The Impact of Color Psychology in UI Design

Why Color Is Critical in UI Design

Color is more than a design choice—it’s a strategic tool that directly affects how users interact with your website. It influences emotions, guides navigation, and creates a memorable agency brand identity. With thoughtful planning, color can enhance user experiences and support your business goals.

Each color triggers a different response. Blue builds trust, red inspires urgency, and green promotes calmness and growth. Designers use these associations to align visual elements with media planning and strategy, creating user-friendly designs that resonate with target audiences.

Consistency in color schemes across platforms is key to building recognition. Seeing familiar colors often builds trust. It makes your brand easier to remember. This helps your brand stand out in a competitive market.

Examples of Color Use in UI Design

  • Blue: Trusted by industries like healthcare and finance for its calming, reliable vibe.
  • Red: Commonly used in call-to-action buttons or sales banners to drive urgency.
  • Green: Perfect for eco-friendly brands or wellness sites to evoke balance and renewal.
  • Yellow: Inspires creativity and optimism, often used in youth-focused campaigns.

How Colors Influence Emotions and Actions

Psychological Effects of Colors

The psychological power of color can shape user actions. For example, red gives a feeling of urgency. This makes it great for online sales. On the other hand, green feels calm and soothing. This works well for wellness brands.

Designers carefully plan these emotional triggers to create the desired impact. Designers often analyze audience preferences and use data to refine color schemes. This method makes colors look nice and encourages actions, like clicking a button or signing up for a service.

Strategic Color Applications

  1. Use warm colors like red or orange for limited-time offers to drive immediate engagement.
  2. Apply cool tones like blue or purple for trust-based industries such as banking or technology.
  3. Incorporate green for wellness or sustainability-focused brands to foster feelings of renewal.

By aligning color choices with audience expectations, brands create interfaces that feel intuitive and approachable.

Building Brand Identity Through Color

Making an Impression with Color

Color plays a central role in establishing a strong brand identity. A consistent color palette helps users connect certain colors with your company. They will recognize these colors on your website, app, or ads. This recognition builds trust and loyalty over time.

For example, a tech company might use blue and gray to show innovation and reliability. A luxury brand could use gold and black to convey sophistication. These choices ensure that the visual identity reflects the company’s values and resonates with its audience.

Practical Tips for Choosing Brand Colors

  1. Reflect your values: Choose colors that represent your brand’s mission.
  2. Understand your audience: Research what appeals to your target demographic.
  3. Stay consistent: Use the same colors across platforms for a unified look.
  4. Test your palette: Experiment with color combinations to see what works best in real-world applications.

A well-planned color scheme, tied to a brand architecture framework, can strengthen customer relationships and make your marketing efforts more effective.

Colors as a Guide for Users

Enhancing Navigation and Clarit

Colors simplify navigation by directing users to key elements like menus, buttons, or calls to action. For example, a bright “Sign Up” button stands out on a plain background. This makes it easy for users to see and click on it.

Strategic color use also reduces cognitive load. When users encounter clear, consistent color schemes, they instinctively know where to focus their attention. This improves engagement and ensures a smoother user experience.

Designing for Usability

Accessibility is an essential consideration in UI design. High-contrast color schemes improve readability, making your website easy to use for individuals with visual impairments or color blindness. This inclusive approach enhances the overall experience and aligns with the principles of SEO-friendly website design.

For instance, designers might use dark text on light backgrounds to ensure clarity or rely on bold accent colors to highlight important actions. These decisions not only benefit accessibility but also support higher engagement metrics, such as time spent on the page.

Color in Media Strategies

Color as a Campaign Asset

Incorporating color psychology into media planning and strategy can significantly impact campaign performance. The right colors capture attention, evoke emotions, and make messages more memorable.

For example, bright, energetic colors like yellow or red can make a digital ad stand out in a crowded feed, while softer hues like pastels are better suited for creating calming, trust-based campaigns. By selecting colors that resonate with the audience, brands can amplify their message and improve conversion rates.

How to Use Color in Campaigns

  1. Highlight promotions or offers with bold colors.
  2. Balance bright accents with neutral tones to prevent visual clutter.
  3. Use consistent color schemes across ads and landing pages to build trust and familiarity.

This intentional approach ensures that color choices align with the campaign’s goals and audience preferences, driving better results across platforms.

Combining Copywriting and Color

The Role of Color in Messaging

Copywriting and color are two sides of the same coin when it comes to design. While copy communicates your message, color ensures that message gets noticed and remembered.

For example, a bold red headline catches attention. Soft background colors help make the text easier to read. This connection between color and text creates a smooth experience for users. It guides them through the content and encourages them to interact.

Using the right colors in your messaging improves your design and communication. This helps you get more engagement and better retention.

Designing for SEO and Engagement

How Color Impacts User Interaction

Colors influence how users navigate your site and how long they stay engaged. High-contrast colors make it easier to read and interact with content, while visually appealing designs encourage users to explore more pages. These behaviors send positive signals to search engines, boosting your site’s ranking.

For example, a well-designed landing page with a clear, color-coordinated layout can improve conversions and reduce bounce rates. This alignment of color with usability not only enhances the user experience but also supports your broader SEO goals.

Tips for Color-Driven Engagement

  1. Use complementary colors to create a harmonious design.
  2. Prioritize readability with high-contrast text and backgrounds.
  3. Test different palettes to identify what resonates most with your audience.

This thoughtful approach to design ensures that colors work as part of a cohesive strategy, strengthening your site’s performance and appeal.

For guidance on creating a visually engaging and functional design, contact Jacob Tyler today.

6 eCommerce Best Practices for Better User Experience

The significance of User Experience (UX) in the field of eCommerce cannot be understated. As digital shopping environments become the forefront of retail, eCommerce businesses must prioritize the implementation of effective UX design to remain competitive. 

This guide will outline the fundamental importance of UX in eCommerce and provide a clear, actionable guide on best practices that online retailers can implement to enhance their platforms.

Why UX Matters for eCommerce

The user is the customer, and the customer is the most important person on your online store. Here are the key reasons why you should prioritize their digital shopping experience. 

  • Increased Conversions: The primary goal of any commercial entity is to drive sales. In eCommerce, the ease with which users can navigate, understand, and interact with your platform directly influences purchasing decisions. A seamless, intuitive user experience reduces bounce rates and cart abandonment while encouraging conversions.

 

  • Customer Retention: Repeat customers are a valuable asset, often contributing a substantial portion of a business’s revenue. A positive, hassle-free online shopping experience encourages customers to return. Conversely, a poorly designed user experience can deter even the most loyal customers.

 

  • Brand Perception: The user experience is an extension of a brand’s identity. A cluttered, complicated, or outdated UX design can project unprofessionalism, damaging the customer’s perception of the brand. In contrast, a clean, efficient, and user-friendly interface elevates a brand’s credibility and trustworthiness.

 

  • Competitive Advantage: In the saturated market of online retailers, businesses must find ways to differentiate themselves. A superior user experience makes your platform stand out, potentially swinging customer preference in your favor even if competitors offer similar products.

 

Of course, achieving all of this is easier said than done, especially when you have a store to run. If you want to save time on optimizing your UX features, you can work with a team like a branding services agency to help you save time and produce a superior finished product that will resonate with your audiences while keeping your brand identity intact. 

6 Best Practices for eCommerce UX

To harness the full potential of UX, here are some practical strategies that eCommerce platforms should implement:

1: Simplicity and Clarity

Your website’s design should be clean and uncluttered, promoting ease of navigation. Use simple language, maintain a clear, logical layout, and avoid unnecessary elements that could confuse or distract the user. Every feature on your site should have a clear purpose and contribute to guiding users towards conversion.

