Customize your Web Design to Cater for Buyer Personas

All businesses and business processes at least seem to have one common goal – that of pleasing your customer and winning their loyalty. But in the modern, digital world where the reach is incredible, ‘customer’ is an abstract concept. Unlike mom and pop shops and other physical business outlets – you don’t really know your customers. This is where the concept of buyer personas comes in. Every business decision should be catered towards pleasing specific buyer personas – that is your ideal customer types.

When you develop personas of website visitors you tap into a powerful psychological resource to boost the usability and customer friendliness of your website with a User Centered Design approach.

What is the website customer persona for selling?

It is basically a “summary of characteristics, needs, motivations, and environment of a key user type on the website”. Simply put, personas are thumbnail descriptions of your typical customers. For each website selling a product or service, there are many users that can be broadly categorized into types with various needs.

When it comes to web design, the way your online assets look and function are key to attracting the customers you want and engage them fruitfully. Custom web design helps you create websites specifically for your set of user personas and helps you to guide them through the sales tunnel to achieve a higher rate of conversion.

Goals for Business Owners

Every website’s and business owner’s goals must be aligned to the goals of the customer. This helps you decide how to present your products to the customers. The information architecture of the website is crucial because customers generally end up on your website when they have searched for some specific keywords or have visited with the intent of purchasing. The use of visual elements and cues like icons, videos, image and infographics make the website more engaging and educative.

Some questions that help in persona development:

• What is the purpose of this site? 
• What are the user goals?
• What is the age-group of the user?
• What is the gender, highest education level, profession?
• What technological devices your person uses on a regular basis?
• What is the primary device?
• What is your user’s primary motivation in visiting your website?

Customizing Pages for Persona Types

Customizing web pages or providing specific web pages for different user types can enhance the value of your product/service for various personas. Once you have identified the personas, you can personalize content, images, offerings around these.

For example, in the hotel industry there are many types of visitors and you could create multiple web pages to cater to each – ranging from business travelers, families, newly-weds and so on. So if you are photographer for instance, some of your personas could be couples, parents-to-be, models, parents of toddlers and so on. The website UI and UX play a crucial role here and you need quality UI development services to take care of all these customized pages.

Calls to Action Fitting the Personas - Similar to the custom pages identified above, call to action boxes can be personalized for the user type. Right from what kind of images to use, the icons, and persuasive language that works for different users – you can customize these elements on your site.  Creating a roadmap and buyer journey for each customer helps because the steps and triggers involved will differ based on subtle personality differences.

One way of going about this is to use A/B testing to find the right CTA.  A/B testing helps you decide which design and copy work better for specific user groups.

SEO - Personas are of course invaluable in keyword research – right from the type of seed terms you can use to link-building and link-bait and filtering, sorting your information to decide upon the best keywords, headlines and meta description. 

Conclusion -There are many different ways to reach out to various personas. From categories/tags, blogs, case studies and other resources on your website. It is important to monitor the customer’s journey maps and change things around your website as the business grows and customer expectations change. In what other ways can you make your web pages more persona friendly? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.