Entrepreneurs and professionals like you use Colorpeak's services to complete their online marketing game and expand their businesses. With modern web design, advertising and viral marketing, your story will carry on like never before.
Building an engaged social media audience is one of the most rewarding marketing tasks that your business can achieve. It’s through these channels that you build a rapport with your customers and establish trust so that when you are ready to ask for a sale, they’re ready to provide.
Here are some helpful tips to guide the process of creating engaging social media content.
Tell a Story
Social media is about storytelling, using both visual components and words. To do so effectively, you need to consider what story you’re trying to tell people about your business.
When you create a video or graphic, consider how it ties into your brand. What thoughts and emotions do you hope to invoke when you hit post? How do you want your customers to feel and respond when they see a photo?
Every good story has a beginning, middle, and end. When you write captions, start with a hook. You have one sentence to get your follower to stop scrolling and keep reading. Consider your goals for this story: are you trying to make an emotional connection or share valuable information?
Every post you create should be intentional. Focus on quality over quantity to boost your engagement.
Engaging social media
Create a Consistent Aesthetic
Creating a consistent aesthetic goes hand-in-hand with good social media content strategy creation. Your aesthetic is what creates consistency across the various social media channels while increasing brand recognition.
Your colours and tone will play a significant role when developing a brand aesthetic. For example, if your business strives to be perceived as fun, bright, and lively, your colours, photo editing, and graphics should emulate that goal. Conversely, if you’re more serious and moody, having darker images and richer colours makes sense.
Planning is key when creating a consistent aesthetic across social media channels.
Highlight Other Users
User-generated content (UGC) is when brands encourage customers to share content featuring their purchases using account tagging and hashtags. In return, the user gets featured on the brand’s page. This is a fantastic opportunity for brands to curate content without having to create it from scratch.
Sharing UGC also creates social proof, showing the audience that other people are happy with your business, thus boosting engagement.
Asking questions shifts the focus from your business to an individual on the other side of the screen. This focus encourages them to interact and share the spotlight. It generates a feeling of recognition and value. As a result, your engagement increases.
Get creative when asking questions to see what works and what doesn’t. Mix it up with topical questions, inquiries that are relevant to your core offering, and conversation starters.
Break Up Text
One of the easiest things you can do to start improving social media engagement today is to break up blocks of text. If necessary, use a line-breaking app to prevent everything from posting in one overwhelming word jumble.
You can also use emojis to intersperse visual stimulation within long-form social media content.
Cater to Your Audience
Remember that creating social media content isn’t about what you want to share; it’s about what your audience wants to see and hear. Catering to your audience will ensure that you’re providing value rather than being scrolled past every time you post an update.
Take time to analyse your insights and determine which posts perform best and why. Then, shift your efforts to incorporate similar content. If you want to continuously engage your audience, you must always be open to adapting.
Use this guide to start creating engaging social media content that gets your audience talking and your customers buying.
AS A PERSON WHO WENT FROM HAVING NO DESIGNER SKILLS TO BUILDING WEBSITES FOR A LIVING, I THINK IT’S WORTH SHARING SOME BASIC PRINCIPLES THAT HELPED ME BECOME A WORDPRESS WEB DESIGNER. TODAY I WILL TALK YOU THROUGH SOME CRITICAL SKILLS THAT ONE SHOULD DEVELOP TO BECOME A FULL-TIME WEB DESIGNER.
If you’ve ever considered becoming a web designer, but you’re not interested in learning to code, now is a great time to give it a try. Why may you ask? The answer is simple – there are so many tools that allow you to design without the back-end knowledge that you can become a WordPress web designer with a bit of imagination and some skills. But to become a successful web designer I would advise you to start with research. The reason why is because there is much more to web design than just translating your vision into a working and functional website using some software (that I will talk about as well).
WordPress Web Designer
1. Plan to become a WordPress web designer
First, to build a website you need to have an understanding of who is it for, what features are required and what are your client’s expectations. Don’t have a client yet? Perfect! You don’t want your first website, which is going to be a disaster anyway, affect your confidence. Start small. Does your mum have a hobby? That’s how I started. I had built a website where she could showcase her cat sweaters. I was not ready for e-Commerce yet to sell them to other animal lovers, but I could start with a nice portfolio showcasing her creations (and my basic WordPress web designer skills).
