Do content marketing CTAs ruin good design?

In a previous blog, Roberta explained how calls to action (CTAs) are the engine for a content marketing program. Ideally, CTAs should be placed throughout your site, not just on blog posts. Should you also put CTAs on your home page? It depends.

The Challenge: Balancing Visual Design with CTAs

A common issue we see with home page design is finding a balance between visual design and effective content presentation. A content-driven site is chock full of images, text and links (including CTAs).

On one hand, putting CTAs on your home page can draw people in to your lead generation tools, demonstrate your areas of expertise, and build trust in your content. On the other hand, as a designer, you don’t want too many CTAs to clutter up your beautiful, pristine interface (because it IS beautiful, and you know it). Plus, having too many CTAs can also confuse users; they don’t know what they’re supposed to look at.

All in all, you have to be careful that you’re looking out for the user first. YOU want the user to download your latest e-book or white paper, but THEY want to figure out who the heck you are. Nobody will download content from your site if they don’t know who you are and what you’re about. People are automatically skeptical of any website nowadays. You have to earn their trust quickly before asking them to do anything for you.

The Solution: Clear Messages, Clean Design, and Scenario-Based Entry Points

For an example of balancing all the elements, I’m going to show you the website we recently developed for a client. Foresite, Inc. is an industry leader in a very specialized field: solving reliability issues for electronics manufacturers. These issues are often linked with some kind of contamination or residue that occurs during manufacturing.

Our challenge was to balance very technical content with a clean and simple design.  Here are four ways we did that.

1.  Say who you are

This is a simple, but often overlooked, element of home page design. Tell people who you are and what you do. If this part isn’t clear, don’t expect people to go deeper into your site. Also, be sure to speak their language, not yours. Visitors don’t want to read your mission statement. They want a clear yes or no answer to these questions:

• Can you solve my problem?
• Why should I trust you?

2. Draw people in with scenarios

The Foresite home page presents scenarios that represent the most common reasons people need them. At OSD, we call those “entry points.” Ordinarily I would recommend 3-5 scenarios, but as you can see, Foresite really needed more. Here’s the key to doing entry points well:

• If you can, focus on “what do you need?” rather than “who are you?”
• Be sure there is little overlap so it’s easy for visitors to pick

When the visitor selects a scenario on the Foresite website, they go to a landing page that highlights services and content most relevant to that scenario. This is a more “guided” approach to navigation, as opposed to an old school “drill down” approach. The result is a more personalized experience with more relevant content. It allows the user to choose a path that’s most important to them as opposed to searching through a list of services that may or may not help.

3. Show, don’t tell (or sell)

After the scenario entry points, we offer “reasons to believe” that Foresite can help. There is a video that introduces you to Terry Munson (the company’s founder) and his passion for solving problems. There are two CTAs that support the company’s content marketing program, as well as blog posts that demonstrate the company’s thought leadership in the electronics manufacturing industry.

Use this section to show the user how you have helped others. Showing your company in action is far more powerful than any selling message you can sling at them.

4. Keep it clean

Foresite is all about keeping a clean environment, so we knew what the site should look like: clean and bright. Being that this site is full of highly technical content, it was important not to clutter up the layout with a lot of photography that really served no purpose. We chose subtle graphic elements such as the texture in the header rather than add a large photo of a circuit board.

In keeping with the trend of clean, flat design, we continued to use iconography throughout rather than busy photos.

Many of the other design elements not only align with the company’s brand, but also maintain the clean look and feel. For example we chose a limited color palette and used circular elements for CTAs to tie everything back to the logo. 

Altogether, the site presents a professional appearance that builds trust and confidence.

- Brad

As interactive creative director at OSD, Brad Wolf is the graphic designer and UX ninja behind many of our web development and app development projects.