Great websites begin with researching your customers to learn the problems they’re facing and how you can be most valuable to relieve their problems. With an understanding of their perspective, it’s much easier to design a website that serves their needs and shows you as a business owner that’s empathetic to their needs.
Once you have answers about what people value, you can write about information that your customers will actually engage with because you’ve researched the questions they arrive with.
Customer Research
- Why is it important? Because customers see your business from a perspective you and I can’t. Their perspective is invaluable to the website design process. This is the perspective your website users will be coming from, so it’s important that we understand that perspective and design your website to the preferences of that perspective.
- How do you do it? Customer research should be as easy as asking a series of questions to your past customers:
- What situation brought you to needing X problem solved?
- What were you looking for in a problem solver?
- Were there any surprises, good or bad throughout the process?
- Start the customer research process as early as possible. Then you can write and design with clear priorities from the get-go rather than course correct later.
Example
I was creating the website for Emerald City Divorce Solutions. My first design draft included a lot of fluff like, ‘we’re here to help you through the difficult divorce process.’
I did a round of user-testing for my design draft. I sat down with someone who’d gone through a divorce and we looked over the website as I asked questions like, “Can you explain to me what this business does” and “What type of divorce client would these services be a good fit for?” I learned that my fluffy writing did nothing to help his website visitors. The questions I got from the testing session were, “What is a CDFA?” and “How is it different from a divorce attorney?” I didn’t do a good job helping them with the problems they actually arrive at the website with – (learning my options, how much will this cost, what’s involved in choosing this option?) In response, I drafted articles that answered these questions directly, I explained the divorce legal process and where professional help is valuable, and I outlined customers’ options in this industry and how to decide.
Providing content that helps customers more deeply understand their situation and options benefits business owners in return. The articles I wrote in response to my user-testing sessions are now his 2 best performing SEO pages except for the homepage:
Customer Research Into Brand Strategy
Effective branding is communication and design that’s attuned to the worries and wishes of your customers.
Customers are going to pick the business that understands their problems and presents solutions with the customers best interest in mind.
The business that more knows their customers best and communicates with empathy towards them has the winning brand.
