Every business decision you make should revolve around your buyer personas—that is, your ideal customer profiles. What your customers need to solve their problems and alleviate their pain points should inform every aspect of your marketing strategy. Focusing on the way your website looks and functions is essential to attract the visitors you want and getting them to engage on your site. Custom web design enables you to create a website specifically for these people and to guide them through the sales funnel so they convert at a higher rate.
It matters now more than ever since overly generic or open source design templates won't be as helpful with customer targeting. In today's highly competitive over saturated market, you absolutely need to focus on targeting to create a website that will attract the right buyers.
Here's how buyer personas aid in custom web design and what to look for to help you design a relevant brand.
What Are the Pain Points of Your Buyers?
Finding pain points is really the crux of creating buyer personas. Business owners have as many problems as ordinary consumers do, and sometimes more. Running a business is never easy, and the need for specific products to help find customers or solve internal issues is always a challenge.
While buyer personas for B2C usually focus first on demographics and buying habits, understanding pain points will give you a wealth of information. A good way to find out what those pains are is to go on social media and do a hashtag search. There, you can see what businesses talk about every day.
Or, if you've had buyers before and want to gain new leads, see what their pains are and whether they're simpatico with the buyer demographics you're targeting.
Once you know the above information, you can design your site to incorporate content addressing how to solve problems. It's also an opportunity to make this part of your overall brand.
What Are the Goals of the Business Owner?
While you want to find the pain points of customers, finding what their goals are can help you decide how to present products or services on your site. Goals are frequently unique to each person or business, so you can't go by just generalities. Regardless, you can go by industry category, which gives you a good idea of the products or services people are searching for.
Information is important to buyers, so integrating this into your design is a good practice while still striving to make it entertaining. Videos and infographics are effective, educative, and introductory methods to prove you understand what those goals are. You'll add to this by demonstrating how your products make a business more profitable.
Customized Pages for Each Persona
The personas you discover aren't always going to mean a demographic with the same type of personality. You'll likely have multiple personas you'll have to cater to. One way to deal with this is to create customized web pages focusing on targeted language you know the customer will gravitate to.
In the hotel industry, for example, you could create multiple pages exclusive to business travelers, traveling families, or married couples on their honeymoons. Think about how many categories your industry could fit into and work with a designer on how many unique pages you'll have to create for different people.
Calls to Action Fitting Each Persona
Just as with custom pages above, a custom call to action is just as important for multiple personas. How you approach each customer to take action in buying something is going to differ based on sometimes subtle personality quirks.
You may have to do some A/B testing to find the right call to action. Regardless, the copy you use, and even the design of the CTA button matters in how it reaches targeted people with specific wants and needs. It’s important not to lose sight of the big picture when it comes to designing your website; it’s all about your audience.
