How to Tailor Your Business Site to Potential Customers
Knowing who your customers are and what they need helps in all aspects of your business, but never more than creating a website to meet expectations.
In the early stages of your startup, you may have thrown up a design to ensure you had an online presence. As your business grows, however, you must tailor your business site perfectly to your base.
Although the number changes constantly, there are approximately 1.9 billion websites in the world. While not all are active at any given time, you still must contend with much competition for people’s attention.
If you want to keep them on your pages, you must hit all the high notes in perfect sync.
Tweaking your business website doesn’t have to take all your time or resources. You can make small changes along the way until you get the conversion rates you desire.
How Can A Business Site Be Tailored to a Customer?
Today’s businesses understand the impact of substantial online retailers such as Walmart.com and Amazon.
They’ve taken personalisation to a new level, and consumers expect brands to remember who they are and guess accurately what they want.
Fortunately, big data has also advanced, allowing websites to track customer information and suggestions based on past browsing and buying behaviour.
The better you know your customers, the easier it is to point them to the right page on your site.
You don’t have to greet every customer by name. However, there are many ways to tailor your business site to your potential customers.
Here are the steps to take your business site from blah to wow.
1 – Create Buyer Personas
You can’t offer custom content until you know who your average customer is. Start by looking at your internal customer data.
What do you already know about those who order from you frequently? What have they told your sales staff they like and dislike? Which things can you quickly change or keep?
Next, dig into the analytics of your website. Where does most of your traffic come from? How long do people stay on each page? Trace their path and the actions taken while on your site.
If you have a social media presence, you can track more details, such as their interests, gender and age. You can even try out some ads targeting different groups and see which ones respond by ordering from you.
Your final step should be to look at your competition. Whom do they seem to target? Is there any cross-over with your audience, or do they specialise in other things?
What seems to work well for them, and what can you do to stand out? You certainly don’t want to copy your competitors, but knowing what works for them helps you avoid failures and seek your success.
2 – Gather Details
The more information you have about your customer, the better you can meet their expectations. Use your landing page as an opportunity to gather detailed facts about your leads.
Offer a short form in exchange for something. Follow-up to collect additional info.
If your business site uses cookies or allows registration, you can greet repeat visitors by name and even serve up custom content that answers their questions before they ask them.
Anticipate their needs, and they’re likely to return when they have similar issues. They’ll also tell others about your helpful content.
Illuminated Integration adds a call to action (CTA) button inviting site visitors to “Tell Us About Your Project.”
Their work is customised to each project, so gathering a few details lets them create a solution for each lead.
3 – Invest in Dynamic Content
Once you have your buyer personas and know what pain points each group faces, it’s time to create content for those groups and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
It would help if you had separate landing pages for each buyer persona and each phase of the sales funnel.
For example, suppose one of your personas is a young professional female living within 25 miles of your business.
In that case, you should create content geared toward awareness and other phases of their journey, thinking about what questions they might have at each touchpoint and answering them along the way.
It’s also easier to track how well a particular campaign goes when you have separate landing pages for audience segments.
4 – Limit Categories
Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Your business has a niche, and that is where you shine. If you’re an expert on a particular topic, choose categories within that niche.
Have you ever visited a business site that seemed to cover everything, almost like a Huffington Post for shoppers?
You’re much better off sticking to four or five main categories. You can always add subcategories and sub-subcategories as needed.
Taking your options to a minimum keeps you from going off down rabbit trails your customers don’t really care about. Everything will be on point and help you create a more powerful brand reputation.
Sol’Ace breaks its furnishings into six main categories. By honing in on what is popular with their audience, they avoid adding clutter to their page.
They feature different bestselling items under each option, or people can sort by price, new items and materials.
5 – Use Beautiful Images
The only thing online customers have to go on is an image of how the product looks. If your photos aren’t crisp and from the right angles, you risk losing your leads before they make a purchase.
Look at how your competition presents its listings. What is the lighting? Are there other objects in the shot? What views is the item photographed from?
Take the time to test different images and see which ones your audience responds best to. You can even conduct some A/B testing with your visuals, changing them out to see which ones work best.
Once you have a standard, add image style rules to your writing guidelines—anyone who adds a product or works on your business site.
