Why is it important to design a perfect website for your target audience? It is not just because you want your customers, prospects and website visitors to have a perfect journey when surfing your website or to help them easily find and understand how your services help them overcome their challenges; it is more than that – you want your website to ‘speak your customers’ language’, the message it conveys needs to be in sync with your brand, mission, vision and industry.
Therefore, your journey of designing for a target audience starts with getting to know your audience.
Identify your target audience
This step is about getting to know your target audience, knowing who you are building a website for. In terms of demographics, you need to know their age, gender, education level, culture and in B2B cases even a business industry of a typical customer. To put it simply, the most important task here is to find out who they are.
When the above questions are answered, you are all set and ready for step 2.
Research and Analysis
When researching and analyzing your target audience, you need to ask the right questions. The most important questions here are what they like, what they do, how to speak to them. You need to know what their values are and what is a typical behavior and preferences when surfing the internet.
To successfully complete the research and analysis phase, there are some questions about your product and service as well, i.e. what the main brand elements are – in terms of colour, font, styles, etc. Simply, what is the visual side of my brand and my future website?
Don’t forget to include competitor research in this phase! Try to learn from them, but also use this chance to differentiate your product and service. Turn their weaknesses into your own opportunities. There are so many advantages you can gain with this – both content-wise and design-wise.
Planning
Having gathered valuable information from the first two phases, you are ready to start planning. Planning is about incorporating what we have learned from the first 2 phases into your new website which is an extension of your business. It is about finding out how to answer your customers’ questions, how to respond to their (business) needs and of course – how to do it within predicted timelines.
Good planning saves you time and money and, in this phase, you need to decide on your website colours, style, fonts, etc. And don’t forget the images! It is known that human eye processes images quicker than words, so choose something that will look pretty and be relevant and interesting at the same time.
Think about the hierarchy of information since it is crucial for website navigation. What do you want your visitors to notice first? Is it a call to action button or is it your portfolio or recent projects that will help them find a use case? Whatever it is, make sure it stands out.
When planning is completed, you have come up with the content for your website. And you know exactly how this content will be presented – the visual side of it and the simplicity of website navigation.
Execution
When well prepared, execution is the easiest phase of this process. Now that you know who you want to speak to, what your audience’s preferences and behavior are, how you want to speak to them and what is the first thing you want to say to them – you are ready for the final step. If you have in-house designers and developers, don’t forget to involve them as soon as planning has started. If you want to outsource this project, make sure come up with a good plan for your website. A good webdesign company will be able to advise and provide some useful tips to make your website just perfect for your target audience.
Conclusion
We have been there and done it many times. This is not just pure theory, but a practice done many times and proven with a number of happy customers we have worked with. An example of one such project is the website we designed and built for J3 Building Solutions Ltd – a perfect example of a project well researched, well planned and more than well executed.
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