7 Features of a Great Marketing WordPress Theme

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Researching Website Design

So, you’ve been tasked with finding a WordPress theme for your company’s website redesign that will also work well for your digital marketing efforts, huh? Starting the hunt for a good marketing WordPress theme can feel very overwhelming. There are thousands of WordPress themes available out there with any number of features and options. How do you narrow it down to just one? It’s impossible to review every single theme out there to see if it’s right for you. A good place to start is to come up with the features that will help you narrow down what you’re looking for. We’ve gone through this process ourselves for our own website and we’ve put together a list of seven features of a WordPress theme that will support your digital marketing efforts.

1) Responsive design

I can’t stress the importance of this one enough. What good is having a website as your digital marketing tool if your user can’t easily consume your content on any device? You absolutely need to make sure your WordPress theme is responsive. Otherwise, your mobile and tablet users will suffer. When you are taking a look at the theme demo, view it on your phone and tablet to make sure it looks good on those devices too.

2) A good Blog layout

Make sure the theme has a good layout for blogs. You’ll want to look for not just the blog post itself, but also a blog overview page that lists your recent blog posts. The theme should have decent styles and configurations available for the author, social sharing and commenting. While all of these blog features come out-of-the-box in WordPress, the theme should make your blog easy for the end-user to engage with your posts and browse through other posts on your site.

3) Call-to-Actions

Eye-catching CTAs are important. They need to be used throughout your site on pages and blog posts. Find a theme that has options for CTAs, ideally using shortcodes. A shortcode will allow you to place your call-to-action on any page or post on the site. Keep that forward path going right on over to that landing page or contact form. Check out our CTAs at the bottom of this page. They were created using shortcodes!

4) Forms

A big necessity. You can’t capture leads from your site without ‘em. Your theme needs to not only contain a well-styled form, but the form itself needs to be easy to create. Many themes come with easy-to-use form plugins, like Gravity Forms, which make it simple to create new forms and add to any page using a shortcode.

5) Portfolios

You want to show off what you’ve done for other clients and customers, right? A portfolio tool can be very handy for marketing to prospects who are in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. You can even use a CTA on your portfolio pages to link to your case studies.

6) Social Sharing

Many WordPress themes come with some sort of basic social sharing option, but you’ll want to pick a theme that allows for more flexibility here. After all, you need to promote your content. Your theme should allow you to promote the content you want to promote without having to hack something together.

7) Slides/Animation

If you want to make your content interesting and engaging (who wouldn’t?) and you have slides, animations, or parallax in mind, then this is a feature you won’t want to skip out on. Many themes come with slide and animation plugins, such as Slider Revolution, that integrate nicely on their homepage or subpage templates. Some even have built-in options sans plugin.

Hopefully, this info will have nudged you slightly closer to that “Aha!” moment and you feel more comfortable venturing into the WordPress theme abyss. Knowing which features you need is one piece of the puzzle. But, there are other factors you may want to consider. If you still aren’t sure which direction to go in, we’ve created a handy-dandy checklist on picking the perfect WordPress theme for your business. This checklist will help you complete the puzzle. Happy WordPress theme hunting!

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