One of the most critical components of good promotional design is focus. This applies to web design, advertising, search marketing, email, anything. If a consumer doesn't know the specific communication that is intended for him to receive in the first moment, he moves on. If given too many options, he chooses nothing; it is what Barry Schwartz calls the "The Paradox of Choice
" in his book by the same name.
For example, with website design, marketers often find it hard to focus on just one thing. The site draws so many different types of users, not only prospective customers but also media, prospective employees, investors and others. So, how do you design for focus when you're talking to many different people each with individual needs or expectations?
First, it is critical to prioritize your company's or division's business goals. With a website, it is easy to initially lay out priorities solely by marketing focus. However, in the earliest stages, you need to retreat and open your mind to the priorities of the entire organization. This activity should include considering functions such as employee recruiting and customer training, not just customer acquisition. By first broadening your influence, you may begin to hone in on critical aspects of success to the entire business that will help you accommodate the various internal stakeholders' interests (which may help you defend a decision you make to exclude "a priority" from the homepage).
Once you've ranked the business' overarching goals, you should prioritize the stakeholders that influence your most imperative business goals. Get to know those important stakeholders and map their respective needs and habits with what you need from them. Give extra weight to stakeholders that need the most convincing and detail how you intend to position yourself to get them to take action.
From your various positioning statements and user action-plans, you need to silo content in a few clear ways. This practice is like master planning a community where you have to zone real estate for different uses; certain things need to be placed next to others. This work needs to be reflected in messaging (the key phrases that will relate well to your search engine optimization goals), the site map and wireframes to effectively communicate the plan through design. Through this process, your final design should reflect careful attention to your business and stakeholder goals by exhibiting careful allocation of real estate.
Ultimately, on the homepage you carve out real estate dedicated to your most important goals and their respective stakeholders. The real estate that you carve out should be proportionate to the importance of your goals. In other words, if your domestic sales goal for a particular product line is more important than establishing an international presence, then you need to dedicate greater visual priority to achieving the sales goal. It seems obvious that this should be the case, but all too often clear expectations are not set for the user because internal resources, in essence, fight for real estate for their individual or departmental goals.
The goal, beyond the homepage, is to re-establish to your content silos user-action plans to craft clear courses and conversion funnels for each stakeholder. It is critical now to focus on holding each user's hand to a completion of a goal. While developing the layout and design, each user's goals should be apparent to the user. You need to enact a call-to-action on every page and maintain singular focus on that call-to-action. Where should they go next? How do you convince the user to take the next step? The better you are at exercising this tactic, the more likely your users are to do what you want them to do.
Now, the great thing about our job is that nothing is as formulaic as I present here; this is more or less a guideline and the execution is unique every time you set out. Your approach each time, however, requires research and creative thinking to define the core statement of feeling that is going to convert your target. From there, planning and execution will need to remain focused on the original intent with a firm dedication. It is easy to highlight such seemingly important things as news, product features and other "highlights." Be bold and focus on what will truly drive results.
Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive. Read full bio.
