If you have been dabbling in digital marketing for quite some time, content friction is something you have probably experienced but have only noticed now. Just like words such as website builder, domain lookup, and hosting, “friction” has become a buzzword in the content marketing industry, and it has the potential to kill your digital strategies if certain measures have not been set up for it.
What is friction anyway? Friction is anything that impedes the conversion process, whether that conversion is for building an email list or for selling products. Anything is involved in friction, from how fast the website loads, the colour scheme, the content, to the call-to-action you used. MarketingExperiments has a good definition for it, they said that it is “a psychological resistance to a given element in the sales or sign-up process.” Which basically means anything on your website can affect a visitor’s decision-making process.
It seems anything can influence them and most of it are subjective, how can you win? Well, the good news is that there is a way to reduce friction, and you can do this through A/B testing. You can focus on the following elements for your testing:
Page length
There are website where you have to scroll all the way down to be able to find what you are looking for, and there are those who just put links on the first fold so that guests can just click on the link of the page they want to go. Any of those are fine to adapt; however, there will always be people who do not want to scroll long pages and those who do.
So what you can do is check which page length does your audience prefer, a shorter one or a longer one? Additionally, test whether the number of images included in the content has an effect on the length that they prefer. In this way, you can see whether your audience can tolerate scrolling down longer pages if it is populated by well-placed images.
Content
Make sure that you are churning out good quality content. There is nothing more disappointing than a perfect website with low quality, objectionable content. Take the time to think of a catchy headline – one that does not border on being click-bait-y, but would still urge visitors to click. Your content should be relevant, informative, and even entertaining. And most importantly, do not forget about your call-to-action, whether you are asking them to subscribe to your newsletter or to buy a product.
Colour scheme
This is completely subjective because colour preferences are different for each person. However, there are colours that people can tolerate and there are those that they associate with other things. For instance, if you see the colour red, to which do you associate it with? How about blue? Purple? So you do have to test which colour scheme works.
But what if you have company colours, you might ask? Well, there is a way to edit them in a way that would be pleasing to the eyes. You cannot do anything about the logo, true, but you can still amend how the colours are used on the website.
Call-to-action
Different CTAs work for different people, and sometimes it depends on the industry. Pick which ones are the most common in your industry first. Choose one from that pile and come up with your own. Test both CTAs and see which one converts better.
These are simple ways you can reduce the friction on your website. Remember that there will always be people who will be critical of what is on your website, all we need to do is to reduce that number.
