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Impress with an Effective Homepage

Someone building an effective homepage on their laptop with stats.

Your website’s homepage plays an important role. It’s the first impression of your business’ digital space. It also doesn’t have a lot of time to provide that introduction. The average user stays on a webpage for only 5.94 seconds and they judge it in only 1/20th of a second. As a result, your homepage needs to be purposefully designed to create a proper impression quickly. For that, it needs to look good, communicate effectively, and motivate your visitor to stay and use your site. Our website design team has the first steps so you can start building that impressive and effective homepage. 

Who Are You?

Your homepage should clearly and concisely present what your business is and does. Name and display your main services or top products as the central thing visitors first see as they land on your homepage. They will immediately understand your business and see its products/services. This should also come with a short description that identifies your business’ name and what it does. First-time visitors to your site will not be familiar with your business. Use this opportunity to provide that information and show off your value proposition.

Navigable

Along with explaining who you are and what you can provide your visitors, you want to make it immediately clear how they can navigate your site for more information or products. Link the central images and descriptions to the appropriate dedicated pages so visitors can access them. The top should include a navigation bar with clear categories and page titles, so users know where to look and find what they are interested in. In addition to being a directional aid throughout your website, the navigation bar will quickly impress any visitor with the contents of your website, allowing them to understand its contents and services more quickly. Furthermore, your homepage will regularly be the return point for browsing. This easy navigation will ensure customers can readily move to the next page that interests them.

Calls To Action

Another aid to navigation that also helps keep a visitor interested is a call to action (CTA). Common examples are a prominent button in the middle of the page or in the navigation bar with a unique, contrasting colour. These will encourage your visitor to go beyond the homepage and guide them through your website’s main pages. The most common examples are “Shop Now”, “Learn More”, “Contact Us”, “Book a Consultation”, or “Request a Quote”. These short, simple instructions will also help a visitor immediately contextualize the products/services your website provides.

Newsletter or Contact Form

Presenting your visitor with a pop-up of a newsletter signup or contact form is an additional call to action that will keep your visitor connected to your website. These allow customers to learn more about your business, stay connected and return, and might include a discount as an incentive to purchase from you. 

Do not present this pop-up right away. Allow your customers to get their impression of your homepage and maybe browse a bit before prompting them with signing up to their newsletter or suggesting they provide contact information. An immediate popup will prevent them from seeing your informative homepage and come off as pushy. Why would they sign up for a newsletter or want to contact you before they know who you are?

Less is Better

Not overwhelming your visitor is essential. Minimalism is a hallmark for designing your website’s homepage. A homepage with too much text, images, video, or CTAs will only confuse or frustrate your visitors. Just like when first introducing yourself, stick to the essentials and be concise for a good first impression. Provide a single large image, a short blurb, and one CTA that shows the essentials of your business. Not every visitor will have the same interests about your business, so it is best to provide the basics and have them navigate deeper in for what they want. Additional details should be placed in their own dedicated pages that visitors can easily access through the navigation bar or calls to action. 

Optimized for Multiple Devices aka Responsive

A proper first impression means your website needs to function properly on various devices, particularly computers and mobile devices. As of this month, over 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. Your homepage needs to inform your visitor, allow direct navigation, and provide direction easily and elegantly on all of those different devices. If a visitor arrives on your homepage and not everything is visible or navigation is cumbersome or impossible, they will be left with a poor impression of your business and leave.

Adaptable

Your homepage should adapt to how visitors use and browse your website. Monitor website traffic to determine where users are going. If a specific service or product page is more popular, highlight it more immediately. This will sooner impress future visitors with the information they want. Remember you have less than 6 seconds. For example, if customers typically browse your new product page, it is a good strategy to link the “Shop Now” CTA to that page. Running user experience (UX) tests of your homepage and website will help you discover such potential site traffic patterns as well as unintended obstacles. Ever heard of heatmapping? Ask us about it!

Home is Where the Heart Is

Your homepage is the heart of your website. It introduces your business, directs visitors, and acts as the regular return point for browsing. It also does not have a lot of time to impress your visitors to stay and start exploring the deeper chambers of your website. These essentials will help guide you to create a homepage that gives the proper impression and welcomes your visitors. If you are looking to redesign or update your homepage to give your business the proper introduction it deserves, contact Rosewood’s website design team.  

