Marketing and selling online with a small or home business

Getting a graphic designer having excellent color sense and good web designing skills is easy. But finding a designer who can turn your site to a winning sales site is much difficult.

If you search for a web designer on Google, you will probably get ‘45,000,000’ results in 0.12 seconds. But how many of them come with the knowledge of online sales techniques?

In fact, most advertisers and companies look for graphic designers who can design spectacular websites with animated effects. But they forget the basic objective of websites i.e. profit making.

Let’s understand when you search for a web designer, what qualities he should have:

Understanding the clients business & purpose:

All minisites head for profit making business. But, even their primary goal is different! While many minisites follow the direct selling approach of selling a product online, some collects databases of online visitors on its page, some offer membership programs, some pre-sell the product and redirect the users to another website. An expert minisite designer should clearly understand his clients online business and the purpose of the minisite he will design. Right minisite graphics is to be used as per the minisite’s purpose.

Knowing the target audience:

A good minisite designer must understand the target audience of his client. The approach of a minisite selling a Forex product will vary completely from one selling a nutrition product. Visitor profile for a dating site is completely different from an online marketing.
The page design, color, text styling and graphics will also vary keeping the target audience in mind.

Color Concept and Text Sizes:

A sharp color contrast on an object turns our eyes on it. Catchy headlines should have bright color effects but it is not right to use too many colors on a particular section.
Text sizes and the font types should be used to achieve better readability; easy understanding and proper highlight of the content. Titles and subtitles should have bigger texts from the paragraph style. Certain portions of text can be highlighted with box type borders and background colors. Bold, italic, underline and strikethrough properties of text highlight the text, so they should be used at proper places.  
Understanding the flow of a sales page:

Minisites maintain a format. It should have a natural flow of marketing conversation. After a curiosity generating headline, elaborate product introduction will catch user’s mind, followed by the advertiser’s expertise in the business. Testimonial section, pricing, discounts, guarantee and special one time offer should be placed just after that. The product selling must be backed by a guarantee or money back promise for the customer, an ‘Order Now’ button and a last impression making footer. The flow mentioned above may be customized based on different purpose but a designer must understand the sales flow and place the graphics accordingly.

Proper Placement of Minisite Graphics:

Following the flow of the sales page, a professional graphic designer will know where to place the graphics for the best result. The minisite graphics must compliment the content of the page and should add more impact to the conversion of the sales page. As for an example, a guarantee or money-back logo must be placed right after the ‘click to buy’ button, so that it gives more confidence to the customer towards a positive buying action.

Keep the above points in mind before you hire a sales page designer for your next minisite project. Remember, graphics designing is a ‘brilliant work’ but matching it with the sales process is a ‘smart work’. I believe, you will hire a smart designer, because, you are smarter than me!