20 Questions to Determine If It’s Time to Redesign Your Website, Part 2

Previously we helped you put your website to the test to identify the glaring problems in design and content that might be costing you valuable opportunities to win new customers. However, these variables really only scratch the surface when it comes to the performance of your site. If your website isn’t your number one salesman, there could be less obvious but equally insidious issues lurking beneath the surface that are killing your site’s ability to convert. If you answer “no” to any of the following questions, it’s time to seriously consider a redesign:

1. Is your site free of autoplay gimmicks and pop-ups?

If you want to alienate a visitor immediately, start playing music or have a spokesperson begin talking automatically as soon as they load the site. Uncued audio, video, animations, banners and pop-ups are completely taboo in modern website design. Don’t insult the intelligence of your users by forcing content upon them. It’s the online equivalent of having a pushy salesman pounce on them the minute they walk in the door and hound them into looking at products or services that may not be relevant to their interests at all.

2. Is the navigation intuitive?

When evaluating your website’s navigational structure, don’t look at it through the eyes of your most sophisticated, web-savvy users. Scrutinize it from the perspective of your most reluctant, technology-averse users. Are there an overwhelming number of pathways presented on the home page? Do the options offered in your top-level navigation menus correspond to specific user needs and motivations? How many layers are you asking users to dig through to find the types of information they are most likely to need? Are action buttons styled and positioned consistently so that they’re easy to identify as a user scans and scrolls through your site?

3. Does your site offer a search feature?

Sometimes visitors will arrive at your site with a very specific need or purpose in mind, especially if they are comparison shopping across multiple sites. Don’t force them to sift through layers of navigation to uncover the one piece of information they’re seeking. Provide a search feature in the global framework that lets them bypass the various menus and links and find anything and everything on your site that pertains to their particular interest, whether it lives in your brochure copy, product descriptions, blog posts or news articles.

4. Is your site compatible with small screens?

In today’s 24/7 world of business, the most useful website is the one that can be accessed anywhere, not just at a desk. As a result, it’s critically important to ensure that your site plays well with all mobile platforms and devices, including touchscreens and tablets. Pull your company’s website up on your phone. Then pull it up on your friends' phones. Then pull it up on every modern mobile OS that you can get your hands on. If you can't bring it up, browse through it, view the content and complete core functions effortlessly, then neither can your users. In order to ensure that you’re providing the best possible user experience for those on small screens, you must make sure that your site’s interface is clean and clutter-free so that you make optimal use of the available real estate to allow the most important content to take center stage. Also pay close attention to details such as the amount of time it takes to load your site via mobile networks, the size and readability of typography, the level of contrast between the text and the background, the function of menus and the “pressability” of links, buttons and navigational tabs.

5. Is your site touch-friendly?

With the explosive growth in the adoption of touch-driven smartphones and tablets, the likelihood is increasing with every passing day that customers will be traveling around your website using touching and swiping gestures rather than the clicking and scrolling action of a mouse and keyboard. To create finger-friendly navigation, all links, buttons and menus must be big, bold and obvious and have a buffer around them to allow a greater margin of error. In the world of touch, roll-overs and hover states are non-existent, so replace buttons that require users to mouse over them to get a sense of action with style enhancements that draw attention to them as action elements. Again, the only way to be confident about how your site rates on the touch-friendly scale is to put it through the paces on actual touchscreen devices. If you don’t already own such a device, borrow one or – if all else fails – make a trip to your local retailer and use the display models there. It’s worth a little legwork to ensure that you’re providing the best possible quality experience for the growing legions of touch users. Read more: Is Your Website Ready for the Tablet Revolution?

6. Is it Flash-free?

The mobile Web is officially a hostile environment when it comes to Flash. Apple’s iOS does not – and probably never will – support Flash. Android does support Flash, but the performance of Flash content on Android devices thus far has been less than ideal. If you have Flash anywhere on your site – whether it’s in the introduction, your navigation framework or video – get rid of it now, or else most mobile users will be plagued with problems. Today there are better, more lightweight and touch-friendly options available, such as HTML5 and JavaScript, that can replicate the same effects that once required Flash.