So, whether it’s your mum or a neighbour sit down with them and ask all the questions that you think will be important to build a website. I would discourage you from skipping this step and interviewing yourself. There are certain things you can learn only when you’re surprised. Therefore, an interaction with somebody else is the best way to do it.
We design questionnaire
The Importance of a Questionnaire
Check out our basic web design questionnaire that I used at the early stage before Colorpeak was an agency. It does not matter whether you’re a WordPress web designer or developer. If you’re building a website, then you need one. Below, I also included some additional links with other questions that may turn out handy for your project specifically. Be cautious though as too many questions will bore your client. Be accurate but don’t go overboard with three pages of questions. As part of a large marketing agency, there will come a time for fancy shmancy questions about the company’s vision or whether their solutions are better than their competitors. Now you need to know if they have a domain, what colours do they like (or hate), what is the website for and do they have content or do you need to create it.
Remember to use the questionnaire as a guide for your conversation; don’t just send it to them point blank. A discussion is a key to land a client. You will not get them through cold calling or emails. Therefore, you should practice this skill as often as you have an opportunity to do so.
Handy links for building your own Questionnaire
WEB DESIGN QUESTIONNAIRE BY TREEFROG - A simple yet effective questionnaire created by Canadian web design company. Basic questions and tick boxes make the experience of filling in the form seamless.
WEBSITE DESIGN QUESTIONNAIRE KNOW HOW - A know-how guide explaining what's important when creating a questionnaire. If you subscribe to their newsletter, you get access to the question list & ready to use form.
There is no way around technical skills development in web design. Fortunately, with WordPress, you can start without any and develop the understanding as you go. Of course, knowing HTML, CSS and JavaScript will help, but you can start without them to become WordPress web designer.
When you finally get to that stage when working on WordPress templates is not good enough, learn HTML first, then CSS and JavaScript will be the cherry on the top. HTML will take you no time; you will just need a few hours to know the basics. With CSS it will be much more, but you can do a day course learning the principles. Knowing those principles will allow you to look up specific things when you need them. JavaScript is a solid coding skill so you should have many websites in your portfolio that you are proud of before you jump into this deeper dive.
Technical skills of a web designer
But at the very beginning, the technical skills that you need as a WordPress web designer are how to set up a website on a hosting platform and install WordPress on it.
WordPress themes that speed up design process
Start your first website by using one of the WordPress free templates. This will help you learn how it works and what are the principles of working with Gutenberg design engine. To make your website look more appealing there are some themes that offer more flexibility and will allow you to be more creative. These are Divi from Elegant Themes, Elementor or Beaver Builder. You can find out the pros and cons of each one on this YouTube video.
Elementor vs Divi Builder vs Beaver Builder: Ultimate Comparison
To state the obvious, as a WordPress web designer you will need some graphic design skills. Fortunately, these days there are many free repositories that you can source images from. If you combine them with basic skills of working with Photoshop or Gimp image processing tools you are set. Also, don’t forget to go through some User Experience (UX) guides. They will teach you the principles of good web design that will help the visitor of the website enjoy the experience.
3. Marketing
When creating a website in 2019, some marketing skills are a must. A WordPress web designer won’t get away without knowing basics of copywriting and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), like keyword research and on-page optimisation. I know many people who would argue with me on that point, but I believe that a competent web designer should have this knowledge.
Content writing - copywriting is the key
You may not have to write content for your website as the client will provide it, but you need to recognise when it’s crap. It's part of your job to advise your client that they need to hire a better writer. Even better, to leave the copywriting to you (or your trusted freelance copywriter - you will find them on Fiverr and People Per Hour, although it takes few orders before you can find somebody trustworthy).
Copywriting skills of a web designer
You will also need to skilfully describe what each page is all about in between 120 and 158 characters in a page description. That requires not only copywriting skills but also some keyword research and SEO knowledge. Fortunately, there are plugins for that! For example, Yoast will not only tell you whether your meta description or page title is too short or too long but also it will score your keyword strength. It will also suggest how to correct your text to make it more readable and point the header tag structure (H1-H3) in relation to the keywords. It’s a great tool. Optimising images is also important, and you need to have tools to decrease image size to speed up page loading time. As a WordPress web designer, you need to know how to add Alt Tags and descriptions and geotag them, which helps with Local SEO.
