Clear Website Goals

01 Aug Clear Website Goals

Defining extremely clear website goals for your website design or online marketing project is very important for your business’ online marketing efforts. If you do not take the time to research and identidy your major goals, web development projects can quickly go off the deep end and become ineffective for reaching your customers.

Defining Your Best Customer / User

The only way to start this process is by creating an empathy with the target audience that your business is serving with this project through Buyer Personas development. What are their problems, how do they feel about the issue and what are you currently doing to solve these problems for your prospects. Reach out to a few of your current clients that you have good rapport with, and who match your target demographic, and establish some real answers with a few questions or a brief survey. Jot down specifics notes from your last year selling your products or services.

• Who was your point of contact on these sales?
• What makes them different from the general public?
• Why did they eventually choose to hire or buy from your company?
• When was the best time and method of contact to reach them?
• What method did you use to finalize the sale?

How far can you break the target audience down into smaller demographic segments? It’s much easier to specifically address an online digital marketing campaign or website to a 65 year old female church volunteer than a 25-65 year old in Nashville, Tennessee. Once we get to as small a demographic definition reference point as possible, then we can begin finding out the specifics of the next steps.

What Interests and Attracts Your Users?

Once you have a fully defined demographic or researched description of the propects that you have to attract, you can begin to work out their interests and needs that will most attract them to your website.

• What drives them to search out your product or service?
• What problems do they have that are related to what your business provides?
• What hobbies, activities, and social media outlets are they involved in?

The answers to these questions (and more) usually determines what avenues an online marketer will take to reach customers and get them to see and identify with your brand.

Usability level For Users

Be sure to find out any devices or special technological concerns your target prospects might have that changes how they access media online. Do you need to keep the website very simple to make it easy for your audience to easily understand where to go next? Some users might have limited exposure to the the online medium and be turned off by modern web design or browser features. Users might be limited to specific browsers. I run into a lot of companies who are still using Windows XP with antique versions of Internet Explorer even though they are rife with security flaws and vulnerabilities. Do they have any disabilities that make using the web more difficult?

• Color Blindness
• Hearing Impairment
• ADHD
• Autism (ASD)
• Amputation or Quadraplegia

These levels of online access and browser usability can be easily overcome through specific usage of design and technology, but only if you plan for them from the start.

Let Your Developer Do Their Job

We are hired as website designers and online marketers due to our experience and specific skill sets in UX / UI / usability design, web programming, and online marketing. It doesn’t make sense to shape the advice of your hired specialist.

Let them advise you.

Listen to that advice.

Weigh the advice with specific benefits that your expertise brings to the project as the client.

If In Doubt, Test

Maybe I shouldn’t say if in doubt when it comes to testing. It makes total sense to do simple testing in most cases. It helps our team make better decisions about how to best handle calls to action (CTAs), information delivery, or marketing hooks. By gathering fully actionable data through user testing, we can make your project more concise and usable for your audience which will deliver better leads and conversions down the road. There are many A-B testing systems or tracking apps that will allow for testing and data collection. They aren’t very expensive and are key elements of the website design process.

Anything on your website project that changes visitor behavior can be A/B tested.

1. Headlines
2. Images
3. Sub headlines
4. Paragraph Text
5. Call to Action Text
6. Testimonials
7. Call to Action Button
8. Links
9. Social proof
10. Media mentions
11. Awards and badges

Once we have the data in hand, we can take the steps in our process to only use the elements with the highest conversion rate.

What is the End Goal?

Once you have defined your prospects, found their interests, and usability levels we can more easily set a few end goals that will govern how the project is created.

• Set one broader goal that defines the main goal for the project
• Set several sub-goals that are measurable and together make up the pieces needed to achieve the main goal

With this roadmap in hand, your developer will more easily be able to sculpt a solution for your online project that brings you more business.

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