Driving traffic to your website takes a lot of persistent effort. Once they arrive on your page, you want to capture your target audience and turn them into leads. What is the secret sauce that makes one website work better for an audience segment than another?

One of the best ways to figure out whether or not your site is designed with your target audience in mind is to go through a series of steps to see how well they respond to landing pages. Ideally, your visitor will land on your page, engage in some way, and convert into a lead or customer.

What Is Meant By Design Your Website for the Audience?

Internet Live Stats estimates there are around 200 million active websites in the world. Not every site is your direct competition, but you do have to compete for attention with all the noise and other options for consumers to spend their time on.

What keeps them on your page rather than bouncing to social media or texting a friend, for example? Designing your website for your audience ensures the message is one they want to hear and makes it much more likely they’ll spend more than a few milliseconds on your site. The longer they stay, the more likely they’ll convert.

Here are some things you can do to make sure your website has your target audience in mind:

1. Get to Know Your Customer

You can’t design a site aimed at your target audience until you know who that is. Start by digging into your internal analytics. What do you already know about your average customer? What demographics show up when you use tools such as Google Analytics? Are they coming from a certain site, area or using a particular device to access your pages?

Next, dig through the calls your customer service department receives. What is the number one complaint? Have you solved the issue already or do you need to do some more work? Have customers said why they chose to buy from you or why they continue to?

Finally, send out surveys with key questions to help you better understand your audience’s needs. You might wonder what their most pressing pain point is. Ask! You won’t know unless you gather information. You can then design a site that meets their needs.

Source: https://www.melissaanddoug.com

Melissa & Doug knows from looking at internal shopping information that their site visitors are going to either look for a particular category of toy or shop by age. They offer these navigational tools to help people go directly to the section they most need.

2. Add Useful Tools

Spend time thinking about what tools would be most helpful to your target audience. What pain point drives them to seek a site like yours in the first place? If you figure out their problem, then you can decide what ways you might be able to most easily solve it for them. Offer a tool, calculator, video, or other freebies to draw them in and give them a taste of how you can make their lives better.

Did you know something as simple as adding a chatbot to your site can improve customer engagement as much as 90% via response rates? You could also offer a calculator, a free downloadable guide, or how-to videos.

Source: https://homewellfranchising.com

HomeWell is an in-home care service franchise. They have locations across most of the United States. If you want to know more about opening your own franchise, you can click on their call to action (CTA) button to explore available territories and locations or see the approximate cost of opening your own business with the HomeWell name.

3. Tell a Story

People love a good brand story. However, will yours resonate with your target audience or not? If most of your customers are younger, they may want to know what causes you stand behind or what current adventures you’re on. Other generations might prefer to hear about the lengthy history of a brand or the story behind its founding. Still, others may want to know what hardships you’ve overcome.

Find your story and tweak it so it resonates with your customers. You can always ask them which elements spoke most strongly to them.

Source: https://www.ruthstoffee.com

Ruth’s Toffee shares the story behind the company founder and an image of her making the excellent toffee the company is famous for. The treats are still handmade. You can see from the pride beaming behind her smile that she puts love and care into her concoctions.

4. Showcase Your Talents

Figure out how you can show what you offer either via videos, testimonials, or a photo gallery. If you have a lot of before and after pictures, such a task will be fairly easy. However, you still have to decide which shots your audience cares about.

You might be proudest of a commercial building you rehabbed. However, if most of your customers are residential, they won’t care much about the same image. They’ll be interested in projects similar to theirs. Think about who your typical customer is and choose the images and videos you share based on what they would like to see.

Source: http://stonevalleyproductions.com

Stone Valley Productions uses video footage to show some of the talents they bring to business videos. You see all types of shots, from aerial to live action. By showcasing their abilities in their own video, they tap into the exact audience who’s looking for what they offer.

Testing Your Website

Once you’ve incorporated the things that make a site attractive to your target audience, it’s time to test it and see what can be perfected. Use split testing and try different CTA buttons. Poll your customers and ask them if they prefer one particular landing page over another. Put yourself in your user’s shoes and keep tweaking until you hit the conversion rate you desire.

Author

Eleanor Hecks is the editor of Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.