Crafting Your Website Design with Messaging
Real quick, here is a brief overview explaining messaging for anyone who doesn’t know what it is. Messaging for brands has two specific parts: First, it is the general “what” that you want to talk about with your audience. Second, it is the “why” you want to talk about the “what”… So whether it’s written or spoken, your messaging is the basis of what your business is about.
The following 3 bullet points dive into how to craft your brands messaging strategy specifically so it will improve your website!
Use critical thinking to develop your website messaging. This takes some critical thinking and basic human psychology. I read a quote by Donald Miller that was spot on. “People don’t fall in love with brands, they fall in love with words they read or heard about brands.” (It was something like that anyways!) So what does that mean for you? Your website should have some words on it (otherwise called, messaging) on there that will give people something to recognize you for. What do people want in general, that you are providing for them? What are you doing to help people achieve a better life? Remember, for the most part people don’t care about how big your business is, or how cool you think your idea is. They care about themselves. Sorry not sorry for being harsh about it. Truth hurts!
Your website’s messaging should be all about what you do and how you help people. The first thing you should tell people when they get to your site is what you do. Another quote by author of StoryBrand, Donald Miller “If you confuse you lose”. And computer user testing shows the same thing. People on average spend 2 minutes on a website. But if they don’t think your website is what they are looking for, you can bet they won’t even spend that much time on your site. So we’re marketing to human beings. Humans who now (according to about five pages on the internet) have shorter attention than goldfish* So make the messaging on your website really, really easy for visitors to know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and why it matters to them.
Use keywords in your website messaging. This is an SEO (search engine optimization) hack. Er. Not really a hack, since it only works if you’re using keywords that honestly represent your business. As you can see in this newsletter/blog post, this content is all about Website Design and Messaging. It’s the main topic of everything I’m writing and I use that phrase throughout all the words that I have written. Google picks up on these things. And they use keywords that are repeated often to decide where your page will land in their pages. If you ever wondered why certain pages pop up when you google “how to make my ex jealous” it’s because of SEO. So develop your messaging and do your best to base it on keywords that best represent what you’re selling and what people are googling.
*Don’t worry, if you heard that about goldfish, it’s isn’t an actual fact. Microsoft even took a write up about it off their website!
As always, if you have any questions or comments, or if you’ve implemented what you learned, please send us a note and let us know! We adore hearing from our readers.
