Elevating Your Site to Properly Reflect Your Company

Most of our clients come to us with an existing site that was great when it was released 3 or more years ago but is now old in terms of design and functionality. More importantly, it does not reflect who the company is anymore or the value it provides to its customers.

These are companies that are growing and succeeding despite the challenging times the overall business climate has faced.

Maybe this describes you:

You are a growing business and your website needs to elevate to match your level of performance and continue to stay on track as you keep growing. In the process of this growth and excitement your website has been gathering dust and slowly over time has become a disconnect for your customers. They may be coming back but, not through your website.

It’s understandable though!

You’ve been hard at work scaling your business and fostering new innovations. You, or your team, may not have had the luxury of time to come together and really discuss what your website does and to whom it serves.

Creating audience personas is a great way for not only creating a user-centric website, but also to help in communicating overall direction of the company from top-down. If nothing else, it serves as a go-to for understanding the mindset of your audience and keeping your decisions inline with their expectations.

Wikipedia has an entry for Persona (User Experience) that is pretty concise: “In user-centered design and marketing, personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way.”

Say Hello to Erin

When going through the website redesign process, it’s easy to be hyper-focused on personal design preferences and less on the content that will be presented to the user; both in presentation and composition. Without this initial focus though, it makes it difficult to understand how your website fits into your company’s overall marketing strategy.

“Who are we building this website for?”, is a good, first question to ask yourself.

The true answer though is that there are multiple audiences the website will be serving. You need to consider each of these and make sure that your website is providing value to all of these different users. If we create a persona for each of the main audiences up-front, it really aids in the website redesign process.

Creating one is easy, here are some characteristics of a persona to consider and I will reference a persona we use when creating our own content:

Name, Gender & Position: You can choose a name of your liking, ours is Erin.

Erin is a director of marketing at a growing company. She has a lot to handle and a lot of pressure to perform as the owners are looking to see the company branding strengthened and all forms of digital and traditional marketing channels leveraged more than they have been in the past.

Company : What company does your persona work for? Is it in a specific industry?

For our purposes the company can be in any industry. They could sell products online B2B or B2C, they could provide professional services in a variety of industries. They should have anywhere from 25 to 1,000 employees and have a minimum of $25 million in revenue.

Education Level & Other Characteristics: Here is where you can get into a lot of detail, beyond what I will reference here.

Erin is in her early 40’s, has a college degree and an MBA, is fairly new to this company but has a breadth of experience from larger corporations she has worked for. She is somewhat overwhelmed with the amount of work to be done as her employer has not had a strong marketing plan in place. She seeks advice and straight talk from partners that she can trust and will come through in terms of delivery and turnaround.

That’s all there is to creating basic personas!

Always Considering the Persona Through the Process

From here you can use photos or caricatures, put your persona in a presentation, or incorporate then into a slideshow for your team.

The key is to get a good sense of who these people are that you are trying to engage. We see personas developed best when engaging all key areas of your business: sales, customer experience, operations, marketing, etc.

In terms of the website redesign process, it is really helpful because it keeps the design and functionality focused where it should be: the user and the value that your deliver to them.

Whether it’s the ability for them to purchase a product or service online, easily contact an expert, submit themselves as a lead, access useful content, etc.

Throughout design and into content strategy you want to consciously put yourself in the persona’s mindset. Personas really simplify things when it comes to content strategy: provide content that is useful to your users.

Whether it’s a whitepaper, product information sheet, video, podcast or whatever, the goal is to provide value to one or more of your personas.

What would they find helpful? What challenges are they facing? What issues are important to them that they need help finding answers to? Questions like these should be driving the content you seek to provide.

Always aim to provide value, as I hope this entry has for you.