We have good news and bad news. The good news is your marketing campaign is on fire. Potential customers are flocking to your website in droves.
But the bad news is they leave as soon as they arrive, without converting or becoming leads.
What’s gone wrong? Well, it’s clear your website design isn’t speaking to your target audience. Although you may offer a service they desire, you’re not getting the point across in an effective way.
It’s time to start speaking their language. A website makeover could be the catalyst that nets you more conversions and fewer bounces. Here’s how to tailor your site to your customer’s needs.
1. Know Your Audience
To create a curated experience, you need to know who is looking at your content in the first place. This should overlap with the information you use in your marketing campaign. Just like your marketing strategy, it’s better to be specific.
Look beyond your target audience. While that’s a good starting place, it isn’t specialized enough to deliver the most personalized website possible.
Of course, I’m talking about search personas, also known as buyer or user personas. These types of personas are snapshots of individual users who exist in the cloud that is your target audience.
Search personas are constructed to represent real people. They will have names, income, interests, motivations, desires, and more. As you conduct customer research, you’ll discover that your target audience consists of a wide array of different people with different values.
The benefit of focusing on search personas instead of a target audience is clear. Let’s say, for example, that your company manufactures grills for middle-aged dads. To reach your target audience, you decorate the website with plaid, beards, and bad jokes.
What you’ll find is middle-aged dads are a more diverse audience than you first thought. This could even alienate some search personas who exists within the target audience. Keep in mind that’s some of their customers may not be middle-aged dads at all, and instead, their spouses or children.
2. Follow the Analytics
Before we dive into actual methods of curating your website, there’s something we should discuss first. What’s the holdup? Well, it’s possible your marketing strategy is flawed.
It can look great even when you’re targeting the wrong customers. But since the website isn’t curated for these stragglers, they will bounce right away.
The solution is to follow the analytics. Web analytics can tell you not only where your traffic is coming from, but where it’s going. If a landing page of your PPC campaign has a high bounce rate, that suggests you’re attracting the wrong kind of customer.
In general, analytics are the key to curating your website and landing those big conversions. For that reason, consider outsourcing your web analytics data for professional help.
3. How to Tailor Seamlessly
Thanks to some nifty code and file organization, you can automate much of the curation process. Some of the most successful websites such as YouTube and Twitter make use of related searches. When you watch a video or view a tweet, the website will display similar content it believes you’ll enjoy.
In this way, the website curates itself. Assuming you create blog content, you can take advantage of the same feature. For your use, it’s as simple as categorizing blog articles and displaying related ones in the sidebar.
This can lead to better visitor retention, which improves the site’s search ranking and chances of conversion.
4. Create Multiple Websites and Profiles
One search persona can be very different from another. In fact, their desires and backgrounds may make it impossible to fully curate a cohesive website that works for everyone. If you suspect this is the case, you’ve got two options to consider.
Your first is the most expensive. You could create a separate website meant to target a radically different search persona. But this option is best for large enterprises.
Instead, you can create different user profiles on your existing website. You’ve likely encountered a website that took this approach before.
It all starts with the landing page. From here, you will prompt visitors to self-select with a simple question. Once the user has chosen a profile, your site will redirect them to a curated instance for their search persona.
Visitors tend to love this approach since it gives them a degree of customization.
The marketing team loves it even more. It allows you to test and quantify your search personas. This information is invaluable for inbound marketing efforts and further site curation.
5. Segmenting Leads
Any good website will use an email newsletter to turn visitors into leads. In a very practical sense, these newsletters are an extension of your website. Your outreach methods should offer the same personalized experience as the site itself.
In fact, you can expect personalized emails to score a 15% higher click-through rate than the traditional option.
There are countless ways to curate these newsletters. Perhaps the easiest is to differentiate the sign-ups according to self-selected profiles. But more dynamic (and expensive) options are available.
Don’t Neglect Your Site
A successful business doesn’t do any one thing right — it does everything. A website is the face of your business. And for many, it’s the only source of interaction between you and your customers.
You now know how to tailor your site for your target audience. Now it’s time to give them what they want. They’ll reward you by becoming customers for life.
Are you a budding entrepreneur still trying to find your footing? Check out our Marketing or Small Business Tips sections for helpful advice.
