When you are evaluating your website, several things must happen. First, you need to ask, “What is our message?” Knowing what you want to say becomes the foundation for any website, but that foundation becomes useless without direction.
Once you have established your message, you need to ask, “Who is our audience?” The same message can be presented in a variety of ways, depending on your audience. You can create a beautiful website that meets all of the visual design tools in the book, but if it ignores your audience’s needs, you’ve failed.
Talk about who you want to reach. Ask yourself what their interests are, what they like to do, how they communicate, and how they digest information. Armed with this knowledge, you can create a website that conveys your message in a way that moves your audience to action that will increase how many prospective leads fill out your online form or an action that will increase the traffic flow of engagement.
Did you know that according to a recent Pew Research study, 97% of Americans own a cellphone of some kind? Are cellphone users part of the audience you’re targeting? Is your website mobile user-friendly? Asking yourself questions about who your potential audiences might be will help you create content geared specifically for them.
Even in this post, we didn’t start writing and hope for the best. We created personas for an audience who we thought would be interested in our product and tailored it to you. That’s just how it works. As you are aware, we didn’t get everything right because we can’t pretend to know everything about you, but we constructed a good idea and shaped our content for you.
Knowing how your audience interacts with your website now will allow you to leverage trends in your industry and identify where to improve your website’s weaknesses for mobile-friendly and usability. You can also use data trends to identify search queries made on your website and improve the type of content you create for your online audience. While there are many levels of contact with a website, you want your visitors to engage, not browse.
The first step in usability testing is to use state-of-the-art technology and tools that tell you how people interact with your website as-is. There are several methods to use to understand this interaction:
Session Replay and Screen Recording Tools:
Use free tools such as MouseFlow and HotJat to analyze, understand, and improve user experience on your website. These tools will provide your team with information to discover powerful user trends, identify, troubleshoot, and fix costly bugs that appear on your site, understand where they’re coming from, and where they go from page to page within your website.
Google Analytics:
With this tool, it allows you to track and understand your customer’s behavior, user experience, online content, device functionality, and more. Google Analytics is a highly valuable tool for any business as it gives you tangible data that you can apply to grow your audience.
Social Media Analytics:
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more offer user insights that enable your team to intimately understand the people they’re communicating with at any given time. Armed with insights, your team is better equipped to fine-tune content strategies and targeting for several components of your brand campaigns.
With an understanding of your audience and how people interact with your current website, it’s time to combine those to understand how to meet their needs. Below are some of the trends in online website usability:
The share of Americans that own a smartphone is now 85%, up from just 35% in Pew Research Center’s first survey of smartphone ownership conducted in 2011. Are all elements and components of your website readily available for mobile users?
A top priority for a website is how quickly it can load allowing users to jump from page to page without buffering. As your visitor wait, are they questioning their own Internet connection or your website? Test the page load speed of each page on your website with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Users will land on your website in more ways than one. With this information, you can plan accordingly where your money is best being spent. Do you know where your visitors are coming from when they visit your website? This process is known as channel tracking.
Know your audience. Know their needs. Use the trends in your industry to create a dynamic website that meets the needs of your audience the moment they land on the home page. Contact Marketing Addiction, if you want help with identifying your audience and increasing the number of your online sales.