Once users land on your website, you have 10 seconds to show them the value your company offers before they leave. If you’re reading this, perhaps that’s happened all too often on your company’s website. Understanding how to execute a manufacturing website redesign (or any industry, really) that will interest and engage prospects will allow you to capture their attention in those first 10 seconds, turning them into leads and hopefully customers one day.

Who better to do a newbie’s guide to graphic design for marketing than a graphic design newbie? I’m a words dude. Always have been.

Picture this: You have a great B2B company (not too hard to imagine, right?). Your team does great work for great clients. You know without a doubt that if more prospects knew about you, you could grow your business like crazy!

If you're like many of the B2B companies we talk to, you live that story every day. 

Why does mobile matter for your email marketing efforts?

Conversion Path: The path a visitor takes through your website to become a lead. A typical conversion path requires a call-to-action, a landing page, a form, and a thank-you page.

You'd think the determining factor of "good design" would be, y'know, the quality of the design. Right? ^Right?

Just having a website doesn’t cut it anymore. Those days have been long gone! A website is often the face of the business and the first place that an individual interacts with a business, whether it’s a B2B (business-to-business) or B2C (business-to-consumer) environment. Despite the fact that the first impression of a business is made through the website, there are common business website problems that are constantly occurring.

Your company just signed a contract with an Inbound Marketing company to redesign your website give your web marketing efforts an overhaul. You've been looking at competitors' websites and the sites of companies that you respect and admire. Then the design phase of your project starts. Just what you've been waiting for! You're so excited to get a new, modern look to your website. You're sick of the current, dated aesthetic.

When the new design comps through for review, you pour over them critiquing every pixel. IT MUST LOOK PERFECT! Finally, the design is approved and the project moves on to the next phase, content. Guess what happens... you lose interest. Without fail! This happens in nearly 100% of small businesses.

The content phase just doesn't feel as sexy as the design phase. I get it. I do. The problem is, the content is the more important of the 2 phases.

Don't Get Me Wrong, Design Is Important

The look and feel of your website is very important in building trust with your visitors. It's also really important from an ease of use standpoint. Good design makes finding what you're after extremely easy. Good design shows that you care about what potential clients see when they look for you. Ultimately, TRUST is the the biggest factor with design in Inbound Marketing. You can't expect strangers to stick around long if your site's design doesn't build trust and deliver the content your visitor is looking for.

Content Is What Get's Eyes On Your Design

However... CONTENT is what actually gets visitors to your website. Then they stick around if the design is trustworthy and the content matches what they are looking for. The effort that goes into the design phase of your website should be monumentally surpassed by the effort that goes into the content creation portion of your website redesign. I know the design phase is the sexy part, but if you care at all about generating high quality traffic that converts into high quality leads, you need a more concerted effort on content than you do the design.

Why is that? For starters, prospects don't Google for the vendor in your industry with the best website design. They Google for a solution to their problem. If your competitor's site answers that more effectively but looks a little less attractive than yours, the visitor won't know. All they will know is that they found a solution to their problem, the competitor's site was acceptable in design and now they are on the path to become the competitor's customer, not yours.

The bottom line is, no one will see your beautifully designed website if you don't build out the content appropriately. Again, I recommend shifting the bulk of your energy from the design phase to the content phase if you are truly trying to attract visitors to your website that ultimately convert to leads and customers. At the end of the day, that's the goal for the vast majority of small businesses online.