2: Responsive Design

With a substantial number of consumers using mobile devices for online shopping, your eCommerce site must function frictionlessly across all devices and screen sizes. A responsive design ensures that your platform retains functionality and aesthetic appeal, whether accessed via desktop, smartphone, or tablet.

3: Intuitive Navigation

Ensure that users can find what they are looking for with minimal effort. Employ a hierarchical structure, clear categories, and a search function with filters to aid in efficient navigation. This structure should lead the user logically from one step to the next, culminating in a purchase.

4: High-Speed Performance

Online shoppers are typically impatient; a slow-loading site will quickly deter them. Optimize your website’s speed by compressing images, using efficient coding practices, and employing a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce loading times, thereby enhancing the overall user experience.

5: Effective Product Displays

Product information should be comprehensive yet concise. High-quality images, possibly with a 360-degree view or video, allow a detailed inspection, which can influence the buying decision. Include clear, informative product descriptions, specifications, and easily accessible pricing information.

6: Streamlined Checkout Process

A complicated checkout is one of the leading causes of cart abandonment. To mitigate this, offer a streamlined, secure, and straightforward checkout process. Guest checkout options, minimal form fields, clear instructions, and multiple payment methods can substantially enhance the user experience.

Other Key Features to Include with Your eCommerce Website 

Beyond best practices, there are some other essential elements to have on your website that will help contribute to a better user experience. 

First, transparent policies. Be clear about shipping, return, and privacy policies. Transparency in these aspects builds customer trust and sets clear expectations, contributing to a more confident and comfortable shopping experience.

You should also include methods to gather customer feedback, such as surveys or direct communication channels, and use this data to make informed improvements. Customers appreciate when their input is considered, and this practice can uncover issues that may not have been initially evident.

A set-and-forget website is one that’s poised to miss out on its full potential. Regular updates, based on current trends and customer feedback, are crucial. Continually refine the user experience, fixing bugs, and making improvements to stay current and competitive.

Lastly, ensure your website is accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities. This inclusivity expands your customer base and is an ethical business practice. Implement features like screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation, and high-contrast elements for better visibility.

Give Your eCommerce Website a Boost 

The customer experience in e-commerce is a decisive factor in a business’s success. It requires ongoing effort and attention to detail. 

By implementing the practices outlined above, eCommerce platforms can significantly enhance their user experience, leading to increased customer satisfaction, enhanced conversion rate potential, and overall growth in the competitive online marketplace. 

If you own or operate an eCommerce brand and you want to take your user experience to next level, let our team at Jacob Tyler assist you. As one of Southern California’s leading branding agencies, we can assist you in enhancing the way you serve your customers through your digital storefront while preserving its unique identity. 

To get started, contact us today or download our brochure. 

5 Reasons Why Content Marketing Should be an Integral Part of Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways for B2B brands to establish a strong online presence and reach out to potential customers—and it’s become a necessity for B2B brands. By creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and engaging content, B2B brands can build trust and credibility with their audience, generate leads, and ultimately, drive more sales. Let’s explore the benefits of content marketing for B2B brands in more detail:

Builds Brand Awareness

Creating high-quality and pertinent content that resonates with your target audience is an excellent way to increase your brand’s visibility and establish it as a thought leader in your industry. By consistently creating and sharing valuable content, you can attract and retain the attention of your target audience, which will help to increase brand awareness and recognition. It also gives you a chance to “speak” at length to your audience, educating them on your offering before they become a warm lead. 

Pro Tip: Create a brand messaging guide to ensure your tone and messaging are consistent to get the most impact out of your content. Get in touch if you need help creating your brand messaging

 Increases Website Traffic

 By creating high-quality content that is optimized for search engines, you can attract more organic traffic to your website. Search engines reward websites that provide valuable and relevant content to their users. By incorporating keywords, optimizing headlines, and using meta descriptions, you will boost your website’s search engine rankings, attract more traffic, and ultimately, generate more leads.

Pro Tip: Chat GPT is all the rage right now—but be cautious when using AI generated content. Search engines like Google can detect fully AI-written content and can potentially rank it lower than human-written content. You can use AI to help get the structure of an article in place, but make sure you rewrite it in your brand’s voice 

Generates Leads

One of the most significant benefits of content marketing for B2B brands—and really, the main benefit—is that it can generate leads. By creating valuable content that addresses the pain points and challenges of your target audience, you can attract potential customers who are searching for solutions to their problems. By capturing their contact information through gated content, such as whitepapers, webinars, or eBooks, B2B brands can generate high-quality leads that are more likely to convert.

 Nurtures Leads

 Content marketing isn’t just about generating leads—it’s about nurturing them too. By creating content that addresses the specific needs and pain points of your leads, you can build trust and credibility which will help move the leads down through the sales funnel. By providing relevant and valuable content at each stage of the buyer’s journey, B2B brands can nurture leads and build long-term relationships with their customers.

Pro Tip: Install a chat feature or a way for potential customers to easily reach out to you and get answers they are looking for. Allowing customers to reach out to you increases your chances of conversion by 14.6%

 Improves Customer Retention

Content marketing is an effective tool for improving customer retention. B2B brands can build stronger relationships with their customers and encourage them to stay loyal through a consistent stream of valuable content. This ongoing education and support will help your customers achieve their goals and stay engaged with your brand.

 The Bottom Line:

Content marketing is a powerful tool for B2B brands looking to establish a strong online presence, generate leads, and drive more sales. So, if you are a B2B brand looking to grow your business, content marketing is something you should consider—and Jacob Tyler can help. 

Get in touch today to learn about how we can help your B2B brand boost its content marketing—and its sales. 

 

The Key Benefits of Social Media in eCommerce

At first blush, the idea of being an online merchant may seem way easier than running a brick and mortar store. All you need is to decide which ecommerce platform is right for you, upload photos of your services or merchandise, and let the money roll in, right?

Uh, not exactly. Your first order of business is to reckon with the fact that you’re up against millions of competitors who also thought that being an online merchant would be a cinch (or at least a good idea). Add to that the tangled task of curating your social media channels to sharpen your brand visibility. In many ways, the world of digital advertising can be split into social and SEO. We’ve written before about ecommerce SEO best practices—but how can social media also help you expand your ecommerce operation?

First, let’s delineate a few related terms—social selling, social commerce, and social media ecommerce marketing:

  • Social Selling: Using social media to find and nurture sales prospects.
  • Social Commerce: Selling services and products via social media storefronts. (Facebook Shops, Instagram Shops, Pinterest’s Product Pins, the Collections feature of Snapchat, and so on.)
  • Social Media Ecommerce Marketing: A broader category that encompasses building brand awareness, routing web traffic to your site, advertising and selling, as well as social selling and social commerce.

For this blog, we’re going to focus on how social media ecommerce marketing can enhance your ecommerce presence. Considering that 44.8% of internet users use social media to find brand-related information, and that consumers spend about two and a half hours per day on social media, developing social tactics tailored to your ecommerce store may help you reach a larger audience and bolster your bottom line. So let’s explore a few ways you can use social media to build your ecommerce brand.

Define Your Conversion Goals

Before you sprint ahead and sign up for accounts on all the major social media platforms, you need to ask yourself which one is right for you. Research who your target audience is, which social channels they frequent, and what types of content they engage with. Imagine that you’re a working, traveling mom of young children who shares tips via Instagram about how to navigate planes, trains, and automobiles with a few tykes and a cooler of breastmilk in tow. Your target demographic is probably going to be working, traveling moms of young children—women who may be about 25–35 years old, who frequent Instagram and Pinterest, and who are just as tech-savvy as the person serving them content.

