If your company sells to a niche group of customers, such as people who eat organic tangerines, then you will want to be sure that your website is tailored to them. When it comes to designing a website for any niche, you will want to start by figuring out who your company is dealing with on a daily basis, what they care about, what they expect from your website, and what functionality the site needs in order to satisfy them. Here are some suggestions on how to make your website more appealing to a niche audience.
Know Your Customers
Effective site design starts with knowing who is going to be using it. Knowing your customers is an integral part of choosing the right design details, such as fonts, color designs, layout, and navigation. If your niche audience is senior citizens over 70, then you will want to be sure that it has large readable fonts and is simple to navigate. If your niche demographic is 18 to 25-year olds who shop on mobile phones, then you will want to be sure that your website is optimized for mobile phones.
In addition to understanding your niche’s demographics such as age, gender, location, and more, you should also find out what drives them. Find out who they are, what core values they hold, which of your competitors they regularly buy from, and what makes them loyal to a company. To paraphrase Sun Tzu in his book The Art of War, intelligence is key to any successful campaign. By learning all you can about your niche customers, you can design a website that meets their expectations.
Make Up a Dummy Customer Profile
After you have gathered information on your niche audience, then you should have enough data to make up profiles for customers who will be visiting your site. Create profiles for each sort of customer who will be using your site and pair them with likely scenarios that they may encounter. Take into account what they will be expecting when they visit your company’s website, and how easy it is for them to navigate to what they are looking for in that visit.
Next, decide what your company’s goals are when a customer visits your website based on the profile. How can you guide them to the action you want them to take? Do you only care about conversions or do you want also to build your brand? Knowing what your niche customer’s want and what your goals are for those customers will greatly benefit your website’s design.
Benchmark
If you have a competitor in your field who is particularly successful in getting conversions on their website or driving customer’s into retail locations, it would be wise to examine their website. When you size up your competitors, you can gain valuable insight into where your organization stands by comparison. Examine their websites to see what they have in common.
This practice will give you a clear idea of what sort of website features are successful and what is not. Carefully inspect its usability, design, content, layout, navigation, and how the sites are optimized. As you perform reconnaissance on competitors’ websites, you note their strengths and weaknesses and incorporate that knowledge into designing a better website.
Design Layout and Content with the Niche Customer in Mind
You will want to be sure that your layout uses colors that are in line with your branding style guide but also uses colors that have certain psychological effects on the customer. Research what colors influence moods and use those to help guide your customer to what you want. Content should be specific to the niche you are trying to reach.
If your niche customers are medical professionals than using exact medical terminology and jargon would be a good idea. If your niche is more laid back than a group of professionals, then use a conversational style in your content. Use images that are relevant to your niche and invoke ideas that will lead a customer to convert, but don’t use images so large the slow load times.
With a little research and forethought, you can design the ideal website for your niche audience.
Is your website working for you and your niche audience? If not, MosierData can help. Contact us here or call 863-687-0000 to find out more.