Business owners understand that the customer experience is an important part of making sales, eliciting positive reviews, and building a good reputation and a favorable brand image. It’s not enough to spend money on marketing and branding – you have to deliver on your promises with superior goods and services, caring customer service, and an end-to-end experience that leaves a positive overall impression. Customers may not remember every aspect of every transaction, but they will recall the high (or low) point of a given interaction.
This includes any encounters they have with your brand in the virtual world, which is why you have to create a website that’s attractive, intuitive, and delivers the information that compels consumers to complete targeted conversions. It’s why you need relevant and timely content for social media, blogs, and other online venues where consumers might encounter your brand.
Of course, these days, more and more people have taken to browsing on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. You want them to have the same experience on these devices as they have when viewing your website on a computer, right? This is where responsive design enters the picture, and as your preferred Asheville internet marketing service provider can tell you, it’s a crucial element of providing the best consumer experience and remaining competitive.
What is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive web design has to do with creating a website that automatically sizes to fit the visitor’s screen, whether they’re viewing your pages on a computer, a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone, or some other device. This might sound like a lot of work. How do you account for every possible screen size?
As it turns out, you don’t have to worry. There is programming designed to create a single version of your website that identifies devices and adapts to deliver a version that will automatically fit the screen size of the viewing device. This leaves you free to devote time and resources to more important concerns like online branding and marketing, content creation, and managing social media accounts.
Keeping Customers Happy
You no doubt recall the early days of smartphones, when you’d click through to a website and have to scroll not only up and down to view it, but also side to side. Or you’d try to pinch down the screen to fit all the content at once, but the text would end up being so small that you couldn’t read it.
Is this the experience you want current and prospective customers to encounter upon reaching your website? Your customers will be none too pleased to encounter such an outdated site, that’s for sure.
You need to reach your customers where they browse and deliver a consistent experience across all devices. More and more, browsing occurs in mobile space. Between 2016 and 2017, visits to U.S. websites via mobile devices increased from 57% to 63%, but even more telling is that bounce rates from mobile devices decreased over the same time frame, from 52% to 47%.
This is likely because businesses operating in the online arena realized the growth of mobile browsing and responded accordingly by implementing responsive design to meet the demand. When you partner with a branding services agency to improve your online operations, it’s imperative that you make responsive design a priority.
The Mobile-First Initiative
Consumers aren’t the only ones expecting responsive design. You and your Asheville branding and marketing team also need to appease the gods of the internet – i.e. search giant Google. If you’re at all familiar with SEO, you are no doubt well aware of the never-ending roller coaster that is Google’s search algorithms.
While the company has worked hard to weed out black hat SEO practices and deliver the best possible experience for their users over the past decade, their current crusade is the mobile-first initiative, whereby they give preferential treatment to websites using responsive design. Want to get in Google’s good graces? You’d better get with the times.
Remaining Competitive
Just because you’re not keeping up with changes to the online and mobile arenas doesn’t mean your competitors are resting on their laurels. If your website isn’t responsive at this point, you’re going to see an increasing bounce rate. Consumers expect responsive design. Where will they go? Straight to competitive brands that aren’t behind the times, if you fail to work with an Asheville internet marketing partner that can get you up to date.
Help from a Qualified Asheville Branding and Marketing Service
If you have yet to upgrade to responsive web design, you’re not alone, but you do need to get a move on if you want to remain competitive and keep customers from fleeing in droves. You can even save time and money when you implement responsive design since you’ll decrease on-site management demands and consolidate monitoring and tracking needs.
When you partner with a talented and reliable branding services agency like Storypowered to keep your digital efforts on point, you have a much better chance to achieve the audience response and the conversions you crave.