With this audience in mind, determine the end-goal of your social strategy. Are you trying to drive them to your site, or are you engaging in some good-new-fashioned social commerce (which we’ll get to later), or both? Let that quandary marinate, and then let the platform you decide to use help you hone in on your objectives. Instagram and Facebook, for instance, let businesses pick one of three conversion goals:

  • Catalog Sales: Allows you to pull products from your catalog and put them into ads.
  • Conversions: Helps you encourage your audience to take a specific action on your site. (Add a product to your cart, for instance.)
  • Store Traffic: Tailored to brick and mortar shops, this ad goal helps you promote your store to customers who are nearby your store.

Instagram and Facebook also let you pair ad formats to your campaigns—usually through video, image, carousel, or collection ads. That last option is a handy tool for ecommerce brands, as it’s designed for vendors to show off their wares, which helps them tap into the importance of mobile commerce. But scope out the sales features of all the big social platforms to figure out which ones will best showcase your products and services.

Build Brand Awareness

Perhaps the key benefit of developing a social media ecommerce strategy is that you can expand your brand awareness. Branding is crucial to your business because it tells your story, establishes trust, and clarifies how you stand out among all the other ecommerce brands out there. Consider social media to be an opportunity to show off whatever makes your brand unique—the depth of your expertise, the empathy you have for social movements, or that penchant of yours to make total strangers laugh out loud. (If that last point sounds trite, remember that humor is a surefire way to drum up a following or clinch a sale.)

An inevitable question lurking about this topic is how social media impacts ROI. Unfortunately, those calculations can get squirrely, because social media often amounts to an engagement strategy with your audience that increases how many people know about—and, ideally, like—your brand. Social media, as they say, is about retention, not acquisition. So transmuting metrics of audience reach into money can turn into a guessing-game. Still, we know that 53% of Americans who follow brands on social media become more loyal to those brands, and that the key to increasing the awareness of your ecommerce store through social media is to post consistently.

Tweet out a fleeting thought once every six weeks, or livestream on Instagram a few times a year, and you won’t see any uptick in the number of people who follow you. Instead, be an active presence on your channels, reply to your customers’ comments, and create content that consumers find valuable. If your posts fail to give your audience the answers they’re looking for, they’ll seek out other social accounts that they find to be more resourceful.

Sell Through Social Commerce

Remember the social commerce options that we listed at the outset of this blog—Facebook Shops, Instagram Shops, Pinterest’s Product Pins? Take full advantage of them. They’re free, and they’re integrated to make the sales process easy. Plus, Facebook and Instagram are better known than you are (at least, we’re assuming they are), so until you become a household name, capitalize on the legitimacy they impart on their users. Somebody coming across “Wacky Bob’s Ecommerce Emporium of Miscellaneous Wonders” via a Google search might think twice about clicking that link, but somebody who finds a miscellaneous wonder that Wacky Bob’s selling on Facebook Shops might figure, okay, Facebook’s vetted this guy, so this will be a safe transaction.

Many brands far more prominent than Wacky Bob, such as Target, use social commerce to add videos, post reviews, list events, upload photo albums, include maps of nearby stores, and create abundant opportunities for people to browse products ranging from honeywood blossom candles to the Martha Stewart MTS-PS10 telescoping electric pole chain saw. (Which, at $99, feels like a steal.) 

Let’s say that you do want to buy Martha’s telescoping chain saw on Target’s Facebook page. You’d click the “View on Website” button, which would link you off to Target’s site. For other transactions, that button might read “Buy on Facebook.” You can link up your social media accounts and purchasing channels into a warp and woof of loops and connections, but the fundamental point here is to bear in mind what you’re selling. Candles or chainsaws of summer swimwear—sure, snap a pic and throw it on a Facebook or Instagram Shops page. For more complex sales, however, where users need to examine and mull over the thing they’re purchasing—engagement rings and mortgage refinancing terms and leases for senior living communities all come to mind—social commerce is probably not the best channel to sell on, since users tend to make snap decisions on social and buy the same way they would pull clothes off a rack at Target a few hours before going to a party. Instead, nurture prospects of more intricate sales on your website. And speaking of which … 

Drive Traffic to Your Site

One downside to social commerce is that, although selling through the shopping interfaces of major platforms has its perks, you are still, in some sense, selling under the awning of another merchant’s storefront. Another tack you might take is to set up your social media accounts to serve as a slip ’n slide that routes users into your site—the checkout counter that you control. Consider the sheer volume of users that you could reach advertising on these channels:

  • Facebook: 190 million people.
  • LinkedIn: 170 million people.
  • Instagram: 140 million people.

Granted, the audience interested in your niche is probably a fraction of all those unwashed masses, and only companies with canyon-deep pockets can afford to pay enough to plunk content in front of most of them. But let’s say you’re that Instagram startup influencer who posts traveling tips for working moms. Social media can serve your operation as an inbound marketing tool, sending other working, traveling moms to your site to buy your training materials or hire you as a consultant. 

Our advice for this influencer is to observe the 80/20 rule of social content, which holds that 80% of your strategy should be quality posts or videos, while 20% should be CTAs or discounts that promote your brand. Remember how we said that social and search comprised the two spheres of digital advertising? Those spheres often overlap. Case in point: The more that users share your social content, the higher your ecommerce store will float up the SERPs (or search engine results pages). Which makes sense: Inundate people with offers and they may think you’re spamming them. Share content that interests or educates them, and they’ll keep following you—and even look forward to the next time that you post.

Collaborate With Influencers

Another benefit of social media: The ease with which you can team up with influencers that your followers love, or with another brand in your niche that can introduce your business to a larger audience. 

Again, let’s say that you run an Instagram account with tips for mothers of young children who travel for work, finding ways to pump or store breastmilk in an airport or a convention center. Reach out to an influencer who specializes in car seat safety or Yeti coolers:

  • Interview them for your podcast.
  • Ask them to review your site and services.
  • Host a Q&A session on Instagram Live about the industry you’re in.

Newsjacking, or the art of aligning your brand with a topic that’s trending, is a related strategy. As everyone with a New York Times app knows, each day brings a fresh opportunity for the media to blast us with “Breaking News” updates. So if you’re overseeing the aforementioned Instagram account and a story breaks about all the Yeti coolers in North America have been recalled due to safety concerns, your task is now to newsjack that report before another story breaks in its place and sweeps it away. Comment on it. Post a video about it. Redirect people to all the Igloo or Coleman coolers that you’re selling on your ecommerce platform (rather than anything that that charlatan Yeti’s peddling these days).

To generate user interest in your content, you could also partner with your own users. Encourage your viewers to share their stories about how traversing the TSA checkpoint at an airport is 1,000 times more harrowing with an infant or a suitcase of pumping equipment. Give them the stage to explain how the Mother’s Lounge is a life-saving oasis, the Starbucks barista can’t grasp why you need a cup of hot water to warm up a bottle of milk, and the passengers on your flight are put out that you’ve brought your child with you, but what they don’t understand is that you’re in Mama Bear mode and your baby isn’t on the plane with them—they’re on the plane with your baby.

Asking your followers to post about their experiences will help consolidate a community that becomes loyal to your brand. Once you’ve amassed a following, point them in the direction of a third-party website like Amazon where you sell some of the products that you trust or that you developed. A tactic like this is akin to leveraging the influence of platforms like Facebook or Instagram to engage in social commerce. Uploading products into Amazon will let you capitalize off the legitimacy of the largest ecommerce brand in the galaxy—and help you set up your shop amid a more rapid stream of digital traffic than you may be used to sustaining.

Work with a Social Media Agency

We often think of social media as the top-of-the-funnel channels where you charm and attract users to your brand, rather than an opportunity to close a sale. Yet the recent innovations in social media ecommerce may be changing the character of social from an organic customer acquisition generator to a paid media model. Time will tell. For the last 21 years, we’ve seen social media undergo seismic changes, and our job involves monitoring its ever-shifting uses and features and advising our clients how to harness it to achieve their goals. Reach out to learn how the insights of this social media agency can benefit your ecommerce brand.

