Today, there is a greater need for a strong online presence for businesses that want success. Being online is more than just enough.
To succeed in your construction business, having a good digital marketing strategy that includes inclusivity and accessibility is important. Like any other marketing objective you set, digital inclusion must also be a priority, like the rest. Accessibility goes beyond giving access to your content.
Take your audience as an example. If they cannot access any of your digital content – will your campaign become a successful one? The answer is no.
In this blog post, discover and learn what accessibility is and its role in a construction marketing campaign. Find out its benefits, the potential risks, and some of the best practices to achieve and make the most of it.
Accessibility in Digital Marketing
In digital marketing, accessibility is the inclusive practice of decreasing obstacles and hindrances that prevent interaction with and access to websites, content, and resources – so everyone, including people with disabilities, can access them as easily as possible.
However, many business owners today do not know about accessibility or do not have any idea how to enhance their websites. As a business owner, it will result in an untapped potential for your construction brand. So, make sure to integrate accessibility and inclusivity into your campaign strategy and find ways to make sure all users, even the handicapped ones, can fully experience your brand, receive and understand communication, and engage well with your company.
As you are about to implement accessibility to your marketing strategy, here are some of the disabilities your brand needs to take into account:
- Blindness and visual impairment
- Deafness and hearing loss
- Speech disabilities
- Physical disabilities and limited movement
- Neurological limitations
- Cognitive limitations
The Benefits of Digital Accessibility
If you are curious about how digital accessibility benefits you, take a closer look below:
1. Increased reach and audience engagement
By following standard compliance, your reach will expand, and you can engage with a bigger audience. Over time, it creates better brand awareness and boost conversions.
2. Enhanced user experience
Including accessibility features like audio descriptions and video, captions will benefit all your users and even enhance the overall user experience of your web visitors. Anyone with a positive experience on your website will stay longer, become interested in your content, and become your customer.
3. Improve credibility and trust
Having accessibility features only means your website is fully committed to giving equal access to all users. As a result, it enhances your brand’s overall reputation and establishes trust among potential construction clients.
4. Expanded market reach
When you ensure your site is accessible, you expand your reach to a bigger audience. People with disabilities make up a great portion of the population. You can access this new and undiscovered market segment by simply addressing their needs.
Doing so can increase your site’s traffic and attract more customers who might have overlooked your construction business.
5. Boost your SEO
Accessibility has so much impact on your Local SEO efforts. Search engines reward almost all accessibility features, including header tags, alt texts, video descriptions, and more. Reaping all these SEO benefits will take you a long way toward making your construction website and digital content more visible and driving many conversions in the long run.
The Potential Risks of Inaccessibility
Once again, accessibility is important. Without user-friendliness and convenience at the heart of your website designs and marketing content, your construction business will run the risk of:
- Falling to convert potential clients due to very poor user experience
- Alienating and missing out on a significantly large segment of users
- Being prosecuted and reported due to failure to comply with accessibility standards
- Fostering a poor business reputation.
A recent 2023 study from WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind) found that 93% of home pages contained WCAG 2 failures. This is not just a big portion of websites; it is almost all! Fortunately, while most websites and content today fall short in terms of digital accessibility, this only means there is just as much room for improvement.
Digital Accessibility Standards
There are three main principles when it comes to creating an accessible website. With these principles, you can easily reference and work to apply them to your digital marketing strategy.
1. Perceivable
Your visitors should be able to understand, perceive, and be aware of the information and content presented on your construction website. Perceiving does not necessarily mean seeing with one’s eyes. Take into consideration the users who have low vision. Consider these individuals alongside your main audience when creating and updating your website.
2. Operable
When your website is operatable, visitors can use every part of your site’s functionality, from exploring a page to choosing a link from the menu to playing and pausing audio and video. In general, the most operable websites are simpler to a certain extent.
3. Understandable
Every content on your website, such as your graphic and written content, must be easily understood by all your web visitors. When your website is not understandable, it limits access to those with cognitive difficulties. Make sure your website is easy to comprehend.
Best Practices for Better Digital Accessibility
Here are some of the best practices you can implement to carry out accessibility successfully to your overall marketing efforts:
1. Keep designs simple
Even normal people who do not have a disability do not want any complexity. About your web design, avoid a complex layout. Complexity makes it more difficult for people to access content. Accessible website design is primarily rooted in simplicity.
Keeping your design simple helps people access it easily and improves your SEO since search engines like Google offer higher rankings to any fast-loading website with cleaner and simpler user pathways.
2. Maintain proper color contrast ratios
Visually impaired individuals struggle so much when reading texts against specific background colors due to low contrast. The same thing goes for forms and buttons. Ensure all texts are big enough to be readable and have sufficient contrast to stand out against the background.
3. Use recognizable focus states
The colored outlines often around links, buttons, and inputs are called focus states. These outlines make it easier for those with limited mobility – or anybody who prefers keyboard navigation to determine what part of the website page they are looking for.
4. Design for screen readers
When designing, it is crucial to consider how screen readers can affect the overall user experience of your web page. For instance, if your navigation menu is right at the top of your page but at the bottom of the HTML document, the web experience for keyboard users may be more frustrating than it will be for others.
5. Audit your code
97% of the world’s top one million websites fail the basic web accessibility test. So, unless your construction website falls within the 3 percent that passes the test, you must start auditing your code to remediate the content on all your web pages, mainly for accessibility.
Also, it is highly recommended that you audit your code for compatibility purposes with the latest technologies.
6. Offer text alternatives
Every non-text item on your web page should have text alternatives, including videos, images, and audio content. This is very helpful for non-sighted people in understanding your content. Image alt text is the common approach to meet this best practice. Top marketers have highly recommended this guideline.
7. Make text content readable
This is where you should consider your potential target audience’s entire scope when drafting content. Your writing has to be comprehensible by a lot of readers, including those who just learned your website’s native language. Also, avoid highly technical jargon and regional slang regarding your content.
8. Structure your pages logically
When outlining the structure and navigation of your website, make sure to place your navigational links and pages in a way that feels more intuitive to your visitors. You can put navigation above the fold or in the page’s header or footer.
Achieve Accessibility with ConstructionMarketing.io
Ensuring your entire digital marketing and website are created with a strong emphasis on accessibility is not just valuable compliance but a smart and moral business decision.
Make sure to implement accessibility, and partnering with us can be your first step to achieving it!
At ConstructionMarketing.io, we are capable of building high-performing, accessible websites. Not only does our agency specialize in website designing and development, we also focus on SEO, Content Creation, social media, and more – all to strengthen your brand’s online presence, increase your lead acquisition, widen your reach, and boost traffic and sales!
We are a full-service digital marketing agency, and our passion for helping our clients achieve their marketing objectives is the core of everything we do.
If your website is far from being accessible to everyone, our team of experts can help you with that!
Get in touch with us today! Let’s make your brand a more welcoming place for everyone!