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Inspiring a Community Through Social Media

An inspiring bookshelf with various books beside a pink chair.

Your follower number is an important metric for determining your brand’s reach, but it means little if that that audience isn’t regularly engaging with your content. That engagement creates a dedicated community around your business. If your content inspires engagement, said community will become invested in supporting, maintaining, and expanding the reach of your brand. That all starts by having a content strategy that inspires and motivates your followers to engage, so here are key tactics of a strategy that builds an inspired community.

Engage and Respond to Your Community

One of your first and best tactics for forming and inspiring your community to engage is by engaging with them. Respond to their comments, posts, and feedback to your content. Be sure to engage with them on your content and theirs. Everyone enjoys some acknowledgement. Giving your community members that attention, will inspire them to engage even more. Others who see that activity will also be more encouraged to engage. Everyone will be inspired to engage with each other, forming true communal bonds around your brand.

Keep That Community Positive

You need to maintain a healthy and safe space to keep that engagement and your community flourishing. Online communities need moderation and supervision. It’s unfortunately easy in online spaces for someone to enter and be toxic. Along with being harmful, they will scare off others from engaging. Be sure to remove that kind of activity from your community to keep dedicated followers and your community healthy. Followers will continue to energetically engage and those who witness that moderation will be inspired to remain in your brand’s safe community.

Educate, Entertain, and Inform

Along with promotional content, provide a variety of content that is educational, entertaining, and informative. The variety keeps your community actively interested and engaged. Educational content can teach your audience about some niche information about your brand and industry. Behind the scenes (BTS) content showcases your company’s human element, and the insider view lets your audience feel connected of your brand and its people. Entertaining content is another opportunity to show off your brand’s personality. It can also jump on a recent social media trend. That further inspires a community who will want to engage with the momentarily relevant content. 

Championing a Cause

It may seem outside your business’ scope to have your brand comment on a societal issue, but championing a cause helps unite and inspire your community. In 2019, Edelman found that 81% of people felt they must trust a brand to purchase from them, and in 2021, they found customers are 7x more likely to purchase from brands they trust. A central factor of that trust is not just honest business practices. People’s trust in businesses relies on their stance on a social issue. 53% of customers say they need their brands to take a stand on at least one social issue, and 86% expect brands to take one or more actions beyond their business or production, primarily addressing at least one societal concern. 

Motivating your followers to contribute or benefit such a social cause will inspire and empower them. They will associate your brand and its community with a larger social impact and benefit. Posts on a certain issue relevant to your brand provide a great opportunity for your followers to engage and feel inspired. If you brand contributes to a charity, you can encourage followers to also donate or promote. Brands for charitable organizations or non-profits can directly inspire followers to action by engaging directly with your content, fundraisers, and events.

Stick to Your Brand and Its Values

Your brand shouldn’t champion every cause or jump on every trend. It will reduce your content’s impact, confuse your brand’s core personality, and undermine its authenticity. Brand personalities are like people; they need to stay consistent for people to trust them. Stick to a select few causes that pair with the character and values of your brand. Your followers and customers can associate these with your brand. A fashion business may promote a cause for body positivity or a charity that provides clothes to the impoverished. Any small business can champion a charity or cause that’s part of their local community. 

Recognize Your Community

Beyond just engaging and inspiring them, have content that recognizes your community. If your community creates their own content with your brand or participates in your charitable acts, be sure to acknowledge and celebrate those accomplishments. If your business sees some success or reaches a certain milestone, recognize how your community has played an important role in that accomplishment. This recognition of a symbiotic relationship strengthens your followers’ bonds with your brand. They will only be more inspired to engage with and support your business and brand.

Start An Inspiring Strategy

With these essential tactics you can start to build a strategy of inspiring content. An engaged community around your brand will stay dedicated to supporting your business and expanding its reach. If you’re looking to build a social media strategy and start creating inspiring content suited to your brand, talk with Rosewood’s social media marketing team. We can help you flesh out an entire long-term plan for inspiring that following.

