Another most important factor for any business is to improve customer engagements, which is absolutely necessary for the corporate sector. These days the customers are more accustomed to looking up online rather visiting businesses. Everyone is busy, people have less time, and they need a solution as quickly as possible. That is why everyone first look up in the internet then decide to visit the business or in some cases people also prefer an entire online customer journey and a digital customer interaction. The corporate sector in Dubai and all around the UAE is actively seeking ways to keep up with the changing market trends. The digital interaction or online experience is becoming more important day by day. In fact a lot many businesses have started offering their products and services online via their websites or by other digital channels. In this blog we will discuss the key factors that can help corporate sector to enhance their brand image by making changes or updating their web design only.

1. Make a Good Plan for Customer Journey

As the saying goes, ‘“If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail” (Benjamin Franklin). Usually corporate sector websites lag functionality and aesthetics. Mostly businesses use their website as an online corporate profile, rather a tool that can add value to both the business and its customers as well. One of the most important job that a website can do is to provide information. Whoever is searching online will be usually at the discovery phase, it is important that the businesses prepare their web designs in a way to provide relevant information in a proper sequence that can take the user from information gathering to convincing them to convert or make a call to your business. That is what is called customer journey. It is important to map the customer journey. The simplest way is to ask yourself the following questions:

• What kind of information they would be looking for?
• Which pages would they going to visit more?
• What content you should provide to build their interest?
• What are your strengths and value propositions?
• What would be the CTA (Call to Action)?
• What info do you need for online form or contact form?

That is how the user experience and customer journey should be planned. Moreover you can take suggestions from your customers, sales staff, customer service staff and the management to make a plan for the user experience and user journey. It is also important to have a plan for the mobile user experience. As the mobile based internet searches have already surpassed the regular internet searches from PCs/Laptops, so it is important to offer a great mobile journeyas well. The content is also extremely important. The pictures, graphics, text, links and multimedia content should be used to project value proposition, provide information and help visitors to get the answers of their questions.

2. Simplify the User Interface and User Experience

Everyone prefer a simple and easy solution to their problem. The websites are very different than the actual businesses, in the actual business the staff and human interaction can help simplifying the customer experience and customer journey. However, in case of a website there is no human assistance available, all that is available is the content, graphics, multimedia, pictures and interactive features of the web page. The corporate sector in UAE is very competitive, the customers have a lot many options available, if your customer journey, user interface or conversion process is difficult or sophisticated, then the users will definitely seek other options. The most common mistake businesses made with their web design is focusing a lot on aesthetic and not paying much attention to the functionality and usability. Along with that, businesses also don’t pay much attention on the loading speed of the web pages, which can significantly impact user experience. These all things are equally important. The web design should look great, the loading speed should have to be fast, the web page should also offer features that simplify the user interaction and make it easier for them to navigate through the content and other pages of the website.

Sometimes some design elements can distract users from the value proposition or the actual message you want to communicate with your web design. It is also important to avoid too many animated effects and micro interaction, certain design elements should be responsive but too much of that will confuse the users and will distract them from the original message of the page. The white spaces and color pallets that are used should be able to improve the text to design contrast ratio. The size, color and style of the fonts are extremely important, chose them carefully. It is important to focus and highlight the important text and content of the page. The textual content is very important, use medium sized paragraphs and avoid too long or consecutive text paragraphs. The text should be adequate enough to converse the message clearly and shouldn’t be too long to bore the visitors. The CTA or call to action button should be placed on easily accessible locations with contrasting colors and clear message on it. That is how the user interface of a web design can be improved which improve user experience and user journey.

3. Organize Navigation and Map Content

Navigation is the most important part of any web design. Whether it is a corporate website or an e-Commerce or informational or government website, the navigation is considered to be the backbone of the customer experience. Whoever will be coming to your website must be seeking some kind of information. For example, if you are purchasing from an e-Commerce platform then you first go to the website, or search in Google, and look up for the item you want to buy, then you go through its page read its description, scroll through the images and such things. That is all part of the page structure and navigation. Usually the navigation is interchangeable with the menus but that is not true, the menus are just a part of the entire navigation and the navigation also includes a lot many aspects. For example at homepage there is a menu with a lot of sub-menus and along with that there are several content areas or technically content widgets, which have details on a particular subject or topic only and upon clicking any one of those you will end-up reaching to their detail page. Similarly the side-pane widgets, quick links, footer links, and content links are all part of the navigation structure of a web design.

It is very important that the user who is reaching to your website’s homepage should be able to access to the internal pages through the menu, links, dedicated widgets, footer, side pane icons, etc. The standard is that a user should be able to navigate to the desired content from homepage within 3 to 5 clicks. In addition to that the homepage should have links for all the important web pages and the content. Most of the time the corporate businesses have multiple services and multiple products. Especially for the corporate sector who deals with B2B have multiple pages about a single topic/product or service. This means that these pages are forming a category, so they should be mapped together in a way that if a user lands to any of those pages he/she should be able to access the other pages within a single or two clicks. That is how the website navigation should be prepared.

