Your target audience refers to the type of audience that you’re trying to attract. In order to attract your target audience, you must give them what they want. How do you do this? Well, the answer is by designing a website that caters to their needs and desires.
As web designers, it’s important for us to keep up with web design trends. However, it’s much more important to keep your target audience in mind when designing your website than it is to conform with the trends.
If you’re not a web designer, but rather, a business owner, it’s even more essential for you to get to know your target audience so that you understand how to cater to their needs and desires.
Your website is your opportunity to make a lasting impression that will affect your audience’s decision as to whether or not they should conduct business with you as opposed to your competitors.
It’s true that fancy bells and whistles tend to attract spectators. However, your shiny new website is of no use unless it properly appeals to the right people. Unless you have the right strategy in place, then your website will fail to deliver any tangible benefits to your business.
Identify Your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience is the first step in designing the perfect website to cater to their specific needs and deepest desires.
Ask yourself the right questions, such as:
- Who are my customers?
- What do my customers want?
- How are my products or services beneficial to my customers?
- Are my products or services something that my customers can afford?
- What separates me from my competitors?
Once you’ve answered these questions, then you must also try to identify what they don’t want or need as well. Knowing your audience’s dislikes is equally as important as knowing what they like since it can help you determine what you should include within your website.
For instance, if your target audience consists of a younger audience, then the chances are that they’re on a lower budget. So, you wouldn’t want to try and sell them something that you know they most likely can’t afford. You want to adjust your products and service pricing to agree with your target audience’s budget.
Make sure to do your research on this point, as it’s vital to the lifespan of your business. Consider your industry and the products or services that you’re selling. Understand who your typical customers are, as well as their age, gender, race, location, income, behaviors, hobbies, and their interests.
The more you understand about your customers, the better you’ll be able to create a website that will speak to them on a personal level
Create A Buyer Persona
Once you’ve properly identified your target audience, the next step is to create a buyer persona that accurately describes who your customers are. Think of some life scenarios that may reflect upon how your products and services may be best utilized.
Consider what your customers may be looking for when they visit your website, as well as how they’ll find you once they’ve made the inquiry. Also, consider what is it that you’re looking for in your customers. Are you looking to promote your products or services? Do you want to achieve more brand recognition and awareness? How about generating high-quality leads to increase your sales?
Get a clear picture of your marketing goals and users’ requirements to enable you to design an appropriate website architecture. From there, you can determine how to plan a relevant content marketing strategy to engage your readers and improve your conversion rates.
Perform Competitive Analysis
You know what they say – keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. As a business owner, you will always have a certain degree of competition. As a marketer, it’s important to keep tabs on what the competition is up to so that you can gain ideas and do what they’re doing, but better.
A little competition is healthy for a business because it keeps you on your toes. You don’t necessarily want to copy exactly what your competitors are doing, but rather, take their strategy and reconstruct it as your own.
Having a clear understanding of your competitor’s strategies will give you a clear understanding as to where your business stands on the competition spectrum.
Put Aside Personal Preferences
We’re all guilty of having personal preferences in terms of style, color scheme, patterns & textures, and design trends. It’s vital as a professional designer to put your personal preferences aside for the sake of the client.
If you’re the client and the designer, however, you should look at what’s best for the customer as opposed to what you like best. For instance, you may like bright, vibrant, and bold designs and patterns, even know your audience may view it as tacky or unappealing.
Or, perhaps you’re a sophisticated adult with an elegant, clean style who owns a children’s toy and clothing business. You may not necessarily have cartoons or animated characters plastered on your walls at home, but it’s vital that your website appeals to parents and their children so that your business can thrive.
Sometimes, keeping it simple is better than being overly complicated. It entirely depends on what your customers are more attracted to. It’s important to cater to your target audience even if the style isn’t exactly your first choice.
Design For Your Target Audience
Once you have a clear target audience in mind, you can start on designing your website for your target audience. Consider the appropriate typography, layout, and style to best accentuate your brand while appealing to your target audience.
Remember, all of these elements will directly affect how your audience interacts with your website. Getting your design elements to match your target audience’s preferences is crucial to improving your conversion rates and attracting new leads.
To design your website for your target audience, keep these following factors in mind.
A.) Choose A Color Scheme
Choosing the right color scheme for your website begins with knowing what message you’re trying to portray. According to Faber Birren, the author of Color Psychology and Color Therapy, associations with color directly affects our senses, language, and personality traits.
Color converys moods which attach themselves to feelings and our psychological make-up in an almost automatic manner. The following colors are associated with specific feelings and behaviors.
Speed – red, yellow, brown
Courage – purple, red, blue
Trust – blue, white, green
Cheapness – orange, yellow, brown
High-quality – black, blue, white
Fear – red, black, grey
Fun – orange, yellow, purple
Reliability – blue, black white
High-Tech – black, blue, grey
B.) Set Your Layout
Setting your layout typically takes a seasoned website design professional who understands the lay of the land in terms of website creation. However, if you’re more of a DIY type of person, then there are some tools that you can use to create your own website.
When doing this, make sure that your website flows naturally in which users can easily navigate through each web page without hindrance. Depending on what your target audience requires in terms of your navigation will determine how advanced your navigation should be. Some target audience require very little navigation options with easy to click buttons while others require a more sophisticated approach.
Either way, your website should be easy to navigate and responsive to all digital devices.
C.) Pick An Appropriate Font
Choose a font that is both appropriate, clear, and reflects accurately upon your brand. Don’t get too carried away with fancy fonts, as they could be difficult to read. Also, consider the font size. 11 or 12 is a good font size to use since it’s easy to read and isn’t too big or small.
D.) Create Dynamic Content
When creating content, it’s important that your text is easy to read and simple. Convey your messages in a way that resonates with the audience on a personal level without being too wordy or overly complicated in your verbiage.
Content is one of the most powerful tools that you can use to describe what your business is about. Make sure that you’re both clear and concise with the information that you present, while also using certain words and tone that engages the audience.
Remember, you want to capture your target audience’s attention within the first few sentences. Appeal to the short attention span of most online visitors. Once you’ve won them over in 10 seconds or less, then you know that you’re on the right track.