6 – Personalise Product Descriptions
Don’t just list a long line of bullet points with specifications for a product. Instead, write up a detailed description based on the information your customers are most likely to want.
Spend time actually testing the product and then writing the description based on how it performs, what it’s capable of, appearance and so on.
Think about the problem your customers face.
Your business site is a sales pitch to your audience. How well do your pages meet the needs of your users? Do you address their pain point and then explain the ways you can help them overcome the issue?
Marlow Pillow uses their product description page to address the problem many people have with their pillows, which is not sleeping due to discomfort.
The description claims “no more sleepless nights.” They also share some elements that make their pillow superior, such as cooling-infused memory foam and 100% vegan materials.
7 – Strive to Be Relatable
Knowing your audience covers the first step of tailoring your business site to your audience. However, you also need to figure out how to be relatable to your users.
Each person has a unique perspective based on individual experiences and family dynamics.
Once you understand the psychology behind your customers, it’s much easier to answer their concerns in a way that makes sense for them.
You can seem more relatable by using second-person language. You should also ask questions you already know the answer to, such as, “Are you worried about a fire breaking out while your family sleeps?”
It’s vital to respond to the question with your solution and a detailed description of how your product or service helps.
8 – Cover the Right Content
As you learn more about your customers, you will find many different topics you could potentially cover on your blog. However, not all content is created equal.
You want to find the topics users ask about frequently and which tie perfectly to what you can offer.
If you don’t have a solution to their question, then it isn’t the right one for you to cover at this time. Look for things you can use to point them back to your overall goal for the landing page.
Sometimes, though, you have to take a selfless approach and cover topics helpful to the customer but not particularly useful for conversions.
Perhaps you have a solution, but it is free. Such content can drive people to your pages and turn them into raving fans.
Please make sure you include a related CTA to drive them to sign up for your newsletter or check out other content you offer that does convert.
Overtime thinks about what some of their customers might find helpful and offers a free mask with any purchase when you sign up for their texts.
Your freebie can be anything from content to an ebook to a physical product. The key is to figure out what your audience segment most wants.
You might want to tie the item to purchase if giving away something of physical value. Otherwise, you risk getting a ton of signups to get the free item from people who aren’t within your buying audience.
9 – List Reviews
No matter who is in your target audience, they’ll likely check reviews before making a purchase. People trust the input of their peers far more than anything you have to say.
Make reviews a part of your business site. Integrate them into product descriptions or add a box to your home page where they can click and see what people have to say.
You might also want to ask for reviews on social media and then grab quotes to share on your site. Consider reviews one of the trust factors you most need to convince people to buy from your brand.
People don’t know you. They have no idea if you’re honest, have good customer service or will stick by what you promise.
Reviews give them a glimpse into how you’ve treated your other clients.
10 – Remain Empathetic
You may feel passionate about some political and social topics. However, you can be sure at least some of your customers disagree.
It’s best, whenever possible, to avoid topics filled with conflict. Unless it directly relates to your industry, you don’t have to push your views on anyone else.
Think about all of your audience. Is there someone a post might deeply offend? How can you phrase it in different terms, so it isn’t controversial?
If you still aren’t sure, you might want to create a focus group and see their reaction.
The business world is filled with business owners who thought they were doing something good only to lose revenue and customers over their choice of words.
Your heart can be in the right place, and you can even be morally correct, but if it drives business away, it isn’t beneficial to your site.
11 – Choose the Right E-Commerce Platform
When choosing what system you’ll deliver content on and the payment gateways your customers most want to use, you must also consider your audience.
If you notice a lot of shopping cart abandonment at the payment step, it could be due to a lack of options or high shipping costs.
Consider the look and feel of your business site. Is it intuitive to your audience? Do they respond to the layout?
You should also look at how many people use mobile devices and consider whether your website meets their needs by being responsive.
Study, Test, Repeat
Take the time to look at what works for your business site and what doesn’t. If customers don’t respond, lose those features.
If they suddenly buy more, repeat those. You should analyse your success and come up with a plan.
Once you know what you’d like to try on your site, make the changes and conduct some tests to see what creates the highest conversions or most engagement.
Repeat frequently for an ever-improving site your customers love, and you deem a success.
Author Bio: Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. She was the creative director at a digital marketing agency before becoming a full-time freelance designer. Eleanor lives in Philly with her husband and pup, Bear.