4. Offer Excellent Mobile Experience and Cross Platform Compatibility

In UAE almost 95% of the population owns a mobile phone. The internet penetration is about 99%. The statics have shown that the mobile searches are more than the traditional desktop/laptop searches. This means that the mobile experience is crucial for any web design. If your website is not mobile friendly or responsive then the visitors will get a very bad impression of your businesses which will harm your corporate brand image. Responsive doesn’t only mean that your website rearrange its design elements and text and everything according to the screen size of the device. But the responsive and mobile friendly means that the website offers a great user experience on the mobile devices. The navigation and user interfaces for the mobile devices are designed slightly differently. So it is important that the website not only rearrange itself but the web design also offers a great user experience on mobile devices.

Apart from the mobile devices one very important point is to consider the cross-platform compatibility. Especially if you are offering different functionalities on your website, the cross-platform compatibility becomes even more important. The cross-platform compatibility means that the website and it’s all visuals and functions work well on all supported platforms. For example, there are two popular types of desktop and laptop computers which are Windows and MACs. For windows people use Mozilla, Chrome, Opera and Microsoft Edge browsers and for MACs the most popular browser is Safari, some also use Chrome and other browsers too. But even if someone is using same browsers on two different operating systems the web pages may respond differently. That is because of the version of the web browser. Same is also applicable for the mobile phones, as the most popular mobile phone types are Android and Apple iOS and web pages could behave differently on both and also with the variation of the web browsers. So, it is important that a website is offering a same user experience on all compatible platforms. If not the users might think that the business have a broken website or doesn’t pay much attention to its online channels which is bad for the brand image.

5. Add Trust Signals in Web Design

The trust signals have a great effect on the visitors. Whenever someone is searching for a product or a supplier they are concerned about the quality, service, pricing and everything. For example when I buy from Amazon or Noon I prefer to go for the products with 4 to 5 ratings, even if I like something if it’s rating is below 3 I will not going to buy it. Same is applicable here too. Whoever will be coming to your website from any source must be concerned. People might not specifically look for trust signals or trust markers but if you put them on prominent places people will feel better about your brand. It will improve your brand image. The term trust signal or trust market is an umbrella term it could contain a lot many things from client testimonials to the SSL certificate in the address bar, everything counts. Different businesses have different trust signals and markers and can use different strategies to implement them.

Product or service rating, client testimonials and social media integration are a few of the most basic trust signals. There are other trust markers too such as having an SSL certificate which often showed as a padlock in the address bar shows the users that this website is encrypted and safe from viruses and bugs. The social media profiles can be linked and integrated within the web design to show your recent social media activates, posts, comments, pols, etc. The links of the social media profiles and pages are also good. Moreover the name and logos of the business partners and customers could also help gaining the trust of the visitor. The about section along with management or team details is also a good trust signal. Similarly there are tons of things that can be added in the web design to gain more trust from the visitors.

6. SEO

The SEO or search engine optimization is a great tool to boost online conversions and it is also a great strategy to generate organic (free) traffic. The Google is a leading search engine with occupying almost 92% of the search market share and almost 98% of the UAE search market share. The SEO means implementing technical and non-technical strategies on the website to make them friendly towards the users and the search engines. The search engines read the website and then analyze it with their algorithms and artificial intelligence, then they index them in a log. Whenever someone tries searching for something, the search engine pull out the saved pages and provide them to the users. Some design techniques and technologies doesn’t support search engines and are not compatible with the search engine guidelines.  Which makes it difficult to read from the web pages or even impossible for the search engine to index such pages. That is why it is important that the web design you are building is SEO friendly and is built to meet all the standard by the search engine.

The SEO is also a great source for generating organic traffic. The organic traffic is absolutely free. The statistical data have shown that the corporate sector businesses can easily generate a handsome amount of free organic website traffic. The SEO is also a long term strategy which makes it even more important. Studies have shown that for any healthy digital marketing campaign the SEO alone should be countered for the 60% to 70% of the website traffic for any business website. Another huge impact of an effective SEO strategy and SEO friendly web design is that when someone search for any product or service in the search engine (Google, Yahoo, BING, etc.) and your company website appears in the first results, the user will get a very positive impression for that and it provide your more chances to amplify this impression through the web design, content and user interface. It improves brand image and brand reputation.

Conclusion

The corporate sector in Dubai and all around the UAE is having a lot of challenges, one of them is the competitive market and the high standards of the customers. There are several factors that influence the market trends however, the brand image and brand reputation is a key factor to gain trust from the customers. If a business doesn’t have an excellent brand image, they might not be able to compete. These days the digital brand presence is very important for the corporate sector. The website is considered to be the backbone of the digital strategy. Making certain improvement in your website alone can significantly improve your brand image. As for the digital communication and marketing channels, mostly the audience and prospects converge at the business website, so it is extremely important to portray a good brand image from the corporate website. If a business follow the above mentioned strategy they can easily improve their brand identity and brand image. RSI Concepts is a leading digital marketing and branding agency with a dedicated website designing and development department. If you want to learn more about the topic or want our help to improve your brand image, feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.

Check out this blog: How the e-Commerce Businesses can Grow in 2022

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