De Rurange CRM Presentation Slide Doc

Simplicity and brevity are best for marketing communications on user experience (UX), blogs, search engine optimization (SEO) and website design. This concept is what I call the digital dangling carrot. As a marketer, we don’t want too much thrown in the face of our customer. Certainly, variety is important, but let’s not throw every variety at the customer at the same time. We should identify who our customer is and what he wants. Once that is found, then use that hot button to entice the customer to get more variety. When marketing this carrot to the consumer in the online world, a savvy person should follow some of the following best practices:

User Experience and Website Design
I think user experience begins with what that user sees – hence, website design is the starting point. Among the top seven things Elementor’s chief marketing officer Ben Pines says people should practice for the best online user experience (UX), three of his points caught my eye.

First, he says the website “design should concentrate on user experience” (Pines, 2018). Like storytelling, digital marketers should make the website memorable. Ben says that is more important than what the website’s content actually says. To stand out in front of my friendly marketing competitor’s websites, I chose the Orange fruit theme to make it memorable. I like other fruits too, but D. Orange is meant to link my personality to my marketing style. There are still some tweaks needed on this site, but I think it’s off to a good start of getting the user curious about the content of this site because of its original and fruity design. With great website design and a delightful UX, people will remember the site and may come back to look for more details.

Second, Ben says websites are scanned, not read. Who’s got the time to read everything from their favorite websites? Not me. Ben says infographics and visuals are the best way to capture these scanners (Pines, 2018). On this D. Orange website, I plan to make some simple video elements that will further engage users. If I can get the scanners to read some of the content then I’ll get closer to getting that valuable attention needed for business.

Third, users want clarity and simplicity, according to Ben’s article. We shouldn’t make it difficult for users to find what they actually want. As I said at the beginning of this squirt (blog) post, “simplicity and brevity” are key. I’m amazed at how easy it is to shop on Apple’s website despite the complexity of all its products. Apple keeps it simple. It was French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal who identified the value of simplicity and brevity despite having put a lot of thought and revision to the work. He said, “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” (Chandler, 2019). So it is with making websites with the better user experience.

Blogs
According to Forbes, the number one best practice a marketer can do for an effective blog is to focus on quality over quantity. The Forbes authors say marketing communicators should not write frequently just to blog regularly. He says there is no evidence that producing more frequent blogs that are less in-depth means more traffic – leading to more sales. The Forbes Agency Council says marketers should “focus on producing the very best in-depth articles that are better than anything else out on the internet in that vertical” (Dreyer, 2018). I think blogs should be thoughtful, revised, updated and relevant to the user a marketer is targeting. If you’re just blogging for blog’s sake, then you’re not going to keep and retain clients to your website. Everything on it – including your blog – tells a story about you and what kind of relationship you want with the user.

SEO
When crafting a digital marketing strategy, it’s best to make your website easy to find in a web search – through a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo. According to Rob Stokes’ “eMarketing” textbook, the best practice of SEO involves “optimizing your website to rank higher on the search engine results. SEO involves creating relevant, fresh and user-friendly content that search engines index and serve when people enter a search term that is relevant to your product or service” (Stokes, 2013). SEO has been a tactic for years and is getting more sophisticated for marketing outcomes as time clicks away. A common outcome of SEO is to acquire and retain customers (Stokes 2013). By digital marketers taking the time to follow Google Ad fundamentals as an example, they would take the time to think of keywords and phrases that would align with what they think their targeted customer would be looking for online.

Those are just some of the best practices I have noticed for SEO, UX and blogs. There are many, many more. It’s also interesting to see how blogs and SEO have evolved as Google and other online technologies have become more sophisticated in gathering user data. I think it’s fascinating to see websites from the early 2000s compared to the ones today. What have you noticed in the evolution of UX, SEO, blogs and website design? Be sure to comment below!

References

Chandler, O. (2019). Blaise Pascal Quotes. Retrieved from www.goodreads.com: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/10994.Blaise_Pascal

Dreyer, C. (2018, March 28). 15 Best Practices For Your New Company Blog. Retrieved from www.Forbes.com: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/03/28/15-best-practices-for-your-new-company-blog/#4e1906e43a9a

Pines, B. (2018, May 29). 7 UX Principles For Creating a Great Website. Retrieved from www.webdesignerdepot.com: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/05/7-ux-principles-for-creating-a-great-website/

Stokes, R. (2013). eMarketing: The essential guide to marketing in a digital world. Minneapolis: Quirk Education Ltd.