Why is design important to your content?

While we haven’t done an official survey, we’re willing to bet that every single marketer out there would love it if their content looked better – be that blog posts, ebooks, landing pages, or anything in between.

Well-designed content isn’t just about your marketing – it matters for your business as a whole. If you haven’t thought much about it before, here are a few stats that might just help get you on the content design bandwagon.

The font styles, sizes, and spacing you choose shouldn’t just be about brand recognition – they should also be working to ensure an enjoyable reading experience for every user.

And yet, complaints about fonts that are too small, have poor contrast against the background, or are just plain bad commonly come up in usability studies.

On the flip side, typography that is optimized can improve the reading experience, even helping them read it faster (aka allowing them to consume more of it in the limited time they spend on your site). Not only that, it can actually influence the user’s perception of the content, their emotional response to it, and how much they trust it (while, as a side benefit, boosting brand memorability).

By 2025, it’s expected that almost three quarters of internet users are expected to access the web (and your content) solely by their smartphones, so if you’re not paying attention to the reading experience on mobile devices, you’re going to be disappointing a lot of people.

As a user, there’s nothing worse than text that’s tiny to read on mobile (because it’s still scaling as if it was on desktop), paragraphs that run off the side of the screen, or features like pop-ups or gallery displays that get in the way or just don’t work at all. In fact, 40% of users named poor mobile design as the #1 reason they’d leave a site and go to a competitor’s, and 57% say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site.

The bad news is that most websites don’t automatically look great on mobile. You’ve got to specifically make sure your content design looks good on every sized screen. One way to do this is through what’s called responsive design, where a site is coded to scale down to work on any screen. Increasingly, people are starting to use mobile first design, prioritizing making sure their site is impeccable on mobile and then figuring out how to scale it up to work for desktop users.

The old saying goes “a picture says 1,000 words” but we think it should be updated to something like “a picture breaks up 1,000 words to make it a more engaging read.”

Yes, visuals in your content – including photos, charts, illustrations, icons, animation, and even videos – can help explain a concept more quickly than text. But they also break up blocks of text, give the user an extra incentive to keep scrolling, and generally make the reading experience more enjoyable. All that adds up to higher engagement: articles containing relevant images get 94% more views than those without and stories with an image every 75-100 words get twice as many shares across social media. Animation and interactive content can take it a step further – catching the eye with movement or getting the reader more involved with the content.

Most marketers don’t just create valuable content out of the goodness of their hearts – we’re guessing you ultimately would love readers to do something even more valuable on your site, like subscribing, reaching out for more info, or even purchasing your product.

Again, content marketing can provide improved conversion rates compared to brands that don’t use content, but not if you don’t guide your users to do what you want them to do. That’s why getting your CTAs right is so important. Otherwise, you’re doing lots of hard work for nothing.

We’re sure you know the value of a powerful brand. You or someone on your team has probably spent hours developing and defining every aspect of your brand. But so often, people forget to bring their visual brand into their content, opting instead for generic blog templates.

Instead, your brand ‘look and feel’ should show up at every turn, especially in your content marketing. After all, for many people this is the first introduction to your company. If, like 91% of B2B marketers, you’re using content to improve brand awareness, you’ll want to be sure your brand is evident. Even if it’s a longtime customer reading your blog, you want them to feel comfortable knowing this content is coming from a brand they trust.

We’ve gone through a lot of different elements to think about. But, perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind, is keeping your design consistent. It may sound boring, but in UI and UX circles consistency is consistently touted as a key design principle because it makes your content more intuitive and enjoyable to consume.

Consistency also makes your brand look more sophisticated – because your design isn’t all over the place.

So choose your design standards, layouts, and templates – and stick to them. This doesn’t mean you can never change your mind, but when you do, make it intentional rather than just because you forgot to use your style guide.