vis will suit certain data, but when it comes to a (not-quite) one-size-fits-all choice, you can often not go too far wrong using maps, not least due to their ability to open up outreach targets. Furthermore, including an index may well be of use when dealing with lots of different metrics in your data, as is the case for interactivity, but remember to keep in mind the old adage of ‘less is more.’

By carefully taking this all into account, that next big campaign should be rooted in success.

As always from the team at Byter, good luck!

www.byter.com

Simply put, the potential revenue of an online company takes a massive hit if its website isn’t getting anywhere near enough traffic. With this in mind, let’s take a look at what you need to keep an eye on in order to help ensure that your business doesn’t succumb to such a fate.

Target audience

Question Time

The reasons your website isn’t getting any (increased) traffic can vary, but they’ll never be known unless you have a clear understanding of who to target. As such, ask yourself the following questions: Who are they? What are their needs? What are their concerns?

Your target audience not knowing that your website can provide them with solutions or, worse still, not even being able to find you in the first place, isn’t exactly a great way to increase your traffic. As such, we come to a fourth question that needs asking: in what ways can your business provide solutions?

Research

It all begins with research. Be sure to delve into your existing customer database to lead capture forms as well as analytics data to help create your ideal buyer persona and gain a fuller understanding of their buyer’s journey. Having done this, your website’s content can be suitably adapted.

Awareness

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing tactics can be used to ensure that your target audience is actually aware of your business and can associate you with solutions, paving the way for them to become customers.

To create such traffic during this awareness stage, it’s all about using the correct channels to provide relevant information for your target audience. Ideas include:

· Creating relevant content

· Improving SEO leveraging social media platforms

· Creating a Google Ads campaign

This should help in getting them on to your website, but they need to be engaged enough to stick around. At this stage of the buyer’s journey, new channels could be used. Ideas include:

· Chatbots

· A call to action

· Forms

CRM integration is a great way in which you can turn a lead into a customer at this stage. If this isn’t an available option for you, why not try emails and workflows? The resulting surveys and feedback on the likes of Google My Business or general social account promotion could snowball into attracting new visitors.

Keywords

With keywords playing a vital role in your site’s ability to rank well, you need to ask yourself what keywords you are trying to rank for through your current content and whether they are in line with what your target audience are searching for.

Keywords involve somewhat of a balancing act. Ones that are too popular are generally harder to rank for, while the opposite can drive no traffic at all. As such, it’s worthwhile to use a keyword tool, which provides an insight into the search volume and ranking difficulty of each keyword, as well as highlighting similar popular keywords related to your search term.

Be sure to specify search terms though long-tail keywords. For example, ‘branding agency notting hill’, as opposed to simply “branding agency.” Seed keywords with minimal competition as well as long-tail high-volume keywords are the way to drive an even higher amount of traffic.

Technical on-page optimisation

On-page SEO consists on technical elements, which should reflect the chosen keywords for each page. These technical elements include:

· Page titles

· Meta descriptions

· Alt tags

· URIs

· On-page content of a page

With on-page SEO being vital in terms of driving traffic to your website, it’s essential that you check that all of these technical elements are correct for your key pages.

Make sure not just to pull from the page content, and instead use a range of your offered services that a user may search for along with these terms. This will help Google to understand what your page is about, thereby improving your rankings over time, increase your traffic and ultimately allow your audience to associate your website with providing solutions to their problems.

Content

Ensure that the content on each page of your website is relevant to the user intent by linking your keywords, technical on-page optimisation and content all together. Your landing page is particularly important, as irrelevant content here will likely lead to nothing but your potential customers exiting the site, creating a high bounce rate.

Relevant Content Tips:

Keep content detailed

Use H1s and H2s to clearly organise content

Ask yourself, where in the buyer’s journey are your target audience?

Weave your keyword into your content

Don’t duplicate content from other pages

Blogs

Seldom does a great blog not involve a content strategy. By showing your expertise in the products and services you provide, an informative, authoritative and trustworthy image can be created. A solid and relevant content strategy will ensure you target a specific stage in your buyer’s journey.

