Ryan VanDenabeele
Your website is the hub of your online marketing and sales, but it’s faltering. Website traffic is down, it’s not mobile friendly, conversions have flatlined, and photography is old, as a marketing professional you’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time for a website redesign. You’re about to start a project that is vital to the future growth of your company. No pressure! Before you get started though, you must answer this fundamental question. Who are you designing the site for, Mars or Venus?
Just like the famous book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, companies and customers have two very different ways of looking at things, especially the online buying experience. When it comes to redesigning a business website, you’ll need to keep both your goals and the goals of your customers at the top of your priority list. Two audiences with two different motivations, both trying to get to the same point. They just get there in different ways. Certainly sounds like a Mars and Venus situation to me!
As a marketer and the person in charge of the website redesign efforts. It’s your job to give the boss a website that improves traffic, boosts sales, and increases conversion rates. You also have to deliver a fantastic and simple user experience for your customers. If done right, you should have goals of both Mars and Venus overlapping, creating a blissful marriage in the online buying experience.
Let’s take a look at a few typical goals a business might have when it comes to a website redesign, then let’s compare them to a customer’s goals when they land on a website. You’ll see that they differ in many ways, but do have overlapping goals in a couple situations. It’s your job to put as many of these goals into the overlapping area as possible.
Business Goals for a Website Redesign
As a business, you want the website to draw in more traffic, look modern and attractive, drive sales, and be an SEO powerhouse. It needs to more just than pay for itself, it has to contribute heavily to the bottom line.
Typical business goals for a website might include:
- Strong consistent brand identity
- Large e-commerce store
- Advertising revenue streams
- Attractive to the marketing team
- Easy to complete a purchase
- Customer happiness
- High concentration of keywords
- Mobile friendly
- Lots of company information
Customer Goals for a Website
Your customer goals will differ depending on who your customers are. Different buyer personas are attracted to different colors, different language styles, different photography, and they all have different buying habits. Your website design should focus on the elements of your most important buyer personas.
Typical customers goals for a website might include:
- Solves a problem
- Delivers a need or want
- Easy to navigate
- Loads quickly
- Pleasing to their eye
- Not confusing, simple to use
- Content that relates to them
- Short quick bursts of information or bullet points
Finding the Common Ground
Obviously a business has to make a profit, so it’s goals are going to differ from that of a potential customer. The trick is to find the common ground. Businesses must look at a website redesign through the eyes of their customers, not themselves. If the customer is happy the business goals and profits will follow. Business and customer shared goals might be:
- Easy to buy
- Simple to use
Not too many shared goals in this example. The business should think about changing their Mars way of thinking and adapt to the customer’s Venusian way of thinking. This goal is to have more goals in common than not. Take a look at the example below, let’s see if the business can alter some of their goals so that they are more in line with its customers goals.
Business Adjusted Goals
- Smaller ecommerce pages = Faster load times = Lower bounce rate
- Make the site attractive to customers, not to marketing team
- Change long in-depth company information to short digestible paragraphs
Knowing your customers, or buyer personas, is crucial in a website redesign. This can’t be stressed enough. The adjustments this hypothetical business made in their redesign plan will greatly improve customer happiness, in turn helping the business’ bottom line. I guess you could say the way Martian men sometimes adapt to make the Venusian women happy. Happy wife, happy life! Same goes for website visitors.
Create a Venn diagram with your business goals in one circle and your buyer persona’s goals in the other. The shared goals should go in the overlapping segment. Those shared goals should be the focal point for your website redesign.
It’s okay to have Mars goals and Venus goals, your business and its customers should ultimately want the same thing—which is happy customers—they just take different paths to get there. You can find out more about redesigning you website based on buyer personas in this free ebook. Remember…happy customers, happy boss!
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