When clients come to Forward Motion Studios looking for a website redesign or a new website, they are often surprised by one of my first questions:
Who are your target customers and how well do you know them?
Say what?
This first question is usually followed by my second: who will be visiting your Website and what will they gain by doing so?
Say who?
One of the biggest mistakes I see from business owners is not being able to tell me who their customer is and why they need to come to their website.
Business owners seem to know what colors they prefer (not what their customers like) and what design they think they want based on their own likes and dislikes – not from any market research from their customers or potential customers.
I think it can be difficult for people to receive feedback which differs from their own – especially when it’s a creative endeavor like building a website. The process can produce strong feelings.
However, we typically don’t buy cars because they look pretty sitting on the car lot, we buy cars because of the features and benefits a certain car will bring us.
A smart business website needs to address the features and benefits for a particular customer need.
And in order to build a website for that customer, you need to know who that customer is. Right down to how old they are and what they like to buy.
A “pretty” website doesn’t automatically translate to immediate sales.
Really.
A website needs to provide for the needs of the reader viewing it: your customer. The “prettiness” is secondary.
Let me use a case in point.
Let’s say you are a hip, young 30-something business owner selling Sports Memorabilia/Fan Apparel and Souvenirs. You want a new website to bring more business into your small store in a local mall.
At first glance, you might think your best customers are teenagers that are into sports and their parents.
You might be tempted to build a visually bright and busy website to target that customer.
Here at Forward Motion Studios Web Design, we could just go ahead and build that website. I mean, if it is what our client wants – right?
But what if through questioning and research we find that this hip business owner’s best customers are actually retired men?
Wouldn’t this mean a completely different kind of website? We would want something more simple in design, easy to navigate with larger fonts.
We’d also want to watch the load time and how the site appears in older browsers, in case this particular customer doesn’t update their computer very often.
We’d build a website with this best customer in mind. We wouldn’t worry about the teenagers and their parents because they will naturally come for the products.
But we don’t want to lose hip business owner’s best customer because the website is too frustrating to use and the information they need isn’t readily available.
We want to keep them happy while attracting more customers just like them.
This is why it is important to be able to answer the question: who are your target customers and how well do you know them?
Next, we’ll want to know your budget, but I’ll save the budget discussion for another post.
Not sure of your website plan? Heather Montgomery, CEO of Forward Motion Studios is happy to walk you through the process by asking the right questions. Call us at 707-578-1390 today and let’s set an appointment to build you the right kind of business website.
Our continued success to you,
About Forward Motion Studios
Forward Motion Studios™ is a Santa Rosa Web Design company that builds, hosts and supports custom websites for businesses. This includes simple, brochure-like web pages to highly complex, software and database-driven eCommerce websites with B2B shopping carts. You can catch their Tweets at twitter/forwardmotion.