As stated earlier, the potential revenue of an online company will take a huge hit if its website isn’t getting anywhere near enough traffic. By following the above advice, the possibility of your company falling into the same category should be kept well at bay.

Good luck!

www.byter.com

Do you want to build your brand name, grow an engaged online community and ultimately increase sales? If the answer to all these questions is a resounding ‘yes’, then ignore social media at your peril.

This article will help you to establish the presence of your business and voice on social media, as well as provide three great ways to increase traffic to you once you’re up and running.

But before we dive right into the land of likes and even more likes, let’s take a moment to fully consider what your brand message is and the various available platforms you’re consistently going to use to get it out.

Platforms and a Plan

All social media platforms have their own different strengths and weaknesses and it’s important that you consider which ones will be more beneficial to your specific business. For example, Pinterest is a great creative, photo-sharing platform far more suited to industries such as interior design than the likes of tech.

In terms of sheer numbers, Facebook rules the roost (2.38 billion users). Also, on the podium are Instagram and Twitter, boasting their own staggering userbases (1 billion and 330 million respectively). Honourable mentions that are definitely at least worth considering are Snapchat, Tumblr, Reddit and the aforementioned Pinterest. All of these platforms provide businesses with the chance to immediately reach a far and wide audience.

To augment your social traffic, it’s crucial that as a business you have analysed the benefits each platform could offer, the audience they will reach and the brand message they will send out. As might be expected, the demographics of each platform’s userbase do differ and a bit of research can go a long way in ensuring that your products and services are reaching the appropriate audience.

What’s your Goal?

When researching each available platform, it is vital to decide what exactly you want to achieve with social media. Perhaps you have a number of followers you would like to reach in a certain period of time. Perhaps it’s simply a key message you want resonated on the platform. Without a carefully considered set of specific goals laid out, it will be difficult for the correct processes to be put in place to maximise potential traffic to your pages. Such a plan will emphasise the point alluded to earlier that not all social networks are the same and that a one-size-fits-all approach is not a recipe for guaranteed success.

Ok, so what are the three ways you can increase your social media traffic?

1) Visual Content

For businesses such as yours, it’s essential that the content you post is eye-catching. With social media users often following hundreds if not thousands of different accounts, it’s important to remember that their attention spans are frequently low and competition for their attention is high.

Making your content highly visual is a great way to grab a user’s attention. Instagram is a fantastic platform to explore the use of visual content, allowing you to create an overall theme that, in time, can become instantly recognisable each time you post. Sadly, when it comes to great visual content, there are no shortcuts.

Think:

· High levels of professional photography

· Vibrant, striking colour schemes

· Visuals that tell stories and show your business in a new light

· And, above all, a clear message

2) Mobile-Friendly Content

With the vast majority of people using social media on their mobile phones, it’s essential that your content is created in a mobile-friendly manner that will be easy to navigate. Ignoring this point is a sure-fire way to activate that inescapable issue of your audience’s diminishing attention spans. Including key information about your company within its ‘bio’ section is an often-ignored point to keep in mind. Remember to include:

· A link to your website

· Your contact information

· A concise summary of your business

Try to keep things clear and instantly understood.

3) Reply Quickly

With social media has become a way for customers to interact with companies, whether that be reviewing products and services or dealing with any questions or complaints, one of the most effective ways a company can gain popularity is to communicate with their audience as often and as quickly as possible. When we consider that one in three people go to competitors after having been ignored on social platforms, we see that necessity in replying to tweets, private messages or comments. Furthermore, it’s worth considering installing the customer chatbot feature offered on Facebook, creating a live conversation with any potential buyers.

Stay on Track

The best way to see if what you’re doing is working is to keep track of your traffic at regular tri-monthly intervals, while always keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing to ensure you stay ahead of the game.

Again, when it comes to increasing your social media traffic, there really are no shortcuts. Creating the appropriate content and getting your brand’s message across takes time. State your specific goals before you dive and always keep in mind the importance of building relationships with your customers and potential business partners.

Keep all this in mind and you’re well on your way to increasing your social media traffic and gaining more customers as a result.

Good luck!

Byter Team.