Practical advice for creating an awesome digital experience for your audience.

Think customer. Think needs. Think experience.

The biggest mistake a business can make when creating a digital product, such as a new website, is to forget about the people they’re making them for.

It’s very easy to think about what you need (as a product owner) and focus on your requirements from an internal point of view. Or to have a very personal opinion on what’s best and not think about what you would need if you were the customer.

One of the most important things to remember - your customers don’t really care about your business. They care about what they’re trying to find out, what they need to do or what they’re trying to achieve. Look at Amazon for example, nobody wants to spend time on their website. They normally visit their website for a reason, and that’s because they need to purchase a product as cheaply as possible and have it delivered to their door quickly. People don’t care about Amazon, they care about getting a speedy service, with good prices and the convenience of buying what they need from the comfort of their sofa.

So if you’re embarking on a new digital project, take time to focus on your customer first. Trust us — it will save you time, money and lots of frustration later on. Figure out what your customers’ need, what journeys to take them on, and what their end goals are.

This short guide will help you to better understand your customer — improving engagement, increasing reach and ultimately getting them to the action you want them to take.

What type of people do you want to appeal to?

First things first. Get to know your customer. Find out what they really need and what they want from your business.

You probably already have an idea about who your target audience is, but how much do you really know about them? Perhaps this thinking is based on assumption, or maybe it’s from others around the business (who have had the same opinion of your customers for the past 10 years!). Customers evolve and change over time and with this, their needs move on.

Take a look at Blackberry for example, they were the founder of the mobile phone and seen as a real innovator at the time. The Blackberry was once a hugely successful business tool but failed to understand what their customers wanted, and didn’t keep up with the latest trends. Quickly, the likes of the iPhone and Android phones took over and led the way with touchscreens, apps and cameras. Blackberry failed to adapt to market needs and learnt their lesson too late.

Kodak and Blockbuster are other business examples of not adopting to customer needs. They failed to change and innovate their product when the digital camera became popular, meaning they fell significantly behind competitors. By the time they were prepared to change, it was too late.

It’s all about adaptability, and a willingness to change and evolve with your customer needs. Blackberry thought they were untouchable, Kodak thought they were safe but over time by not listening to their target audience and innovating for them, they failed.

So take some time to get to know your customers again.

You can gather insight from a variety of sources, and most customers are now online and leave a data trail on various sites and search engines. You may also have data that you’re already collecting, such as through Google Analytics on your existing website or through an active database of customers. You can also collect new insight by using survey tools and speaking to customers directly.

Take a look at all your customer touchpoints and start tracking everything, if you’re not already. And keep it up! Keep growing your insight around your customer, learning about how they behave online, how they interact with your website or digital product and what their preferences are. Putting all your learnings together will help you create a picture of your users.

There are many tools out there that can help provide you with some valuable customer insight, here are some things to look into:

Google Analytics. You may already have access to this, or a similar tools such as Webtrends, with your existing website or digital platform. It’s a great tool to help you understand how your customers behave online. It shows you where your visitors are coming from, how much time they spend on your website and where they are geographically. You can also do some clever things, like setting up goals to see the purchase funnel, and see where customers are dropping off along their journey through your website.

Google Trends. This is such a useful tool for trying to understand what topics interest your customers. It shows trending terms on Google (search), so you can find out what your target audience is searching for or associated search terms for a competitor.

Social listening. Your customers are already out there on social media and you may already be communicating via Twitter or Facebook, for example. Listen to what your customers are saying to help understand existing sentiment to your business or competitors, the reach of your message and how your brand is perceived. You can also identify influencers who can help you build credibility and visibility.

Customer surveys. A simple and quick way of capturing the views of your customers. This can be sent to existing customers, or shared with visitors to your website. Be careful though, as the nature of surveys is that customers might share their ‘opinion’ which isn’t necessarily what they do behaviourally. For example, ask a customer if they find the new website easy to use, and they may answer ‘no’ because they don’t like the colour of the homepage, whereas they can easily find and order a product through your website. It makes sense to use any survey results alongside other insights. Google Forms is great tool, where you can specify what data you want to collect from (by age, geography, income etc) to make it really relevant to your audience. You can get results within a matter of days with a low cost.

CRM. You may already have a customer relationship management system, although it might not be your central place for keeping all your customer records (you may be one of the many companies that still have excel spreadsheets floating around!). If this tool is used properly, you’ll be able to see patterns in sales of your service or product, see how effective your customer service processes are and what customer groups are loyal to your business.

LinkedIn. This social network is a brilliant resource for looking up customer and prospect profiles to understand their backgrounds and interests. It’s also useful to join some like-minded groups that are relevant to your target audience and find out what things are important and needed by your potential customers.

