Whether you are a blogger, an ecommerce business, or even a brick and mortar business, your website is your most powerful tool. The majority of people use online search to find businesses when they need to buy products and, hopefully, they will end up on your website. When it’s designed properly, you will be able to convert those leads into paying customers and build a strong business. Unfortunately, a lot of people are failing to get the most out of their website. There are a number of reasons for this but it often comes down to mistakes made during the design process.
When designing a website, market research is crucial but people often fail to consider this. We think of market research as something you do when you are designing a new product, but it’s just as important when building a website. If you are unhappy with your current website and you feel that it’s time for an overhaul, here’s how you can incorporate market research into the design process to improve the end result.
Mapping Out The User Journey
When people enter your website, they go on a journey. They search through menus and click different pages to find whatever information they are looking for. Making sure that the journey is as easy as possible for them is key if you want them to have a good interaction with the site. From your point of view, you have a clear idea of how you want the customer to interact with the site. You know what your end goal is, whether that’s buying a product or reading your latest blog article. You also know what steps they need to take to get there. However, many people make the mistake of assuming that they know best and the customer will follow the intended journey. The thing is, the user has their own ideas about how they want to interact with the site and they may clash with your own. Finding a good balance between the two is crucial to designing a good website.
Before you can do this, you need to understand who your customers are and how they like to navigate websites. Surveying customers about their ideal website experience gives you a lot of great insights into how to design your site and create the perfect layout for them.
Incorporating Your Brand
Branding is a central element of web design that adds to the overall user experience. If you run a business, you need to make sure that the website aligns with your brand. But even if you are creating a site for blogging, you still need to develop a brand that appeals to your target audience, and that means knowing what makes them tick. Working with people like Full-Service Agency Swype Creative is so helpful here because they have an understanding of industry research and brand strategy as well as web design. Although a simple web design company can help you with the practical design elements, working with a comprehensive service that can incorporate your brand will always result in a better website. During the market research stages, you can learn more about what kind of branding resonates well with your customers and then use this for the basis of your website design.
Organizing Product Pages
When selling products online, the way that you organize your product pages makes a huge difference. You want the most relevant and popular products to appear front and centre, so customers can find exactly what they are looking for right away. The easier you make the process, the more likely people are to make a purchase. You can use sales figures to give some indication of which products are most popular once the website has been running for a while but when you are first designing it, you should rely on market research. Polling customers about your product lines and which ones they prefer will help you arrange your product pages in the right way and group things in a way that makes logical sense to the customer.
This kind of market research can also be useful when writing product descriptions too. Often, businesses write long product descriptions filled with jargon but they don’t actually provide the key information that customers want. During market research sessions, you can find out what is most important to the customer and make sure that this information is presented first. If people see a long description and none of the relevant information is there in the first few lines, they will simply leave the page without making a purchase.
Driving More Traffic To The Site
Once you’ve designed your amazing website, you need to get people to visit it. There are a lot of ways to drive traffic to your site whether it’s through social media, using paid ads, or improving SEO to encourage more organic traffic. However, you can’t develop a good strategy without doing your market research first. How can you design ads if you don’t know what kind of marketing materials your target audience connects with? How do you know which keywords to focus on if you don’t understand your customers’ browsing behaviour?
Before you can develop a good strategy for driving more traffic to your website, you need to know your customers inside out. You need to build a clear profile of your average customer and their web use habits before you can start increasing traffic in any meaningful way. If you don’t, you’ll end up wasting a lot of money on things like paid ads that don’t drive qualified leads to your site.
Market research isn’t just for designing products, it’s an integral part of the web design process. When you put market research first, you can create a website that is tailor-made for the user, meaning that their experience is better and the website performs more effectively. If you don’t do your market research, everything is based on guesswork and it’s likely that the user will be unhappy with the overall experience on your site.