How Social Media Drives the Perception of Service in the Medical and Healthcare Industry

At first glance, healthcare and social media wouldn’t seem to mix well together. Medicine is one of those old, august professions, like law, full of Latinate terms and suggestive of stern erudition. Social media, meanwhile, often resembles a game of three-year-old soccer—an anything-goes melee of quite public mud-wrestles and high-pitched screaming. Plus, isn’t healthcare full of HIPAA and compliance issues and regulatory matters concerning privacy? If you livestream an open-heart surgery on Instagram, couldn’t you get sued?

The answer to that is yes. Do not livestream an open-heart surgery on Instagram. With that said, medicine is a pretty tech-savvy field. Think eMAR. Think telehealth. Think VR headsets that patients use to overcome motor deficiencies. So calm your qualms: Social media marketing can help providers reach more patients and act as leaders during a health crisis. Fact-check your messaging and observe industry rules about sharing patient data, and you can turn those puckish platforms into loudspeakers for the public good. Here’s how.

Keep People Informed

We’re still living through what may be the deadliest global pandemic since the 1918 Spanish flu: COVID-19. For the past year and a half, most of us have checked our social feeds every day for any number of updates—the latest CDC guidelines, takeaways from our governor’s press conference, stats on deaths and infections regionally, nationally, globally. One of the dangers of social media is that it can foster misinformation, and make no mistake, the internet is awash with health tips that are patently false. But reputable social media accounts, like the WHO or Johns Hopkins or your local hospital, can provide much-needed advisories on public health matters such as COVID, ebola, a particularly infectious flu season, and so on.

Companies use social media to grab an audience’s attention, but medical marketing can often work in the opposite direction: People seeking insights from life science professionals about imminent threats. As of January 2021, 53% of US adults reported that they get their news “often” or “sometimes” from social media—which provides the added bonus of being able to keep up with the minute-by-minute, exponential pace of viral outbreaks. Health authorities, then, should use their social accounts to announce updates with the data and transparency needed to navigate through an emergency. A few digital DEFCON tactics to consider:

  • Integrate a chat box function into your site to help people work through any problems they’re experiencing.
  • Publish a Q&A section on your site. (No matter how many insights you give people about COVID, they’ll still have questions.)
  • Ask your social team to reply to comments that users leave on your posts so that you can dispel baseless screeds and route people to fact-based, objective resources. (Yes, such things still exist.)

Striking up a dialog with your audience in times of distress won’t just boost your social metrics—it’ll provide a sense of clarity that transcends a transaction. After all, what better way to earn people’s trust than to resolve issues about their health and wellbeing?

Interact with Patients

Health organizations can use their social media to keep the public apprised of pollution levels, disease risks, transmission rates, and so on. But they can also use their social platforms to maintain a dialog with patients about their individual health concerns.

Facebook, for one, lets users create what’s known as a “secret group”—which, yes, has a comical, double-secret-probation ring to it, but which is actually quite useful, as it provides its members with one degree of privacy deeper than a Facebook “closed group.” These secret groups are hidden from trolls and roboscammers. You can’t search for them or request to join them. To get in, someone has to invite you, and all the content shared inside it is visible only to its members, making it the perfect digital round table to host discussions between, say, hundreds of people who may have been treated for Crohn’s and colitis at the same hospital.

Caregivers and physicians can use these secret groups to share links to the latest research on Crohn’s, recommend nutrition tips and treatment advice, analyze environmental triggers, or give their professional opinion on episodes or flare-ups that different members may be battling through at the moment. These groups aren’t meant to be substitutes for regular appointments. Instead, they can operate as an ongoing panel where patients and physicians stay connected, lowering the possibility that someone in need of medical advice can’t get it in time.

Make Your Services More Accessible

Healthcare is a sprawling enterprise in the US, employing 11% of US workers and accounting for nearly one-quarter of government spending. With all the money flowing through this sector, it’s no surprise that it’s maddeningly complex. Getting a doctor’s appointment is difficult. Deconstructing an insurance policy requires a law degree. Keeping the differences between payer, prescriber, pharma, and PBM straight is beyond the ken of most mortals. 

Nothing about the medical landscape in this country screams “easy to access”—yet social media bills itself as the easy-to-access interface with the world. So how do you pair a speedy function with a cumbersome form? You post content that lets patients access your services no matter which stage of the funnel they’re in.

Again, imagine that your clinic specializes in treating Crohn’s and colitis. Post content that builds a relationship with people diagnosed with Crohn’s who are still in the awareness stage. Share research and link to articles about Crohn’s for other people who are familiar with you (and, therefore, deeper in your funnel). Offer resources for them to connect with you in case they want to switch doctors or need a second opinion about whether they should undergo surgery. Set up your life science marketing strategy to clear hurdles for them. Patients will love you for simplifying the escalating intricacies of healthcare—especially since contacting most providers nowadays is as straightforward as calling the Pentagon.

Change the Perception of Health

We’ll admit it: Advertising can be an unlikeable field, especially when it tricks consumers into funnels that are exploitative or unethical. (Payday scams or pitches for harmful herbicides or attempts to gloss over data breaches all spring to mind.) Yet advertising can also reshape our norms for the better. MADD (“Mothers Against Drunk Driving”) started as a grassroots organization in the 1970s, but through decades-long campaign work, they’ve changed how we view drinking. Pre-MADD, bartenders overserved without compunction, people wheeled their way home from their neighborhood tavern cheerfully snockered, and none of your buddies even had the vocabulary to say, “Who’s the DD tonight?”

Granted, MADD’s ads can be a touch shamey and Prohibitionesque, but they still altered how we behaved at the bar and helped create the Uber-home world we live in today. Leaders and brands can take a cue from MADD’s mad success and urge people to lead healthier lifestyles. Take Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” initiative, or United Healthcare’s “Step Up for Summer” pledge to get enough sleep, walk 10,000 steps a day, and eat more fruits and veggies. What’s social media’s role in all this? Serving as the open-air forum where we raise awareness about breast cancer, make sexual health a comfortable conversation, share stories from a global community of patients—the list of potential campaigns is endless.

Advocate for Your Constituents

Yes, the idea of a company that champions a social cause is very much in vogue these days, but fear not: We’re not advocating that you advocate for a polarizing issue and forever hold the high ground. Yet we are aware that health organizations are often quite involved in the communities around them, so use your preferred platform to talk to those communities:

  • Give out the address of nearby needle exchanges. 
  • Combat misinformation about opioid abuse or pain medication management. 
  • Link to webinars that educate the public about a given topic—anything from the efficacy of mask-wearing to Lamaze classes. 

Consider the demographics of the region that you’re in and post health-related content that the people who you care for most frequently would benefit from.

Stay Compliant

Despite everything that we’re saying about the miracles of social media in healthcare, we still want to stress the importance of the regulations that buttress that industry. Know your HIPAA, but also follow your FDA, because that agency will review your social posts and they will send you warning letters if, for example, you’re touting drugs that have not yet been approved. 

That sounds like a simple enough fix: Don’t advertise unapproved drugs. But social media moves quickly, content creators most likely aren’t versed in the FD&C Act, and mistakes happen. To minimize mistakes, pass any posts that you’re unsure about by the lawyers. You may not want attorneys running your Snapchat account, but it is useful to have some knowledgeable staffer in-house who can steer your social strategy through the galaxy of regulations in healthcare—as well as through the health content terms of service for each social platform that you’re using.

And since this is such a sensitive field, monitor the comments that users leave on your social media. False claims, malicious statements, or descriptions that might breach someone’s privacy can all raise compliance issues. Lean on your legal team to advise you here, and use an app like Hootsuite’s Social Safeguard, which lets you upload the policies that you have to abide by and filter your posts through its auditing software.

