It's normal for a marketing agency to include website design services with the work they perform. As a client, though, you may be wondering how the website's design will fit into larger marketing efforts. Here are four things every client should know about to get the most out of a website as a marketing tool.

1. Branding Consistency

Few things are as important as making sure that visitors instantly get that your website is part of a larger and highly unified brand. This means making sure that the logos, color schemes, and fonts that appear on packages, print advertisements, social media feeds, and other items are consistent. You don't want to have, for example, a blue color scheme for your main product's packaging only to leave visitors confused when they see red as the primary color used on the website.

2. Campaigns

If you have several differentiated products or services under your main brand, it's wise to have your website designed with subdomains that can anchor each of them. Automakers, for example, frequently use this approach. If you search in Google for the Ford Raptor, you'll find a page that's focused on that particular truck instead of the company's broader lineup. A well-conceived campaign on a website should feel like an independent web presence in its own right.

3. Marketing and Sales Funnels

Particularly when clients need to develop long-term connections with visitors, marketing and sales funnels can be very useful. This is an approach to designing a website that has one thing lead to the next thing and ultimately encourages the visitor to a specific action.

For example, your social media feed might drive a visitor to a specific article on the blog. The blog article might then include a prompt that encourages the visitor to sign up for a mailing list to receive updates about future articles. In this way, the visitors are funneled toward a set of desired actions. Likewise, less-receptive visitors are filtered out.

4. Data, Data, Data

Website design services are increasingly focused on data collection. Although visit logs have been common for decades, modern technologies are capable of much more. If you want to track how long users read pages or viewed videos, for example, that's something your analytics dashboard should make readily available to you. Similarly, most systems can now package the data into reports that can be reused in other contexts.

Learn more by contacting a local marketing agency.