Keyword research and why is it important
In terms of keywords, clients will often tell you what keyword they want to rank for. Nine times out of ten they will be wrong. Sometimes because the competition is too strong and sometimes because nobody searches for that keyword, so there is no point to rank for it. I have included some articles below that will give you a better grasp on keyword research. After that use Google Trends or Answer the Public tools to judge the value of your keywords.
Last but not least! In fact, wanting to learn is a major player in changing your career path to a WordPress web designer or any website designer or developer, to be frank. The web design field is vast, and there are many stages to learn about it before you can confidently say you are a competent web designer. You will need to be passionate about it and be hungry for knowledge. We live in the time where there is a YouTube or GitHub answer to every problem that you may encounter when designing a website, whether you want to change the colour of the font or animate something in JavaScript… and yes, I’m thinking about my mum’s cat presenting his favourite sweater on a catwalk….
Learning web designer skills
Conclusion
It seems like a lot, but do not feel overwhelmed. You will simply acquire all these skills while designing websites and being open to self-learning. I am a firm believer in "learning on the job" and acquiring abilities that you need to resolve problems one by one as you approach them. This is why the best way to learn WordPress web designer skills is to actually try and design some websites for fun and google your way through obstacles. So, go ahead, start now. Just register your new site on WordPress today, and tomorrow… well, the sky is the limit… OK, if you think this is cringy, then it is, but do it regardless. No postponing!
The above skills won’t make you a Frontend Web developer yet, we will get to that in another article, but it will get you started. Don’t miss the opportunity. Today is the day when you choose the path to become a WordPress web designer.
I thought I'd drop a few words about Vistag as we've tested the tool a little bit on two of our now interactive websites (not e-commerce, yet...). The first website did not work due to, what we believe was Slider Revolution interference. Vistag and Slider Revolution tandem renders our website completely unusable. Therefore, we decided to switch it off there.
Vistag.com
The second of our interactive websites, a static WordPress site, was (is) much better. We're still testing it there but performance is all good and Pingdom/GTMetrix/PageSpeed did not mark any meaningful drops in loading speed scores. Even with 10+ or so tags thrown on two web pages.
Vistag Highlights and PROs
To cut to the chase, I really like the visual presentation and interactive aspects of Vistag. Objectively looking at it - Vistag WILL make you and others hover, click, poke, fondle and (hopefully) buy-through those flashing gems. There is just no way around it given how our brains and eyes work.
However, at this point in time, Vistag isn't finished tool yet and many fundamental options are missing.
Vistag's missing features (or rather Not-There-Yets)
Some of the things we'd like to see rather sooner than later include:
"mailto:"/"tel:" and other HTML special links to enable CTA's (Call-To-Actions) for anything that is not e-commerce
images within the tags that could be fed from WP Media / external URLs
CSS selectors and more customisations
global UTM trackers
The dashboard and interface would also benefit from some conscious cleanup and re-planning for easier navigation. The User experience (UI) is a bit all over the place on the admin side.
I've also looked at this new "Lookbook" feature, which allows to add images to tags. I'm sure this is probably my pure ignorance, but I still don't get it. Again, it could be lack of my attention but how is this better or more important than just feeding and tagging pictures from WP Media or external URLs. The link on the dashboard takes me to some vague Documentation on how to make it work, but nothing else.
I've mentioned CSS customisations already but let me reiterate the fact that the default font size and colour (light-grey on a white background?) is just unreadable. To change that you need to do some CSS gymnastics on your website. But it seems to be in development now, so fingers crossed that we won't wait long for this must-have feature for interactive websites to work as intended.
Your images. Shoppable. Create visual content that sells like crazy.
Vistag - an ultimate web design enhancing tool?
At this point, I can't give it a 5-stars review because Vistag is incomplete; clearly in beta stage, and an exorcism on their bugged code is yet to be performed by the developers. However, I can confidently score this tool 4 out of 5 because this brilliant, yet simple idea serves you a ready-made link between human behaviour and computer science that you can use to your sales advantage, this very evening. And all this without the need of getting two PhDs in the respective fields trying to sweat something like that in your own basement. A fine marketing tool with great potential to make your plain web become one of truly interactive websites.
You simply install Vistag, place tags over your e-commerce images and the job of selling fidget spinners and made-in-China "what-have-you's" is done for you.
You can check Vistag on their website or, if it hasn't left the station yet, you may even jump on their AppSumo bandwagon.
Find out more about interactive websites and tools:
