Inbound marketing website design is vital to any effective inbound marketing campaign. Any inbound marketing agency worth their salt will know that best results will depend on optimising every step of the user journey including social proof – from first encountering your content right through to making a purchase.
Welcome them, embrace them, and make it easy for them to buy from you
From the moment somebody visits your website to the moment they either make a purchase or leave, the job of the content marketer is to keep the target audience and overall website visitors engaged, gently nudging them down the marketing funnel.
Your inbound marketing website design determines the user experience that will make visitors more likely to take positive actions and be happy when they’ve left the site.
Check out the following articles to learn more about Inbound Marketing:
- 6 Tips To Create a Successful B2B Website
- Top 3 Tactics to Supercharge Your Website Conversion Today
- 6 Essential Elements for Eye Catching B2B Website Designs
- 3 Great Design Tips to Increase Website Conversion Rate
There are a number of objectives that effective inbound marketing website design should achieve, including:
- Showing your prospects that you can solve their problem
- Showing your company in a positive light
- Encourage visitors to stay
- Offering easy navigation that works in your favour (“buy” rather than “leave”)
- Gently persuading them to move through the funnel towards a sale or booking
- Capturing useful data for remarketing purposes or to gain insights on user behaviour
Accomplishing these will help you generate leads, increase sales, or accomplish whichever goal you set for your business.
Put your best foot forward
Deliberate and strategic, an inbound marketing strategy weaves seamlessly with the architecture of your inbound marketing website. A holistic approach, it delves into the psyche of site visitors, intricately linked with overarching inbound marketing goals. The design ensures a compelling first impression, a facet pivotal to soaring search engine rankings, and nurturing visitor inclination to explore, engage, and ultimately adhere to your offerings.
To start, in this day and age, you must have a responsive website. Your website should adhere to search engines' recommendations and best practices. A friendly inbound website has content marketing and the website's performance as its core focus.
Social proof - one of the currencies of credibility
This boils down to one simple question: who else is using your product or service? Human beings are much more likely to join in with something, especially if it is new or different, once they can see others doing it.
Lots of people doing something gives social proof, an influencing factor that makes us more likely to do the same. When our peers take part, the social proof is stronger. When those we look up to, admire and aspire to be like start doing it, social proof goes through the roof.
If you can’t beat them...
Consider the initial reluctance you felt towards crafting a blog post as part of a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. Gradually, your peers and relatives embraced the inbound marketing methodology, showcasing their achievements and improved search engine rankings. The growing traction became irresistible, prompting your active participation. Just as abstaining from a trending phenomenon can appear peculiar, refraining from adopting the inbound marketing methodology might equally raise eyebrows.
What does social proof look like as part of our inbound marketing website design efforts?
There are many types of social proof, including:
- Celebrity endorsement or Influencer Marketing on social media platforms
- Recognition from industry experts
- Testimonial or Customer Reviews including comments from social networks
- Product Reviews
- Press coverage
- Stats showing the number of users that have purchased or are using your product
- Embedded widgets showing ratings and reviews from a third party site. For example Trustpilot
These social proofs act as trust seals and heighten credibility. They are a great way to generate interest in your products and services.
Trust, credibility and interest are all drivers for conversion. Focusing on them will bring a positive ROI for your inbound marketing efforts.
According to Brightlocal Research:
- 84% of people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation
- 7 out of 10 consumers will leave a review on a business website or for a business in general if they're asked to
- 90% of consumers read up to 10 reviews before forming an opinion about a business
- 54% of people will visit the website after reading positive reviews
- 73% of consumers think that reviews older than 3 months are no longer relevant
- 74% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more
- 58% of consumers say that the star rating of a business is most important
These points are not only evidence of the importance of social proofs, they also highlight considerations for inbound marketing website design. Given how easy it is to elicit a review, it makes sense to ask for them. This could be done as somebody is leaving the site.
The best reviews can be used as testimonials. If you don’t want to ask for reviews on your site, you can always pull them in from review sites.
A word of caution: if you are going to use reviews as social proof, be prepared to stay up-to-date as anything over 3 months old will no longer be viewed as relevant. That’s fine if the review is still showing elsewhere, but if it is prominent on your site, the effect could be detrimental.
Celebrity endorsement
Elevating inbound marketing websites to their optimal potential involves a dual focus on search engine optimization and technical SEO. This holistic approach encompasses not only home pages but also landing pages, strategically harmonizing design and functionality.
Visual elements, particularly images showcasing celebrity endorsements of your product, exert a compelling appeal, often eliminating the need for extensive accompanying text. The integration of a celebrity's endorsement as a succinct quote operates as a potent testimonial, seamlessly merging with the main body copy for heightened impact.
Press endorsement
Sometimes, showing that your company is well respected or has won kudos from Which! or similar can be as simple as just including the logo and a quote on the home page or other landing pages, as accounting software firm, Wave, has done here.
Big brand logos
Many companies are choosing to show who they’ve worked for by displaying the logos of their more well-known clients on the home page or other landing pages. If space is a consideration, just show some of them, or a moving row of them. You can always have a “more” link to a page where you can really show off.
Look what online project management and collaborative software company Asana has done:
Testimonials
Celebrity endorsements are difficult for many companies to obtain. However, testimonials from real people that your prospects can relate to can carry a lot of weight in terms of social proof.
Take this public speaking and presentation skills trainer for example:
Richard McCann has made sure the first thing visitors see when they visit his corporate presentation skills page is a video testimonial.
Clearside, a company offering services to help sales teams, has gone all out to cover testimonial quotes and awards on a dedicated page. The awards include some big names.
There are loads of ways to incorporate social proof into your inbound marketing web design. What’s important is that you prioritise what’s best, what potential customers really need to see. Lower priority social proofs which can be included within the site but not necessarily in their face (depending on how powerful they are) would be media mentions.
Media mentions
If media mentions are what you’re looking for, make it easy for the press to interact with you. Give them a dedicated area where you can show press archives highlighting previous publicity.
Productivity software firm, Zapier, have published a “Press Kit Essentials” guide where they advise what should be included on a press page:
- Company Overview
- Press Contact
- Product Information
- Media Assets
- Clients
- Notable Media Mentions
- Past Press Releases
Wrapping it up
If inbound marketing website design should be anything, it should be innovative. This means striving for new ways of doing things, always putting user experience and the principles of inbound marketing first on your business' websites. There is no one solution, but a range of choices.
If you have any questions about incorporating social proof fir a successful inbound marketing website design, or about any other aspect of inbound marketing, get in touch with Incisive Edge.