Partner with the Pros

Ah, social media—the kiss-and-tell darling of the digital era, the funhouse mirror that we all use to show off everything from muffin recipes to our vacay in St. Lucia to our uninhibited willingness to duke it out with total strangers over whether Jordan or LeBron is the GOAT. (LeBron, duh.) According to data from Salesforce, social media is the most popular method for consumers to engage with brands, and social ads happen to be relatively cheap these days. So what’s our diagnosis? If you’re in the medical and healthcare industry, treat yourself to the wonders of social media.

Here’s our only caveat: Don’t use social media to make medicine cool. Don’t pressure some emeritus surgeon into TikTok’ing, well, anything (unless s/he’s an avid choreographer on the side). Don’t compromise your institution’s professionalism for a marketing ploy. Conversely, don’t churn out content if it’s not your specialty, because a lot of healthcare social feels sterile. (There, we said it.) All of the tips that we’ve recommended can help you turn prospects into patients. But, first, talk to a social media agency that’s worked with medical pioneers before—and knows how to bring your brand to life.

How Social Media Impacts ROI:

Social media is the great leveler of our age, the apotheosis of the shift from the one-to-many to the many-to-many models of communication, the subway train that banker and bus-boy alike all ride. In certain ways, it’s also the most complex innovation in digital marketing, so it’s worth remembering that digital ad spend eclipsed traditional advertising budgets in 2019. By 2023, digital will comprise over two-thirds of total ad spend. Point being, social media seems here to stay, and companies should use it to maintain an ongoing conversation with the world—enhancing their brand awareness and extending their customers’ lifetime value.

Yet even though social media may be the preferred advertising art form of the future, it’s still often so unruly, so hard to track and control. Social content can send shock-waves through the internet, conjuring up a tsunami of likes and shares and reposts, but—was it worth the cost? Hard to say. Or, at least, hard to correlate those intangible results to sales figures on a 1:1 basis. So how do you quantify this most qualitative medium? You’re about to find out.

Calculate Your Investment

If you want to determine how your social media marketing impacts your return on investment, you need to keep a record of your investment. Tab up the cost of the platforms that you’re using. (Most are free, but you may be paying for a premium version of a management tool, etc.) Then take note of the money that you spent on paid digital ads and on labor. Correlating a content creator’s salary to the results that come back probably isn’t arithmetically sound, but it’s worth poring over hours billed per project or how much you’re shelling out to freelancers.

The meaning of the numbers that bubble up may depend on how your social media eventually performs. For the moment, though, tally it up and put it aside.

Match Metrics to Goals

As you track how much you’re spending, determine what you want to accomplish with that money. Do you want to improve your SEO, add new email signups, sell more puppy-training sessions through your ecommerce platform? Pinpoint your goals, then calibrate the results with metrics that are commensurate to the value of those goals. 

Let’s say that you want to improve your SEO. Measure whether your bounce rate goes up or down—but not whether your profits go up or down. Conversions and site traffic and lead generation all tie together, but they’re also distinct returns. So choose the yardstick that you want to plunge into the market, and benchmark your current stats so you can compare them with the outcomes. Knowing how you perform now will give you a sense of how realistic your goals are. Imagine that 100 people have signed up to your email list. Adding another 100 this month is—to put it mildly—ambitious. Adding another 10? Doable, and a good goal.

Bear in mind, though, that there is a bewildering array of objectives that you could achieve and KPIs that you could measure. So, we beg of you, don’t try to measure them all. Track a few metrics—and track the right metrics. A savvy social media marketing agency might tell you that views, likes, retweets, and followers are considered “vanity metrics.” Sure, it feels nice when someone gives your post a thumbs up, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into a business result (like a sale or a new customer). Whereas other insights are more illuminating:

  • Bounce rates tell you if you’re maintaining your audience’s attention. 
  • Engagement rates tell you how many people are commenting on your posts. 
  • Converting click attributions tell you which ad a customer clicked on before making a purchase. (More on this stat later.)

Sharpen Your Tools

Since tracking and measuring are integral skills in social media marketing, it should come as no surprise that instruments galore exist to crunch the numbers on how social impacts ROI. Here are just a few of them:

  • Hootsuite built a calculator where you can plug in data like Facebook visits or landing page conversions and match them against your overall investment. 
  • If you want to get precise about those visits and conversions, let Google Analytics give you a panoramic view of all the numbers flowing through your funnels.
  • Building links with UTM parameters helps you understand which sites your visitors came from, which channels routed them in, which part of a promotion they clicked on, and so on. 

The takeaways that these tools provide, in sum, indicate which of your marketing efforts you should work on because they’re underperforming—as well as which ones are over performing, and need some extra rocket fuel poured on them.

Don’t Wait to Iterate

A good digital marketing agency is always measuring the results of a campaign, but they should also measure different versions of that campaign to gauge which one impacts ROI most effectively. So keep A/B testing. Target different audiences. Experiment with a range of tones. Tinker with the copy and the CTAs. Sub out a carousel for a pulldown ad. See what works, but also adopt the mindset that no one thing “works.” The market’s always in flux, so be ready to pivot on strategies as you monitor which aspects of a campaign your audience responds to the best.

Companies that don’t like how their audience is responding—or that panic because their audience isn’t responding at all—sometimes hose out more content as a quick-fix solution. Beware this tactic, because inundating the market can feel spammy. In a word: Slow it down. People prefer digital experiences that feel well-executed and personalized to them rather than torpedoed willy-nilly in their general direction.

Redefine the Return

You know how much money you’ve piped into your social media plan, and now the results are coming back. But what do the numbers mean? A reasonable business leader might assume that one dollar spent on social media should return at least one dollar in revenue. As we’ve indicated, though, your upfront return might not even be money at all.

Strictly speaking, companies don’t need social media. Factories and restaurants and brokerage offices would pump along just fine without a Facebook account. But having social media imparts legitimacy onto your brand. Think about it: If you’re applying to an engineering firm, but they don’t have a LinkedIn page, wouldn’t they seem behind the times to you? (Like, probably-not-much-career-growth-here behind the times?)

Without a social media presence, you also lose opportunities to stake out what distinguishes you from the competition. Look at this Ben & Jerry’s tweet about how Brown v. Board of Education led to the school-to-prison pipeline. The comments that their post garnered range from “This is why you’re my favorite brand of ice cream” to “Bro, you’re ice cream.” Yet Ben & Jerry’s is at least positioning itself front and center in the public forum. Is this positioning performative or genuine? Up for debate. But it seems that the value of engaging with multiple audiences about a complex topic on social media may be cultural cachet and brand visibility rather than a single line-item amount.

Give it Time

Print advertising was all about big, bold declarations—billboards or magazines plastered with headlines that wowed viewers. Digital advertising is less about seizing an audience’s attention and more about serving them bite-sized reminders across the channels they frequent. One of the difficulties with social media is that it’s snackable, and perfectly suited to serve up those reminders, but it moves so quickly that it can put campaigns into hyperdrive, truncating the lifespan of a marketing investment and making its results too intertwined to unthread.

Remember “last click attributions”? That metric can help you see how a post might lead to 100 people clicking into your site and spending $5,000 on your product. All that’s useful to know, but some marketers argue that the insights it provides are somewhat blindered—it doesn’t take into account the other touchpoints that had previously introduced the customer to a brand. After you Googled, “I want the best vacuum cleaner,” Dyson and Shark ads may have popped up on your social platforms. You did your research. You were leaning toward Dyson. Then you saw one last Dyson ad on Facebook and clicked the link and made the purchase.

