How We Match Your Website Design With Your Target Audience

When companies go to high profile digital agencies, they often want a state-of-the-art website with award-winning web design. What they often forget is that their target customers aren’t 25-year-old digital entrepreneurs who can swiftly manoeuvre whatever functionality a website throws at them.

For your website to function as a lead generating machine, your web design needs to resonate with your target audience.

Over the last twenty years, technology has taken quantum leaps. The changes and advancements that have occurred have been extremely encompassing — forcing all age groups and demographics to adapt in their own capacity.

Let’s rewind twenty years.

Twenty years ago, tablet was a Scottish confectionary — not a tech gadget. Twenty years ago, the Amazon was a rainforest in South America, not an eCommerce giant with more world power than the British Prime Minister.

The rapid speed of technological advancements has meant that we now have a world where different demographic groups have very varying digital capabilities and needs.

There’s no one shoe fits all when it comes to websites. Every site needs to be carefully designed for the specific target audience in mind — it needs to be intuitive and provide value.

So, how do you design a website to a specific target audience? It all starts with a lot of research!

If you’re looking for a web design agency based in Glasgow, get in touch today and we’ll provide you with a ballpark estimate for what it would cost to have your new site designed and developed by Digital Impact.


Identifying Your Audience Personas

Before we start any design or development work, we do a lot of primary and secondary research to get to know your target audience.

We essentially don’t really care about the classic persona questions of where your target customer lives, what they do in their spare time, or whether they’re a dog or a cat person.

What we’re looking for is what problems they have, and how your company provides solutions. We want to know exactly how your target customers go about identifying problems and needs, how they search for solutions and what factors come into play when choosing a solution provider. We want to know what they’re looking to find on your website.

It’s easy to make up a bunch of fairly qualified assumptions about how your target customers use the web, but this is a dangerous path to go down and frankly much like shooting blind. A new website is a fairly large investment for most SMEs so if you’re going to invest in a new site, you need to make sure that the web design agency you choose is qualified to give you a proper bang for your bucks and empower your business.

At Digital Impact, our web design is always informed by data. With access to Google Analytics and a broad range of other analytical and data gathering tools, we can derive a lot of intel about who’s using a website, how they’re interacting with it and at which stages they’re encountering bumps in their user journey.

We also carry out a lot of primary research including interviews and user testing sessions to make sure that we understand how a target audience thinks, what they’re looking for and how confident they are with technology and in searching for information.


In-depth Industry Research

As well as researching your specific audience, we’ll also be deep diving into the industry you’re in. We do this to get to grips with what has worked in the past (marketing and web design-wise), how your competitors are performing and how the industry as whole designs and delivers information.

What we’re looking for here is some general information about how the industry works.

We’ll be looking at how trust is built, and how we can use this in your new web design.

We’ll be looking into how your competitors use their digital assets and to what effect.

And we’ll be looking into general digital trends in the industry.


Defining User Goals

All good design is goal based. If goals aren’t explored and defined properly, the whole web design project will set off in the wrong direction.

Through user research, we will investigate why your users are looking for information in the first place — why they are on your website.

There’s always a reason why someone is on a website. For us to be able to guide the user to a resource or landing page that provides the information they’re looking for, we first need to find out why they are there.

When defining user goals you need to remember to put things in perspective. Although your business goals and their user goals should align to a certain extent, they will likely differ slightly.

As Theodore Levitt said, people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want to buy a quarter-inch hole.


Matching Functionality and Capabilities

A website built and targeted at teenagers will likely be cataclysmically different from one targeting early pensioners.

To match website functionality with audience capability, we’ll be looking back into our early user research of questioning and observing online behaviour.

It’s crucial that the designs and user journey are a perfect fit for the target audience.

By clearly defining the digital skillset of the target audience and how they navigate the web, we can build an intuitive and informative user journey around these insights guiding them from when they first land on your website to where they ultimately want to be.


Building Your Websites User Journey

After conducting a mahoosive amount of research, the design team can start mapping and optimising your user journeys.

A user journey map is essentially the main path we want the target audience to go down from first arriving on the site to visiting key touch points and eventually converting into a customer. Or it can be a few different routes depending on who they are and what products or services they’re interested in.

This is a super useful visualisation that will help really nail down how users interact with the site so that key stages of the journey can be improved and optimised for conversions.


Ongoing Data Informed Conversion Rate Optimisation

Users change and so should a website. In reality, you should see your website much like any other asset you have. You’d expect to upgrade and improve machinery as time goes by, and you’d encourage professional development for your staff benefitting both themselves and your business. Your website is no different.

If you are not working to improve and optimise your site you will one day find it hopelessly out of date and need to reinvest in a completely new site.

If, on the other hand, you keep working to optimise user journeys for conversion and A/B test your CTAs and key design elements you can keep your site current and improve your costs per lead as you go.


Looking For A New Website Or To Revamp Your Old?

Is your website attracting traffic and converting leads or is it dead in the water?

The perfect website attracts traffic and converts visitors into happy customers. With a new site designed and developed by Digital Impact, or a redesign of your old one, we can help boost your conversion rates and increase the qualified leads you get through your website. Check our design services for more information.

About The Author: Sidse Sorensen

Digital Marketing Consultant

With a BA in Public Relations and Marketing, Sidse is our resident digital PR whizz. She holds the reigns on our client's linkbuilding campaigns, ensuring they secure elusive placements on top-tier sites.