7. Is your site supported by a content management system?

Publishing unique, high-caliber content to your site on a regular basis is a crucial element of today’s marketing that is integral to helping your company conquer many key business growth objectives. The only way to achieve this efficiently and cost effectively is to have a content management system behind the scenes of your website that allows designated administrators within your own company to create and post certain content types – such as blog posts, company news, event information and press releases – within the existing framework of your site. A solid, robust content management system will make it easy and intuitive for almost any user to publish sophisticated, engaging content that includes photos or videos and follows graphical style conventions that maintain a cohesive look and feel with your site as a whole.

8. Is there a way for users to subscribe to receive updates?

It takes a lot of effort to find and entice new qualified visitors to your website, but the greatest payoff comes when you can grab these users and convince them to come back again and again. Don’t put the burden on them to remember to check in every so often to see what’s new on your site. Make sure they have the option to subscribe to receive updates either by RSS feed or email so that when you publish a new blog post or send out your next e-newsletter, you’re in their feed reader or inbox, prompting them to click through and dive into your latest content.

9. Is your site free of black-hat SEO techniques?

If your website has ever been in the hands of a less-than-reputable developer or SEO “expert,” there may be dangerous black-hat SEO tactics in play that are putting your site’s performance in organic search results in serious jeopardy. Black-hat tricks like keyword stuffing and invisible text are the crutches often employed by snake-oil SEO practitioners to artificially improve the position of a website in search engine results pages for specific terms or phrases. However, the problem is that all of these illegitimate methods are condemned by the major search engines, which are programmed to weed out and penalize imposters. While these techniques might provide a temporary boost, when they are uncovered by the search engines (and they inevitably will be), your site will be blacklisted, and you’ll be off the map completely when it comes to organic search. There’s no short-term benefit that’s worth the cost of such a great potential risk.

10. Do you have tools to track the metrics on key conversion points?

Where do visitors to your site come from? What keywords are they using to find your site? Which pages do they visit most often? Which pages might be turning them off and sending them elsewhere? How many visitors leave after viewing only one page? How long do visitors tend to spend on your site? The answers to all of these questions are critical to helping you shape your site and adapt your online marketing efforts to maximize conversions. However, unless you have the required tracking code in place in the underpinnings of your site to tie into a metrics toolset like Google Analytics, you’ll find yourself with major gaps in the information you need to make crucial decisions that affect the growth of your business.

How did your site rate?

If you’ve answered “no” to several of these questions, it’s time to move overhauling your site to the top of your business growth priorities list. By partnering with a top-notch website design firm, the initial investment required to redevelop your site to meet these criteria will be returned to you many times over in the lifetime value of the new customers you’ll be able to capture with a site that offers a powerful and engaging experience to users on any and every platform and device.

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Taking Aim: How to Identify Your Target Audience

What's your mark?

Your business – and every business – has a singular driving goal: capturing more customers and, ultimately, owning your market. Today, owning your market doesn’t require you to spend more on marketing and promoting your business than your competitors. However, it does require you to have a more efficient marketing and promotion engine in place that yields maximum return for every dollar and every hour you invest. The process of building this engine doesn’t begin with tactics; rather, it begins with identifying your target. No business – yours included – can afford to market to everyone. Of course, it’s tempting to try to reach as broad an audience as possible in the hopes that no potential customer will slip through your fingers. However, in actuality, this approach will cost you much more money and deliver far less satisfactory results because you’ll have greatly diluted your chances of reaching those whose needs you truly serve. It’s important to understand that your target audience does not encompass anyone who might possibly ever buy your products or services. Rather, your target audience is comprised of those who are most likely to buy and, therefore, become the primary focus of your marketing efforts. Identifying the right niche provides the foundation for success in all aspects of marketing and promoting your business:

• It allows you to focus your efforts on those tactics and mediums that are most effective in reaching this particular group.
• It allows you to tailor your sales message to focus on the needs and concerns that are of greatest relevancy and urgency.
• Most importantly in today’s marketplace, it allows you to build a strong community around your brand comprised of people who love what you do and happily serve as your fans and evangelists.
• And in real dollars and cents, it’s the difference between sending thousands and hundreds of thousands of postcards to achieve the same end result.