That single Dyson ad may not have been the superstar in this scenario. Maybe it was just the last reminder in a series of waves and winks—many of which happen through multiple interactions with Dyson’s social media that are hard to alchemize into dollars. So even though social media is fast-paced, give it enough time to mature and glue together all the collateral that contribute to your brand awareness. The return you get on that may be immeasurable.

How to Dominate the Search Engines (SEO and Paid Media):

Fun fact: This month marks the 15th anniversary that the Oxford English Dictionary first listed “Google” as a verb. Google and other search engines have since become so important to the business world that digital marketers encounter this question from our clients all the time: “Can you get us to the top of the first search results page?”

That’s a steep request, but also a pertinent one: Search engines are the starting-point for 93% of web experiences, yet only about 25% of users venture onto the second results page. We all know that search engines are in the business of selling your data to corporations, but we allow them to commoditize us because they route us to the answers that we’re looking for. (If they didn’t, we’d jump over to their competitors.) So to dominate the search engines, keep in mind these marketing strategies that the engines reward—and the ones they penalize.

Master the Elements

If you want search engines to crawl your site, you need to become proficient in the basics of search engine optimization. Here are just a few tactics to consider:

Plan Out the User Journey

Before you delve into alt tags and meta descriptions and the rest of it, audit your digital identity to gauge how users are interacting with you. Is your bounce rate going up or down? Are you achieving the holy trinity of clicks, likes, and shares? What’s the final conversion that you’re driving your audience toward? Figuring out how your channels connect will help you plan SEO strategies that ladder up to a larger objective, rather than just improving your metrics for the sake of metrics.

Weave in keywords into your digital content, but limit yourself to about one keyword per 100–150 words—and write a few long-tail keywords that contain the entire phrase that someone might be searching for (4–6-word lines like “how to write a cover letter” along with smaller snippets like “resume” and “job application”). Remember, only weave in long-tail phrases if they feel natural. Search bots will lower your SEO score if your long-tail keywords sound like pianos dropped into the middle of sentences that were otherwise flowing along smoothly.

Incorporate Links

Search engines understand that the internet is a hyperlinked database of information and that we’re all clicking through 37 tabs at once to find the answer to our most pressing question right this second. So if you work in links that are specific, sincere, substantial, and succinct, and that connect to relevant content, search engines will consider your site to be “authoritative.” (If that term seems oddly inflated, that’s because it’s a euphemism for sites that aren’t spammy and that don’t annoy the search engines’ product—us.) Avoid linking to content that’s over a year old, and include internal links to improve the visibility of the lesser-known pages of your site.

Don’t Forget Mobile

In 2011, about 35% of Americans owned a cell phone. A decade later, that number has zoomed up to 97%. Worldwide, you’re looking at 5 billion cell phone users, and to top it off, about half of your audience is finding you through their phones. Point being, optimize for mobile. Search engines will filter you into oblivion if you don’t. Besides, a website today that’s riddled with wonky text and misspaced links when it loads on your phone just feels so … 2011.

Never Cry Wolf

Ever heard of “information scent”? That’s a UX concept that holds that internet users are clicking the links and CTAs that give off a palpable whiff of the intel that they’re looking for. But the opposite could occur, too—sites and content can emit a nasty information scent.

Let’s say you’re writing a blog about starting your own business. If your headline is “Learn How to Grow Your Bottom Line 1,000%,” people will click your link, but if you don’t supply a miracle-gro solution to boosting their revenue, you’re going to disappoint them. In the short term, you’ll drive traffic to your site. In the long term, users may call you out for the charlatan that you are, which could result in search engines downgrading you because of misleading content and sneaky redirects.

Act Local

Search engines are a quandary. On one hand, they make the global village even more united and universal. (Every day, people from Nebraska to Nairobi are all Googling, “How do I fix the printer?”) At the same time, they exert the equal and opposite force of localizing the world. People may or may not be thinking globally these days, but they do seem to be buying locally: Searches with the phrase “near me” in them have risen 150% in the last two years, and 28% of online local searches result in a purchase.

Whether you’re a Mom and Pop shop or an international conglomerate, you’re located near someone, so optimize your web presence for local SEO to make it easy for people to find you, digitally and physically. Update your Google local business listing with the pertinent details about your operation (hours, address, phone numbers), and post customer feedback—especially if it’s positive. Search engines will boost your site’s visibility if people rave about you, since you’ve demonstrated your value to their users.

Make Your Content King

To get noticed online, you need to produce something noticeable, like videos or a blog, and push it out on a regular basis, which demonstrates that what you’re saying is timely and current. If people like watching or reading your work enough to linger on your site, search engines will reward you for having a low bounce rate, since that metric tells them that your site is (you guessed it) valuable to their users.

We’ve talked about linking out from your site, but the real goal is to have authoritative sites link to you. Imagine writing a blog about how to harness fusion and National Geographic gives you a shout-out on social media. Search engines will propel your site up their rankings. But you don’t have to solve one of science’s biggest challenges to craft an organic media plan. If you’re an ecommerce entrepreneur, write an article about your market niche on Forbes that links to your site. Upload your videos to YouTube and your music to Spotify. Even guest blogging on less-established domains can drum up the SEO credit that search engines recognize and respect.

Pay to Play

Blogs, videos, backlink hierarchies, designing for mobile—these are all SEO strategies, sometimes termed “owned media” because they appear on channels that companies or users control. (Or that Big Tech lets you think you control.) The other approach you could take is paid media, where you outright pay search engines to rank you higher. One benefit of paid media is that it’s precise: Spend enough, and you can plop your content in front of your target audience, your competition’s target audience, people who are midway down your funnel, and so on.

The main caveat with paid media is that it can feel, well, like you paid for it. Is it really a surprise when Nike serves you an ad about how great Nike is? But when consumers praise Nike on Google Reviews—doesn’t that feel more credible, like humans are recommending a product to each other? Praise like that is called “earned media,” and brands sometimes pay to put that media in front of audiences that their paid media was intended for. Don’t be afraid to pay for ads, just be sure to interweave them with owned and earned media, and keep in mind the old adage about how money can’t buy you likes.

Be Useful to Users

The seven major search engines today are Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo!, Yandex, Ask.com, and DuckDuckGo. But let’s not kid ourselves—“Google” has entered the lexicon in a way that “Bing” has not for a reason: Google commands over 70% of the search engine market and 85% of mobile traffic. Google now handles (give or take) two trillion searches each year. Web optimization trends die every season because Google’s webmaster guidelines change all the time, so you’re better served studying their algorithm rather than trying to trick it. Better yet—study what your audience wants. Explain something that users might not know (how to tie a tie, how to interpret case law, how to dominate the search engines) and Google and its brethren are more likely to route them your way rather than to your clickbaity competitors.

Why a Good Logo is So Important

First off, let’s define terms: Your logo is not your brand. As we’ve written before, your brand is the reflection of your products and services, your workplace culture and the totality of your values. Your logo, meanwhile, is the imprimatur of your brand. Think of it as your professional coat of arms—the seal that guarantees the quality that you provide to your customers, the emblem perched at the apex of your brand architecture. Need a few more reasons why a logo is so important? Let’s get granular with it.

A Logo Gets You Noticed

Never forget how busy your consumers are. We’re all sending emails on our tablets, jumping on work calls on our laptops, hopping around between twenty apps on our phones. All that shuttling between tabs and devices tends to obliterate our attention spans into fruitflyish units of a few seconds that your digital marketing has to capture an audience’s interest.

Enter your logo, which amounts to a 1,000-words snapshot of your brand. If an ad pops up on your consumers’ screens and they get the vibe that even the logo isn’t for them—it’s too posh, not posh enough, perfectly posh but more (or less) than they wanted to spend—they’re going to keep on clicking on. Rest assured, this is judge-a-book-by-its-cover territory, and the cover of your book needs to scream, “Buy me. Because this experience, my target audience, is tailored to you.”

