3 Ways to Make a Website for Your Target Market
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As entrepreneurs and small business owners, we’re proud of our self-made success—and we should be! It takes a lot of determination and grit to get to where we are.
But entrepreneurs and small business owners often thinktoo objectively when it comes to their website.
Here are three ways they miss the mark:
This is not at all what your customers want in a website, nor is it how people make decisions to purchase or revisit your business.
I’ve got three great ways to make your eCommerce site about your customers, not about you:
Empathy-based marketing has become a much-talked-about topic since COVID-19 hit. It was around before then, but it’s really gained momentum in the past six months.
Basically, empathy-based marketing means thinking like your customers, and putting yourself in their shoes. (It sounds similar to compassion, which is related to sympathy).
Here’s an example: you have a retail store that serves a wide range of age groups, and you notice that elderly people aren’t coming in as often. You thinklike one of your customers. Maybe you’re tired, or frail or extremely anxious about COVID-19 because you’re immunocompromised.
So, as an empathetic small business owner, you update your site content and create store signage for this segment of your audience. Between 8 and 9am, your store is going to open just for people over the age of 65. Everything will be sanitized, there will be free coffee and staff will be available to help people shop.
Now here’s a real-world example: when hundreds of Delta Airlines passengers had to sit for hours on runways due to extreme weather, the airline ordered hundreds of pizzas.
The passengers were in a much better mood, and I’m sure were way more likely to use Delta again or give positive feedback thanks to the extra-cheesy empathy.
Often when small business owners are building their eCommerce site, they concentrate on the design aspects they prefer.
Really liking the colour green or having a collection of already-purchased images from a stock photo site are not good reasons to make them part of your eCommerce site.
It’s all about doing the research before you make a website for your target market. It’s important to do an in-depth analysis of things like:
We can get so caught up in giving our customers lots of options, or storytelling about our brand that we don’t even realize we’ve created utter chaos!
Before you begin posting content or products, it’s crucial to map out your navigation. Adding multiple drop-down menus or tabs as you go, without a well-thought-out plan, is a recipe for disaster.
When you make a website for your target market, every image, piece of content and CTA should have a purpose.
Bold, concise headlines will draw attention, while long chunks of copy will look overwhelming. What customers want in a website is a clear path to a call-to-action to gently guide them, not randomly placed buttons.
And don’t be afraid of white space! Clean areas of white space will do wonders for your site. White space makes your copy much more readable and creates a contrast with your other elements that visitors love.
By cleaning up the clutter and guiding people towards your products or services through sensible navigation, you offer a much more enjoyable experience than hitting them with walls of copy, multiple drop-down options and muddy CTAs.
We’re not afraid of white space!
I hope this gives you a clearer idea of what customers want in a website. By truly listening to your audience with an empathetic ear, you can create a connection with your eCommerce site and products or services that will keep them coming back.
If it’s time to give your website an upgrade so it will attract the right people with the right message, hire a professional web development agency who has the understanding of how much psychology plays a role in great web design.
