Think About the Customer Journey When Designing Your Website

Your website should be the backbone of your digital marketing because it forms the basis of your online presence. Everything that you do online should connect in some way to your website. Your social media profiles will link to your website. You will likely add you website to your online advertising. It is your website that will attract users from the search engines.

Not only that, but your website is where people will assess if you are the brand for them, which means that your website needs to deliver an experience that they will enjoy and embrace. While this does mean that your website needs to look great, there’s more to it than that. Your site should take them through the customer journey in a natural way. Here’s more information:

Nail Down Your Customer Journey

Do you understand the details of your customer journey? If not, you should take a step back to get to know it before you start designing your website. After all, digital marketing will only be effective if you know what the end goal is and id you have the insights needed to get you there. You need to create a detailed buyer persona, or more than one if you are trying to reach multiple market segments. You can’t map out your website design effectively if you don’t know what their journey is!

Take Some Time to Strategize

These days, it isn’t enough to simply design your website according to how it looks and then put it live once the development is complete. Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of businesses do nowadays. While it is more important to have a web presence than not, you do your brand a disservice by rushing the process. Instead, you should take the extra step to strategize and determine how the customer journey relates to your design. Known as Journey Mapping, this extra step will deliver your visitors an optimized experience that will not only make them happy, but also increase your bottom line.

Marketing, Design, and Development Working Together

It is for this reason that it is important that the marketing team, design team, and website development team all work together to create the finished product. Marketing knows what needs to happen on the site in order to please the customers. Design knows what needs to be done to best express your brand. Development knows how to tie all these elements together in order to put together the best website possible. With a little advanced planning, all three elements can collaborate to create a website that not only looks great, but best expresses the brand, and also delivers an excellent user experience that will please your audience.

If you didn’t take the time to strategize before you built your website, it is not too late. Even if your website is already live, you could strategize at any time. After you determine what needs to be done to keep your customers happy, you can have your developer go back and make the changes needed to make your site more user friendly.