Embracing your web presence is necessary in order to be successful, regardless of what industry you’re doing business in. Thankfully, the sophistication of the modern digital landscape places a litany of tools for doing just that at your disposal.

For most new customers, your website will be their first touchstone with your business. While this gives you the perfect opportunity to make a great first impression by precisely tailoring it to your target audience’s needs and desires, a poorly designed, unprofessional website is also the perfect way to lose potential sales. This is why it’s important to recognize the need to have your website designed around the particular customers you’re pursuing, rather than just designing for design’s sake.

The possibilities of website functionality are constantly growing in scope and scale, which means that you have a more nuanced ability than ever to optimize your website for customer conversions. However, this type of optimization requires an intricate understanding of your target audience. In the same way that you structure your business around meeting your customer’s needs, based on what they want and how they think and shop, your website needs to be structured around these same needs, along with the ways that people navigate the internet.

So with all that being said, let’s take a look at what you need to understand about your customers’ needs, and how you can translate these into design principles that propel your business to higher sales, and a more effective web presence.

What Does Your Target Audience Need?

The process behind designing a successful website has many similarities to starting a successful business. When starting and running your business, you need to intimately understand your product or service to ensure it serves the purpose you intend it to. When designing a successful website around your customer base, you need to clearly and concisely communicate this product/service understanding.

Once you understand your target audience in this way, you need to ensure that these key factors about your business are built into your website through the user experience. This will vary significantly, depending on what you need to accomplish.

• For an online retailer like Amazon, the user experience is centered on easily locating an exact product from an inventory of millions.
• For a SAAS company, like Salesforce, the user experience is centered on driving potential customers to contact a sales rep, and keep them moving through the sales funnel, using calls-to-action.
• For a less digitally-focussed operation, like a plumbing company, the user experience is centered on clearly displaying services, service areas, and contact info, so that potential leads can be converted easily into offline jobs.

As you may have gleaned from above, your user experience is closely tied to who you’re selling to, and this often breaks down along the B2B/B2C divide. In the next section, we’re going to examine a few examples of B2B and B2C websites, to show how the connection between user experience and customer base is expressed online.

Shaping Your User Experience

Creating a killer user experience that converts potential customers into sales or leads involves implanting your sales pitch in your web design and content, building a website in the same way a contractor implants the ideas in an architect’s blueprint to create a physical house. A great web design/user experience strategy must reckon with, and answer, questions like:

• What value do you deliver to your customer base?
• How does your target audience navigate a website?
• Why do your customers choose your company over competitors?
• How do you pitch your product/service? Is your pitch effective?
• Can your target customer understand your product/service?
• Does your pitch align with their needs?

Once these, among other questions, have been answered, and your web design project is completed, you must ask one final question about the final product: does your website design recognize your customers’ needs and clearly outline the value of your product/service, and encompass it all in an accessible and intuitive user experience? Let’s look at some examples of websites that answer ‘yes’ to this final question. B2B: Headset is a cannabis data, analytics, and market intelligence company helping cannabis retailers harness the power of data in a rapidly maturing industry. Along with the sleek, minimalist design commonplace among tech companies, their website offers several excellent examples of B2B user experience.

• Information is divided up by different customer segments, showing a great understanding of how each product supports different customer bases.
• Using their market intelligence, they generate and post free market intelligence reports on the best-selling products in major states (California, Nevada, Washington, etc.) to prove the value of their data.
• They also offer the opportunity, through a prominent header CTA button, to get started for free with Headset Insights Pulse, a slimmed-down version of their paid market intelligence product, to try before you buy.

B2C: Casca is an innovative sneaker company aiming to reduce the negative impacts of fast fashion through 3D-printed customization, sustainably-made leathers, and timeless designs. Their futuristic website matches their commitment to style, and creates an environment for easy online browsing, rife with examples of how they’re doing business differently in the footwear industry.

Embracing your web presence is necessary in order to be successful, regardless of what industry you’re doing business in. Thankfully, the sophistication of the modern digital landscape places a litany of tools for doing just that at your disposal.