A Logo Imparts Legitimacy

Since your logo is the summation of your visual identity, a sloppy logo is akin to a restaurant buffet swarming with flies—that first-impressions moment when a customer thinks, ‘Definitely not spending my money here.’ And even a good product without a logo might seem scammy. Microsoft is an established brand, but if someone tries to sell you a Microsoft laptop that doesn’t have the Microsoft logo on it, would you trust it?

If your answer to that is ‘definitely not,’ then you’ve pinpointed the importance of a logo, which rubber-stamps legitimacy onto a brand—and onto all the collateral that your brand produces. Dedicate some time to perfecting your logo design, because it’s gonna live front and center on your website, tucked in the corner of your business cards and peppered throughout your social media feeds. As the North Star of your brand’s aesthetic, your logo ensures the consistency that consumers need in order to be confident that the same company is talking to them across a medley of platforms and campaigns.

A Logo Communicates Your Brand Personality

A good logo should be eye-catching, but it also needs to hint at what your brand does or convey who you are. For that reason, banks or life insurance companies opt for typography that looks sturdy and reliable. Whereas a business that delivers beauty and wellness products might draw from a palette of yellows and greens and pinks—and throw in a few monstera leaves while they’re at it—to send out vibes of optimism, health, joy. 

Position your logo so that it acts as a harbinger of the experience that consumers are about to receive, be it financial advice or a box of hand lotions and jade rollers. At the same time, bear in mind that some of the most famous logos toe the line between functionality and artistry—getting across what a business does in more subtle messaging. In the Gillete logo, the “G” and the “i” look sliced open, as if by a razor. The yellow arrow in the Amazon logo connects the letters “a” and “z,” implying that Amazon sells and ships everything from A–Z. The ultramodern Apple symbol nods to the Biblical story of the fruits of knowledge (with the bite—or byte—in it representing the tasting of that knowledge).

Because a strong logo should err on the side of coherency and precision, making even one of its design features too abstract can befuddle people. Take the Apple logo again. The bite-of-knowledge motif is clever, but Steve Jobs & Co. were allegedly worried that, without that bite, customers would think the fruit was a cherry tomato. Point taken. If you’re on a mission to build the most urbane tech company in the world, the last thing you want is to overhear someone saying, “Does this thing look like a tomato to you?”

A Logo Welcomes You into the Club

One of the truisms you often hear in marketing is that your customers need to see themselves in your branding. Which means that your logo should tell your audience, on some level, “You’re in the club.” 

Imagine that you own a gym and your logo is a bodybuilder lifting a ponderous barbell above his head. That logo is going to do wonders to attract lunkish fitness fanatics rather than the just-making-a-change crowd, because an effective logo has its own personality and it talks to the personality of its clientele. The Mercedes-Benz logo is refined, silver, sleek. The Nike logo is on a swift upward-and-onward trajectory. The Coca-Cola logo is energetic and bouncy. The iconography of each of these brands tells you what the brands stand for, but it also fulfills a blank-canvas effect of absorbing meaning that customers pour back into them.

One of the most original recent examples of this in-the-club blank canvas may be Disney. The Disney logo is Walt Disney’s signature written against the backdrop of a fairytale castle, but it’s sometimes abbreviated to the silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head, which is three black circles resembling a Venn diagram that’s drifting apart. Think about that: Three black circles can stir up memories of watching movies and reading books about adventure and friendship. Those memories, in turn, are powerful enough to sway people to subscribe to Disney+, get married at the Happiest Place on Earth, and become annual passholders who fill closets upon closets with Disney merch—which are stamped all over with three black circles.

That’s the power of a logo.

A Logo Champions Your Individuality

Your logo design should be the crowning symbol of your values and beliefs, the shield or flag that your company rallies behind, the signpost that guides consumers along their journey into your fold. All true—but stay flexible enough to change it. Case in point: Check out Apple’s ye olde logo from 1976, a landscape portrait of Isaac Newton reading under an apple tree (with a William Wordsworth quote decorating the frame, to top it off). Pivoting to the minimalist apple with the bite taken out of it was the right move, because Apple is all about sophistication and simplicity. So be honest about who you are and what you want your logo to say about you. Otherwise, you may end up contriving an image rather than consolidating an identity.

Why Copywriting is Important… And Why You Probably Can’t Do It Yourself

Copywriting is a curious art. Virtually everyone in the ad-business world is literate, so it’s easy to assume that all of us can write with the best of ’em. Ask non-specialists to design a logo or code JavaScript and they may lack the basic skills to even start working. But, writing—we text and email all day, don’t we? Doesn’t that qualify anyone to write ads and websites?

Not really. Don’t get us wrong, there are plenty of great writers out there. Yet even great writers steeped in college lit courses or seasoned in composing long-form stories might never come across the principles of advertising writing that make for excellent print collateral or website design. So if you can afford it, shell out some money for professional copywriting. Here’s why it’s important.

Copywriting Sells

Imagine talking to a car salesman who makes you feel like you’re trapped and withholds information from you. You’re probably not going to buy a new Lexus from this person. Now imagine that the salesman is charming without being pushy and seems knowledgeable rather than hungry. That guy might get you to sign on the dotted line today. The same fundamentals of salesmanship apply to the copy on, say, your website, which amounts to a conversation with your audience that should be enjoyable for them.

The balancing act here is to connect with users as fellow humans while also observing the more technical to-dos of UX/UI copywriting—optimizing keywords, avoiding duplicate content, weaving in external links, and uploading metadata into the CMS. Fusing SEO (search engine optimization) strategies with a relatable voice will help your audience A) find you and B) like you, which tends to amplify your brand awareness and lead to higher conversions.

Copywriting Improves CRO

So far, we’ve talked about SEO, but a related term, CRO (conversion rate optimization), is equally important. SEO is the process of luring an audience to your site. CRO is the process of urging that audience to take a certain action on your site—be it buying your vampire lust novel or signing up for your seminar on how to enter the arbitrage business. 

Smart copy helps inch up your conversion rate percentage, since it fulfills a salesperson-tour guide capacity of establishing trust, clarifying the USPs that separate you from your competitors, using language that caters to distinct user groups, and so on. Your copy, in total, is your brand voice. If people love that brand voice, you’re on your way to retaining a base of customers who purchase from you again and again.

(Good) Copywriting Wards Off Calamity

A strong copywriter should serve as a QC gatekeeper, saving your brand from the marketing equivalent of that gauche-pickup-line moment that can bruise your rep. Companies don’t like to admit how many times their campaigns flop, but they do—all the time. Look at this ad that Mr. Clean ran in 2011. The design appears to depict a mother teaching her daughter (with joyous exuberance) how to do house chores, while the copy reads: “This Mother’s Day, get back to the job that really matters.”

As you can imagine, that ad faced swift backlash. We don’t know who wrote the copy, but our guess is that it was someone with a tin ear whose insensitivity may have cost the client a heap of money. Because competent Head of Copy directors know what effective campaigns look like, they also know what disasters look like. So they earn their paychecks in part by finding the best phrases that bubble up in the first-draft creative stages and cutting everything else. Ergo, they often talk to their teams like this: “Keep working on this tagline. Bury this concept and don’t ever show it to anyone. Wait, this idea might have legs …” 

Copywriting is Always Changing

In our humble opinion, writing a 10,000-word story is sometimes easier than fitting the perfect 10 words onto a billboard for a scrap metal yard client, finishing up a landing page for a patent search startup, and then knocking out a blog for a beards-and-brews shop—on any given Monday. With the long-form story, you can at least sink into the storyline and narrate from a single perspective. Whereas when you’re juggling copy assignments, you’ve got to master the chameleon-style art of shuttling between a range of brand voices and account strategies.

