Is it too late to wish you a happy new year?
Regardless – it’s a new decade! What an exciting time. You’ve wrapped up your 2019 and have big plans for your business in 2020. First on your list is probably revamping your website.
By now, you probably have a pretty good idea of what makes your website sell or the areas you need to work at to make it sell.
But wait! Ever wonder why it’s so important to have a well-designed website in the first place? I mean if your products are good then why worry? Well, here’s a quick answer to those whys!
Your Website is Your Organization’s Most Important Salesperson
If you’re a restaurant, your website can help increase bookings. If you’re a lawyer, your website can help you earn more clients. If you’re a speaker, your website can help you get more gigs. Regardless of what your business model is, your website represents you. And you would certainly want to appear the best to your customers.
The more appealing your website is, the more it works for you.
And that is what we want you to take away from this blog. “It doesn’t matter how good your product is! If it doesn’t look good, it’s simply going to waste”.
Don’t look at your website as merely a static poster for your business. Think about how you can get your website to work for you in 2020. No idea how to achieve that? Don’t worry, because we here at DxM Creative are happy to help!
So without further ado, let’s get right into it and make your website work for you!
What Does a Successful Website Design Look Like?
A website has been designed successfully if it generates more leads for you and ultimately closes sales. Your website is designed well if it can front load some of your pain for you. It fits in perfectly with your buyer journey and provides the right information to the right person at the right time.
And how should one go about achieving that?
Well, the easiest way to answer this question is to look at successful websites with similar business models to yours. Ask yourself– what makes their website more appealing than yours? I know you don’t want your website to look similar to your competitor and copying, well, always seems wrong. What you’re looking for is to find the notable edge in your website. Something that’s not only unavailable in your competitors, but also hard for them to imitate!
And the key to doing that is to have everything that your competitor has and more. So consider grabbing a paper and a pen, have your website open in of the tabs and then open all the top competitor websites and observe! All those big and small features that they have and you don’t. This will give you a pretty good area to start at and make your website excel!
How to Design a Successful Website
Besides the common benchmarking, we have plenty of other tips that can make your website stand out!
Building the Buyer Persona
The first step is to revisit your buyer personas. Who are you selling to? What do they require? What kind of services do they like? What attracts them the most? How do they like being spoken to? What are their pains?
You might feel that this is unrelated to your website and has more to do with your sales strategy. But remember, your website is also a member of your sales team! Sales strategy is where you decide what type of customers or markets you are going to target. But the next step is to make those customers know that they are the ones being targeted. Hence, it becomes important for your website to feel like home and serve the type of customers you want. Make it about them.
Understanding The Buyer Journey
Now that you have an idea who the buyer is and what your website should be like to retain that buyer, the next step involves knowing how “people” become “buyers”. This is known as The Buyer’s Journey.
The Buyer’s Journey is categorized into three stages. These are;
- The Awareness Stage
- The Consideration Stage
- The Decision Stage.
It is important for you to understand each of the stages people go through in order to really understand their behaviour. Let’s discuss these stages one by one so we can provide the perfect platform for each of them.
Awareness Stage
The awareness stage is when buyers feel the need to pursue a question. They become aware of a problem they’re facing.
Do I need a particular product or service that can add value to me? It’s the first stage where your potential buyer is born! Whether you’re an online bakery or a campaign runner, your job begins from the very moment the buyer realizes that they need what you offer.
This begins the brutal race between you and all your competitors. Every one of them is fighting to gain that potential buyer. This is where the buyers enter the Consideration phase.
Consideration Stage
In this stage, buyers have finally decided to address the question and are out there looking for the right match. Congratulations! They are near. But now what?
Now it is our job to offer exactly what the buyer needs on a platform that clearly matches their taste. Only then will the buyer consider you in favour of all the other competitors and move on to the final stage.
Decision Stage
Here is when buyers have decided what solution they are willing to take to solve their problem. So, if you have succeeded in the first two stages of your buyer’s journey then you have exactly what the buyer is looking for. Here is where all those efforts will bear fruit!
So before revamping your website, you need to closely understand each of these stages that your buyer will go through. Only then can you hope to make the roaming window shoppers into customers ready to pull their wallets out.
Rise of The Planet of Social Media
And since we’re talking about how customers behave, here is another insight DxM has noticed in its days on the internet. Nowadays, people don’t generally roam around purposelessly on the web browser. They do that on social media– research says 142 minutes a day!
It’s way easier to get people to visit your Facebook page than your website. If your business model involves selling points on social networks, where buyers can make a purchase directly from your social pages, then that’s not a problem for you. However, if you want people to visit your website, we’ve got some advice for you.
What can your users get on your website that they can’t get on your social profiles?
This can be anything from detailed information about products, free value in the form of blog posts (like this one!), product comparisons to make their decision easier, etc. Anything that intrigues people to know more about you and what you offer, or even makes their life a little bit easier!
If your website is where the Consideration phase, and then ultimately the Decision phase of buyers occurs, then these social forums are for the Awareness phase of your buyer’s journey. Your social accounts are an opportunity to build confidence, a positive perception, and engage with your users at an early stage. Your website then serves to meet these expectations when the user is ready. Your users’ journey should feel natural and seamless. Perfect synergy between your social forums and your website is the way to achieve that.
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You’ve taken the first step towards your 2020 new year’s resolution of a successful redesign.
