Your website not only reflects your brand image and personality, but is also the most powerful marketing tool you can use to attract buyers, promote your products, and grow revenue. If designed well, your website can become your ultimate sales tool open to the world 24/7.
Achieving your business goals online calls for a solid plan. Here’s how to determine and organize your web design process in order to create a powerful sales engine.
Research and Discovery
To design a stellar website, you need to start by examining your business model. It’s imperative to evaluate your key goals, struggles, and target audiences. You have to be precise and put together in-depth information about your market positioning.
As an example of the R&D steps below, we will be using a made-up company called “West Coast Travel” offering trips and tour packages in the Florida Everglades.
Stakeholders’ comments on the current website:
What are the key executives in your organization saying about your website? Start by interviewing everyone. This is a great way to distance yourself from the project and collect opinions about the look and feel of your current site. Write down a summary of all comments.
Examples:
“Our website does not reflect our store locations”
“No mobile version”
Stakeholder’s comments on desired tone/messaging:
Note the information you hope to highlight on your corporate website. What should your website sound like?
Examples:
“West Coast Travel knows the Everglades like no other local tour company”
“Traveling with us is an adventure”
“Bring your baby aboard, our tours are family-friendly”
Stakeholders’ comments on the direction of the new site:
What is the vision you are looking to embrace?
Examples:
“Be authentic”
“Capture the experience”
“Build excitement”
Current Paint Points related to website usability:
What isn’t working right now? Which web features could you improve? Write a report about a visitor’s user experience and think of possible ways to solve problems.
Examples:
Paint Point: No UX or persona segmentation
Recommendation: Edit, reorganize, and redesign the “tours” portion of the website to make it more identifiable, more informative, and more user friendly for each audience.
After you interview everyone and compile detailed notes, you should have a pretty good understating of what is missing from your current website (your weaknesses) and what new information should be incorporated (your strengths).
Market Segmentation
Who are your buyers and what are their many personas? You need to identify your ideal customers and document their details. It’s critical to study your customers’ goals, needs, and challenges, as well as their demographic and ethnographic makeup. Each market segment should have its own profile.
Get as detailed as you possibly can. In our example with West Coast Travel, we have looked into one primary and one secondary audience below. Your company could have several primary, secondary, and maybe tertiary audiences. If this is the case, spend the time qualifying each one of those customers. One important rule is to keep the information as lean as possible. Over-complicating the process and creating too many personas with overlapping characteristics could cripple the method. In most cases, a group of 3 to 7 personas should suffice.
Once your research is complete, you will be able to craft customized content that resonates with each buyer persona, improve their online experience, and increase your conversion rate.
Example: Primary Audience 1: Florida Families
Who they are:
Young parents with kids under the age of 5
Families who like to travel and love the outdoors
Florida residents
Families with an average income of $70,000/year
What they buy:
One-hour airboat ride
Day tour in the Everglades
5 night/6 days Everglades adventure package
What we want them to know:
West Coast Travel is the oldest Tour Company in the Everglades
Safety is our priority
We offer family-friendly adventure tours
West Coast Travel has been awarded a state safety award
Part of the proceeds go towards the John Darling Wildlife Fund
What we want them to do:
Sign up for a tour
Like our Facebook page
Subscribe to our newsletter
Submit user-generated content through our site
Participate in social campaigns
Points to emphasize:
West Coast Travel is the most famous tour company in South Florida
Great value for your money
Secondary Audience 1: Single Couples
Who are they: Young couples without kids (mainly from Europe and South Africa)
What they buy:
One-hour airboat ride
What we want them to know:
West Coast Travel offers the best airboat rides
The rides are a great adventure you cannot miss
What we want them to do:
Find West Coast Travel through Google
Sign up for a ride online ahead of time
Points to emphasize:
West Coast Travel is the most famous tour company in South Florida
Great value for your money
Once you have the market segmentation down, it’s time to think of your objectives, principal competition and site must-haves.
Company Key Pillars
Take some time to analyze and prioritize your company’s core pillars. What makes you stand out? What makes you unique? This will be very useful and will help your design inspiration.
Examples:
A leader in airboat rides in the Everglades.
A family-owned company for 5 generations
Winner of consecutive state safety awards
Site Must-Haves
This is where you should summarize the needs for your presence online.
Examples:
Clear company messaging
Targeted user segmentation
Intuitive user experience
Social integration
Responsive/mobile design
Hopefully going through this detailed R&D process will help you analyze your business value proposition, key strengths, and buying personas.
Most websites tend to be all things to all people and the messaging is “corporate centric” instead of being “customer-centric”. In a world where your competition is a click away, brands should spend time tailoring their digital content to exactly what each buyer is looking for. The more relevant, the higher the chances of earning your visitors’ trust and converting them into buyers.
Ready to boost your online presence? Ask us for advice. Just say hello@edesigninteractive.com.