As a copywriter, you know that your billboard headlines can be longer and more ad-like, your landing page copy should fill in the knowledge gaps of the users who read it, and your blogs should be chunked into an information hierarchy. And you know how to write in all these formats in a tone that drives the appropriate result—whether it’s conveying information in an About Us page or sounding CTA-oriented in paid media. 

That even veteran copywriters can struggle with aligning voice, format, and client goals may be the most compelling reason to hire a veteran copywriter: They oversee the sometimes boggling responsibility of making sure that your links are accessible, that you’re leading with benefits-driven language, and that every last H3 subhead helps boost website optimization.

Copywriting Requires Research

The word “copy” is prefixed in front of “writer” for a reason: In practice, copywriting often amounts to winnowing vast reserves of information into a few sharp lines. You’re not exactly copy-pasting what the client has already written, but you are distilling existing content down to its essence. Which means that before they can even write a single line, copywriters spend a lot of their time researching everything from licensing deals to the patient access journey in healthcare to the great chestnut blight of the twentieth century.

So if you need copy written on a bevy of subjects, bear in mind that you really have two jobs in front of you: First, becoming a quasi-expert on a given niche. Second, condensing your newfound expertise into writing that grabs people’s attention and influences their buying habits. Because even if you’re an authority on a certain subject, you may not be an authority on how to convey that subject with a few core insights. Copywriters do all the research about your brand to pinpoint why it matters in a way that nudges your audience further down the marketing funnel.

You Just Can’t Hack It

You’ve probably heard the term “hack writer” before; it derives from “hackney,” or a horse that you could hire for cheap. If you underinvest in copywriters, you may end up with a stable of hacks, rushing out a high volume of words that produce a low caliber of brand. Remember, one daft headline on a site or one typo on a book jacket can torpedo an entire messaging strategy. When you hire a worthy copywriter, you’re not only getting a deep researcher—you’re also teaming up with an editor who reviews the orthography of each piece of content with such rigor that your business always sounds svelte and sophisticated. For that reason alone, leave the writing to the pros.

How to Optimize Your Web Copy to Drive Conversions

“Print is dead.” “Don’t quit your day job.” “Yeah, because the money’s in writing.” As a writer, you hear it all your life: You’re doomed. High school counselors, your uncle’s friend in the red sweater-vest at the Christmas party a few years back, even your doctor — everybody around you feels the need to let you know that anyone who writes for a living will end up penniless, curled up in a gutter.

The thing is, they’re not wrong (even if they are exaggerating). Writing is not so much a field as a precarious skill that you enter the job market with at your own peril. At the same time, people need to communicate, and that’s when you hire a writer. Blogs, websites, landing pages, retargeting ads, and other tactics in your digital marketing strategy — we copywriters probably handled the language for all that. But if we didn’t, and you’re wondering how to optimize web copy to drive conversions, here are some tips the writers at Jacob Tyler have written for you.

Stay on Point

The term “writer” got batted around a lot in the paragraphs above, so let’s define terms: Slinging digital marketing copy is often way different than crafting an essay or plotting a novel. Print tends to afford writers more space than digital layouts, which are usually functional or parceled out between web pages. Remember, readers on your site might be clicking between 15 tabs at the same time, and they’re likely to only scan 20% of your page’s content, anyway. 

So keep your sentences pithy. Guide your audience to the most relevant info with headers and bold type and bullet points, since people may only be on your site to get an answer (“Should I hire this company for my kitchen remodel? When does this place even open?”). And be consistent. You don’t want to strike a lofty third-person tone on the landing page only to switch to the earnest first-person in the “About Us” section. Maintain the same voice throughout your web copy so users don’t feel like they’ve somehow jumped between those 15 tabs unbeknownst to them.

But What’s the Point?

Let’s return to one of the phrases above: “People may only be on your site to get an answer.” That idea is more pertinent than it may appear. Novels, essays, scripts all give authors the breadth to move characters through countries and centuries, picking up on themes later on that they foreshadowed at the outset — and letting the reader (or viewer) sink into an argument or a narrative. Not so with digital copywriting, which needs to be punchy because it drives toward a CTA. Copywriters, with each page you compose, ask yourself: “What is this accomplishing?”

Are you nudging users to book a resort, enroll in theology school, become a member of a credit union? Craft your content so that it’s smart and fresh, yes, but don’t leave your reader floundering in a sea of pretty descriptions. Effective UX copywriting compels prospective clients to journey further down the funnel, so you should A) have a CTA, and B) make your CTA compelling — and then run A/B testing to make sure it really is driving people to book a resort or enroll in theology school or become a member of a credit union. (Which it is, if you’re wondering. Those are our accounts, and our director of business development would love to tell you all about them.)

Mean What You Say

Even though web copy may be the newest medium in the history of writing, the old verities of how to compose a good sentence still apply to the art of digital marketing: Go heavy on verbs and nouns, light on adjectives and adverbs. Know your grammar, and if you break it, be able to defend it. Read what you’ve written out loud and let your ear guide the phrasing. Be specific — but don’t get prosy with detail. And assume the reader is smarter than you are.

Since web copy does generally hinge on a CTA, copywriters can sometimes trick themselves into taking the attitude that they’re tricking consumers down the funnel. But people know when they’re being talked down to; they sense it if you don’t believe in what you’re saying or selling. So find a way to enter into the copy emotionally. If your client is a nature preserve, conjure up memories of fog raveling fir trees. If your client is a bank, think back to that feeling of security that a customer service rep at your mortgage company gave you when you called about maybe, hopefully waiving late fees. Adopt whatever mindset you need to write with passion, because if you don’t care about the subject at hand, why should your audience? 

Know Your Audience

On that note: Never forget who your target audience is. Imagine you’re a business that makes high-end baby products. Your target audience might be Andy, a thirty-ish accountant who’s about to have his first child. Inhabit Andy’s perspective. This guy is overjoyed, scared, nervous, and impatient all at once for this baby to arrive. He can’t wait — so he’s buying as many baby products as he can to feel like he’s prepared, but baby strollers confuse him (Do they fold up? Can you fit them in a car? Do you really need the accessories they come with?), and he’s willing to pay more for the right one because he doesn’t want to let his wife down.

Talk to Andy. Soothe his worries. Strip out your buzzwords and address him as “you,” as if writer and reader are just having a beer and talking about how baby strollers work. Try out a headline like “Baby Strollers Made Simple.” Then get into some body copy that addresses Andy’s concerns dead-on: “We know what you’re thinking — which baby stroller should I pick? We’ve got some answers.” 

Hear that sigh of relief? That’s the sweet sound of a conversion.

Mix It Up

The best web copy is minimal web copy. We’ve said it before: Be succinct. But also be willing to yield space to developers and designers who optimize conversions with their own skill-sets. A page of copy stamped onto whitespace will look HTML-y to users — like they landed on a blog from the dial-up days, or like you put zero seduction into guiding them through your digital marketing strategy. Nest the copy in a color palette that makes your sentences pop. Break it into modules alongside photos that illustrate what you’re describing. Nail that brand headline for a CBB client, but be cool with a programmer animating it so that it emerges out of a cloud of smoke. Think past the copywriting to visualize how your words — thrilling as they are — complement the talents of the other artists working alongside you. And remember to proofread your site with the rigor of a technician. No matter how svelte that CBD brand line is, it’ll look dazed and confused if even one word is misspelled.

Web copy, a memoir, a brochure for a museum — you can make any piece of copy excellent if you trust in it as an art form that moves people. What does that have to do with conversions? Well, it’s not by accident that Google penalizes websites that stuff the text with keywords. Think about that: Even search engines recognize that writing that talks to an audience like humans is more valuable than jargon that assumes consumers are psychographic profiles. Use keywords and meta descriptions, absolutely, but remember this above all else: Write with soul and sincerity, and people will listen to you.