For most new customers, your website will be their first touchstone with your business. While this gives you the perfect opportunity to make a great first impression by precisely tailoring it to your target audience’s needs and desires, a poorly designed, unprofessional website is also the perfect way to lose potential sales. This is why it’s important to recognize the need to have your website designed around the particular customers you’re pursuing, rather than just designing for design’s sake.

The possibilities of website functionality are constantly growing in scope and scale, which means that you have a more nuanced ability than ever to optimize your website for customer conversions. However, this type of optimization requires an intricate understanding of your target audience. In the same way that you structure your business around meeting your customer’s needs, based on what they want and how they think and shop, your website needs to be structured around these same needs, along with the ways that people navigate the internet.

So with all that being said, let’s take a look at what you need to understand about your customers’ needs, and how you can translate these into design principles that propel your business to higher sales, and a more effective web presence.

What Does Your Target Audience Need?

The process behind designing a successful website has many similarities to starting a successful business. When starting and running your business, you need to intimately understand your product or service to ensure it serves the purpose you intend it to. When designing a successful website around your customer base, you need to clearly and concisely communicate this product/service understanding.

Once you understand your target audience in this way, you need to ensure that these key factors about your business are built into your website through the user experience. This will vary significantly, depending on what you need to accomplish.

• For an online retailer like Amazon, the user experience is centered on easily locating an exact product from an inventory of millions.
• For a SAAS company, like Salesforce, the user experience is centered on driving potential customers to contact a sales rep, and keep them moving through the sales funnel, using calls-to-action.
• For a less digitally-focussed operation, like a plumbing company, the user experience is centered on clearly displaying services, service areas, and contact info, so that potential leads can be converted easily into offline jobs.

As you may have gleaned from above, your user experience is closely tied to who you’re selling to, and this often breaks down along the B2B/B2C divide. In the next section, we’re going to examine a few examples of B2B and B2C websites, to show how the connection between user experience and customer base is expressed online.

Shaping Your User Experience

Creating a killer user experience that converts potential customers into sales or leads involves implanting your sales pitch in your web design and content, building a website in the same way a contractor implants the ideas in an architect’s blueprint to create a physical house. A great web design/user experience strategy must reckon with, and answer, questions like:

• What value do you deliver to your customer base?
• How does your target audience navigate a website?
• Why do your customers choose your company over competitors?
• How do you pitch your product/service? Is your pitch effective?
• Can your target customer understand your product/service?
• Does your pitch align with their needs?

Once these, among other questions, have been answered, and your web design project is completed, you must ask one final question about the final product: does your website design recognize your customers’ needs and clearly outline the value of your product/service, and encompass it all in an accessible and intuitive user experience? Let’s look at some examples of websites that answer ‘yes’ to this final question.

B2B: Headset is a cannabis data, analytics, and market intelligence company helping cannabis retailers harness the power of data in a rapidly maturing industry. Along with the sleek, minimalist design commonplace among tech companies, their website offers several excellent examples of B2B user experience.

• Information is divided up by different customer segments, showing a great understanding of how each product supports different customer bases.
• Using their market intelligence, they generate and post free market intelligence reports on the best-selling products in major states (California, Nevada, Washington, etc.) to prove the value of their data.
• They also offer the opportunity, through a prominent header CTA button, to get started for free with Headset Insights Pulse, a slimmed-down version of their paid market intelligence product, to try before you buy.

B2C: Casca is an innovative sneaker company aiming to reduce the negative impacts of fast fashion through 3D-printed customization, sustainably-made leathers, and timeless designs. Their futuristic website matches their commitment to style, and creates an environment for easy online browsing, rife with examples of how they’re doing business differently in the footwear industry.

• Their front and center CTA buttons make it simple to access men’s and women’s products, guiding customers directly to their products.
• The website is full of information about the specific ways that Casca shoes are different, because they understand that this is one of the main draws to their brand, catering to a customer base that cares about this.
• Interactive tools throughout the website make checking out different colors and different styles of their footwear as simple as can be.

Could Your Web Design Better Serve Your Customer Base?

Whether you’re looking for more appealing design visuals, more gripping and informative website content, improved website functionality to serve your customer base, or all of the above, Vrrb has you covered. Contact our team of expert marketers, designers, developers, and strategists today, so we can build something awesome together.