Here are the steps you should take to ensure that you’re targeting the right audience:

Segment your customer base.

Who are your customers? Of course, there are many different ways to answer this question. Often it’s easiest to begin by examining your sales data and segmenting your customers into groups based on demographic factors, including age, gender, income level, education level, marital and family status, industry and geographic location. In working though this process, you’ll likely find that a particular group or groups emerge as those who buy from you most often. This simple step can also help you identify how best to market the same product or service to different groups. Some market segments may be better reached at trade shows while others can be reached at home with a direct mail campaign.

Dig deeper.

Breaking your customer base down into groups based on basic common characteristics like gender and income is only step one. To reach and engage with these groups effectively, you’ll need to develop a deeper understanding of both their lifestyle and their motivations. Start with one of your products or services and evaluate it through the eyes of the customers that exist within each group you’ve identified. Make a list that includes every possible reason this type of customer might want this particular product or service. Maybe they are trying to solve a problem, maybe they just want to feel good about themselves or to satisfy a basic need. Going through this process will help you drill down to the specific benefits and outcomes that should be the core focus of all your future communication with this group. Secondly, think about the routines of their day-to-day lives and how this communication will be best received. Do they frequently read the paper? Do they spend a lot of time in the car listening to the radio? When searching for news and entertainment, do they turn on the television or pick up their iPad? Are they likely to be active on social media platforms and, if so, which ones? This type of analysis is essential to ensuring that you choose the right vehicles and mediums to capture their attention.

Keep digging.

At this point, you’ve established a solid foundation of knowledge about your target audience. But if you dig a little deeper, you might uncover additional information that will allow you to sharpen your approach even more. Now that you’ve segmented your market and gained an understanding of what drives your customers, see if you can identify which group or groups offer the most marketing bang for your buck. For example, of all those who are most likely to buy your products or services, which groups represent the most profitable? In the B2B world, these are usually the clients with the greatest longevity or those who utilize services with the greatest profit margin. Also, who are the customers or clients that send you the most referrals? These are your very best customers because they do the work of selling for you, so make sure you are not only reaching your existing customers who fall into this category but also others like them because they represent a group whose needs you are particularly good at serving. Finally, it would be a mistake not to examine who your competitors are targeting. This is not so that you can just copy their strategy and run with it. To the contrary, what you’re really looking for is any gaps in the market that they might be overlooking so you can swoop in and grab these underserved segments.

Put your target to the test.

Now that you’ve identified your audience, it’s time for the rubber of your marketing plan to hit the road of execution, right? Not so fast. You need to put your construct of your target audience to the test to ensure that it’s one that can sustain and grow your business. This process is often called a SWOTT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunity, threats and trends) analysis. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Are there enough people within the audience you’ve identified to support your business?
• Can they afford your product?
• Will they see a legitimate need for it?
• Where do your prices fall in regard to their expectations? Too low? Too high?
• Are there opportunities to upsell other related products or services to this group?
• How much competition already exists in the marketplace for this group?
• Are there any trends you can identify of which you should be taking advantage?

While the process of identifying your target audience may seem complex, these steps hold the keys to competing effectively in today’s marketplace. When you clearly understand who buys from you and why, only then can you find the channels they frequent and become one with your tribe. And wouldn’t you rather own your target market than merely shoot arrows into the dark, hoping one will land?

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