Asking a Small Business owner to “assume the perspective of your customer” is easier said than done. It’s not for lack of trying, but owning a small business isn’t just a job, it’s a lifestyle. And when you put that level of passion and commitment into something, your unique familiarity with it can be tough to shake.
Yet this is the simplest way to quickly optimize your website. By deeply considering your customer’s perspective and buying journey, we can make decisions that put everything in the right place for the customer to easily and quickly complete their interaction with your business and hopefully even leave a nice review.
While it’s absolutely essential to have each of these elements be part of your website, the specifics of their presentation need to be in consideration of your specific customer demographics. Most notably will be the difference between information on an online store, where the priority is to drive sales, versus a traditional brick and mortar business, where the priority is to generate in-store visits.
The must-have’s
Contact information
Much of your web traffic will be coming from customers looking to use your website as a tool to communicate with you. Whether by email, phone or in person, the information that helps them accomplish this needs to be a top priority. Placing an easily found “Contact Us” link in the top right corner of your website is never a bad move. But if your customers aren’t web savvy, consider putting your address, phone number and hours of operation right on the home page. Additionally, if your business location is a little off the beaten path, consider using a map application on your website to help people better understand your location.
Product information
This is a growing priority for small businesses online, as a huge number of searches now happen on mobile with the intent of “in the moment” product research, sometimes even in-store. This means that the more specific information you can have online about what you sell, the better. Even if you haven’t made the push to a full-ecom site, where you can take orders and transact online, it’s still important to offer info on the main lines of products your business offers.
Keeping an up-to-date and functional product catalog online can be a lot of work, but it is most certainly worthy of consideration given the potential value. This is particularly important if your demographic skews younger and more web savvy.
Business description
Give a quick, easy-to-find snapshot of your business and history available for people interested in learning a little more about you. Keep in mind, if people are looking at this part of your website, they are likely close to buying. Make sure you put in a little sales effort here to help seal the deal. Make it concise but include things like business history, location, relevant achievements and philosophy. It’s also not a bad idea to include customer testimonials if you have them.
Quick Links to social channels
Social platforms like Facebook and Instagram are all great tools to help foster a direct line of communication between your business and its biggest fans. Your website should prioritize getting those followers and likes as easy as possible from your customers by installing a quick link widget into the footer or header of your website. That way, no matter where your customer goes on the site they are always one click away from connecting with you on Social.
Content/media
It’s becoming more and more common to see small businesses feature active content strategies and it’s easy to see why:
- Content is authentic – No one likes being sold to, and content is a great way for a business to build a relationship while leaving the hard sell on the shelf.
- Content is made for local – A good content strategy can help a business establish itself as grounded in its local area through authentic stories that are for and about their community.
- Content is hyper-targeted – Based on how you answered the first three questions your website, at least a little, is likely targeting customers at a specific part of the sales funnel. Having a fully realized content strategy allows you to add balance to your site. For example, if your site is designed to drive new sales, perhaps the content can be targeted towards customer retention by adding value to those people already in the fold.
Easy content strategy win = how-to videos
These can be extremely effective and easy to produce. Plus, creating how-to videos gives you the platform to demonstrate your expertise. Double-win if it’s related to your business.
Putting it all together with design
When considering design and layout, it’s completely appropriate to look for an opportunity to infuse some of your business’s personality into your website’s look and feel. But heed this warning: design is where it’s most critical to consider the customer’s perspective. Too often small business owners create a website that works perfectly for themselves while failing to consider how it will work for their customers.
Here are three top level considerations when choosing a design.
Mobile functionality is king
This has to be top of mind at every stage of design. While most modern design templates are mobile functional, it’s worth taking second looks at the ones that do it best. And if you haven’t updated your website since the inception of the smartphone, you might want to think about a redesign.
Keep it simple
You may have noticed that this article really pushes the need for priorities. With that in mind, consider putting only the most crucial information on the home page. Your home page must include easy links to: contact info, product info and business description. After that, it becomes really dependent on your goals and objectives. But when considering the perspective of your customer, oftentimes less is more.
Build for speed
By keeping things simple and prioritizing mobile functionality you are likely also building for speed. But this point is critical enough that it’s worth repeating. Your site needs to load at warp speed! According to a study from Forrester Consulting 40% of shoppers will wait no longer than 3 seconds of load time before abandoning a retail website. As well, Google uses load time as a big factor in determining your search rank so a slow site might even be keeping customers from finding you when they look online.
Final thoughts
All in all, it’s a pretty swell time to be building a website for your business. Hosting is cost effective and secure, design templates have never looked nicer, and there is plenty of great content out there to help guide you through the process. But if you are ever curious if your website is serving you well, just follow this tip from Kevin Lao at Google: take out your phone, pull up your site and ask yourself “do you like what you see?” Now go to your closest competitor’s site and ask yourself the same question. Your answer will tell you all you need to know.
If you have questions about your website or if you need a new one but don’t know where to start, contact us today. Shopfuel is different from most every other agency; we wont charge you any huge design or development fees – instead we charge a small monthly management fee.
Instead of building you a website, handing you the keys and saying “Good Luck” we will help you daily with any updates or questions you may have in realtime.