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Getting Results with “Calls to Action”

Typewriter which has written "call to action" on a page

If you have even only dipped your toes into online marketing, you will have come across the term “call to action” (CTA). They’re ubiquitously mentioned because of their efficacy. Calls to action display a click-through rate (CTR) of 4.23%. That’s more than double the average CTR of Google search ads at 1.91%, and more than ten times the rate of 0.35% for display ads. A single CTA in an email can improve click rates by a staggering 371% and purchases by 1617%. Including well-crafted CTAs in your digital marketing is essential, so Rosewood’s digital marketing team has put together everything you need to know about calls to action to get you results.

What is a call to action?

Calls to action are a staple of effective marketing. They are the main way to motivate and direct your potential customers and clients to complete a certain task that’s being promoted in your marketing. An ad, email, or social media post may show an enticing product, service, discount, or piece of content to pique their interest. It is the call to action’s job to then rouse someone to click and follow their curiosity. 

CTAs are found in every kind of digital marketing. They are prompts in the text of blogs, posts, and ads. They are buttons on websites and ads. Even email subject lines can have calls to action. You may have followed a call to action to reach this blog from Rosewood’s own social media and you’ll find them in this article. They are everywhere because they are an essential conversion method of digital marketing. The ability of effective CTAs to convert marketing into revenue makes them integral to increasing your marketing’s results and return on investment. 

What makes an call to action get results?

There is precision to creating an effective call to action with impressive click-through rates. Here are the staples for crafting successful CTAs that get results.

Intentional – Know the results you want

To create any call to action you need to have a clear intention, a defined goal and result for that piece of marketing. The CTA will result in a click, but it needs to be associated with another action attached to that click. It could be a specific purchase, redeeming a promotion, or contacting for information about a service. Establishing that precise goal allows you to set the impetus of the CTA and where it leads.

Directional

CTAs are meant to guide someone, and that is only possible if it provides clear direction and guidance. Most call to actions include a simple command or suggestion. Some common examples include “Read more”, “Check it out here”, “Buy now”, or “Follow the link in our bio”. All of these make it clear where they are steering a user. That direction also needs to continue beyond just the written prompt. Every call to action should be linked so that it leads to the relevant page or contact method. The last thing you want to give a viewer is the first direction and then leave them lost on your homepage wondering if they need to take the next right or left. They are more likely to just leave from confusion.

Clear and Concise

That direction should be clear and concise. Short and sweet is the standard practice. Simple commands like “read more” or “buy now” explicitly and concisely tells a user what they need to do. Providing longer or more complicated CTAs reduces clarity and clicks. 

CTAs should also be visually clear. Hyperlinked text should be visible so that it is immediately recognizable that it leads to the relevant page. Even better are button CTAs with strong colours and text. These make a call to action more visually prominent and so they have better click-through rates. The average CTR of a button call to action is more than 1% higher than average at 5.31% with the highest performance at 70%.

Personalized

As with most marketing, the most effective calls to action are personalized. These identify a person by name, their location, language, or interests. A Hubspot study of over 333,000 CTAs found that personalized ones perform 202% better. Such personalization isn’t usually possible in social media, but Google and Meta ads and email marketing can utilize user information to create personalized marketing that speaks directly to your audience.

FOMO

Calls to action are about motivation. One of the most effective motivators is the “fear of missing out” (FOMO). This is not actual fear or anxiety but an incentive. FOMO incites someone to make an action a priority rather than forgetting and not following through later. Create this excitement by indicating time sensitivity. Identify clearly there is time limit on a promotion or that stocks are limited. Pair this with a call to action that creates urgency with words like “now”, “soon”, “today”, or a phrase like “don’t miss out” to inspire that click. Avoid making every CTA evoke FOMO, or users will soon become numb to its effects. If everything is urgent, nothing is.

Restraint and Focus

Lastly, calls to action are a crucial aspect of your marketing, but practice restraint. Don’t flood every piece of marketing with multiple to try to generate clicks. CTAs turn from motivating suggestions to tedious, overwhelming commands if they are a constant stream. Every piece of marketing should stick to a clear focus. Longer pieces of marketing like emails or blogs can have multiple CTAs; however, they should still be restricted to a thematic few that fit the overall piece of content. 

Start Creating Your CTAs Now

Now you have the essentials to start crafting effective calls to action to see more directed results from your marketing. Want some assistance in creating or honing your CTAs for social media, blogs, ads, and emails? The best time to start is now. Talk about CTAs and the most productive for your business with our digital marketing team today. See? Urgency, clarity, and direction. 

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