Izzy James
Digital Marketing
When designing, creating, and owning a website, we all know how important the look of the site is, and that we need to prioritise marketing to bring in visitors. But how about once those visitors are actually on the site, and interested? It’s crucially important to think about the customer journey and how you want visitors to travel through your website – ultimately you want your visitors to do something, so you need to create a journey that will lead them to that action.
This blog will discuss all aspects of the customer journey, from targeting your audience to getting them to move around your website how you want them to.
Why you should look into your customer journey
Before designing and creating your website, your first step can be to investigate and map out your customer journey and how your website design can impact this. This is an important step that many people forget about but can help determine how your customers will move across your website and how you direct them to the actions you want them to take.
A customer journey map can include elements such as:
- What pages people visit and in what order
- The steps customers take to achieve their desired results
- Which aspects of your site are most popular and which are not
- Problems customers may be facing on your site
This stage often takes the form of a ‘wireframe’. This is a basic layout of a website, showing where your menu, top banner and content will go, for example. You will need to consider where you place your Call To Action points to convert visitors, and if all the pages in your website structure flow well and deliver all the information needed before a conversion point.
How to appeal to your audience
Before learning how to appeal to your specific audience, you must work out who your target audience is and understand what actions they may take across your website. You can do this by looking at previous campaigns for your business and who they reached and received conversions from. If you are just starting out, you can undertake competitor research to see who is interested and converting within your industry. Make sure to look out for customers’ genders, ages and the types of lifestyles they run.
For both new and established businesses, drawing up your ‘Buyer Personas’ could be a foundation for this, working out the exact demographics, industry, attitudes and needs of your target customers.
Once you have figured out your target audience, you can begin designing your website to appeal to them and appeal to their needs. If you offer some IT software or service for example and audience is non-technical, your website needs to take them on a journey of hand-holding and explaining, before converting them to an ‘advice call’ or something similar. If your audience is technical, you might take them on a journey of providing detailed specs and downloadables, case studies, and then a conversion point that involves a ‘demo’ or a downloadable trial.
Track, Assess & Trial
After building an initial attempt at your ideal customer journey, you need to ensure you’re tracking its success and results.
You can track final Goals (such as phoning you, submitting a form, download a PDF, etc) in Google Analytics. Then to track the journey itself, you can use a combination of Google Analytics to track page views, and software such as Bing Clarity or Hotjar to track click locations. This means that on a page, you can see exactly where someone clicked on the page (even if they clicked a part of the page that isn’t a link). This shows you where people are most likely to flow through your pages, and where they might get confused and not realise a link is accessible, or how to navigate through a part of the page.
You can then go back to the beginning of the process, armed with your end goals, assessment of your customer journey so far and problem areas. This will give you the information you need to improve the journey on your site for maximum visitor retention and conversions.
Here at Daneswood, we can offer the best advice about your website design or even create and design your whole website. If you want any more information on what was mentioned in this blog or on any general website enquiries, please contact us today and our team will be more than happy to help.