Employees. Don’t forget about those that have direct contact with your customers. They will have some really valuable feedback from managing enquiries and complaints, and they’ll understand your customer pain points the best.

Which of these people are your top priority?

It’s impossible to appeal to everyone, all of the time. You need to find out who the most important group of customers are going to be for you, who’s the highest value for your business and make sure you’re targeting them in the best way possible.

Have a think about it in terms of the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule. 80% of your sales typically come from 20% of your clients. So it makes sense to focus on the important customers, the ones that are going to increase your sales and not waste too much effort trying to please the less valuable customers.

Often business owners want to appeal to the masses, but keep focused on your top priority group of customers and make them your primary audience for your digital platform.

How do they typically access and engage with digital content?

A business often creates a new website or an app as a ‘must have’, not really understanding why they need it for their customers. Or even the value it can add to their existing business through increased sales or new services or revenue streams.

Working on a recent high-profile campaign for a charity, our research showed that 66% of users accessed the previous campaign site using a mobile / tablet. This gave us the insight to know that customers needed a responsive website so they could access it using their preferred device.

Have a think about who your customers are, where they are online and how they engage with digital content. Then you can move on to what information they need and how you best service this through simple and easy-to-navigate customer journeys through your website.

You’ll also discover that users may consume information differently depending on how they’re accessing your website. So for example, on a mobile you’re more likely to be multi-tasking. Think of all the times you’ve sat on the sofa with one eye on the TV and one on your phone screen. Even more reason to give them what they need easily.

So here’s a scary fact. You have only 3–5 seconds to grab the attention of your customers. That’s it — not very long is it? You’ve got to make an immediate positive impression, get them to consume and find the content they need, sell your product or service and convert them to do business with you. No pressure then!

Based on this lack of time you have to make an impact with your customer, you can see why it’s so important to get your content spot on. Keep it clear and easy to understand, position it in the right place so you aren’t making it tricky for them to get the information they need. Nobody has the time to click 10 times or scroll through reams of copy. Don’t be tempted to include too much copy, keep it short and to the point, whilst keeping sentences short and don’t use jargon. It’s always best to speak in the language that your customers speak in so you don’t alienate people. Yes, this likely means no to acronyms or business jargon.

It can be quite a challenge to keep your website copy short and to the point when you have 10 other colleagues contributing. It can be helpful to choose an owner to be responsible for each product or section, so you don’t have too many cooks.

Make sure your website, or digital product grabs the attention of your customer from the moment they land on your page.

What information do your customers need, or what service are they trying to use? What are they trying to do?

People are largely left alone to make their decision online, with less and less businesses having a personal sales approach, it’s just not cost effective. This puts even more importance on giving the customer an exceptional user experience and serving them what they need, at the time they need it.

A customer will visit your website or digital product with an aim. They will always have a reason to visit, and they could be at any point in their purchasing journey. Through analysing how customers respond to your website content you can see what’s helping them to make a decision to use your business.

People expect a good experience online, they want to get the information they need or buy the product or service as quickly and easily as possible. Anything else just causes frustration and a reason to complain (people love a public rant at a business on Twitter!).

People expect immediacy. Give your customers an exceptional, streamlined user experience and make them want to return.

Keep learning about your customers, a website is never finished.

It’s exciting and feels great when you finally launch your new website. But as scary as this might sound, a website is never finished. The most successful websites are constantly reviewed, tested, tweaked and improved.

If possible, run focus groups and observe how real users navigate your website I promise you’ll be surprised at the result. You’ll learn about how they search and find the content they need. Don’t be tempted to give them any direction, even if they’re struggling. You can write a simple user story for each task, like the Rachel Davies’ popular template: As <persona> I want <what?> so that <why?>. For example, as a <team leader> I want to <book my team on a negotiations skills training course> so that <they can get a better deal with suppliers for the business and save costs>.

Don’t worry, you only need a handful of users to test. 5 is plenty to give you enough insight to be able to understand what needs updating or fixing on your website or digital service. Use this insight along with more quantitative research, using tools such as Google Analytics or online surveys to collect and review data on your users.

Look at what content your users are visiting most and what’s engaging them. Think about how this works across your overall content strategy, including social media and any other communication channels.

Keep content up to date — what’s the reason for having the content? Make sure everything is serving a purpose. With website content it’s definitely quality over quantity. Don’t be worried about removing content, as less is often more when it comes to copy too. Users have a very limited attention span, and people expect to get information quickly, so keep it simple and easy to understand. You may worry about SEO rankings by having less content, but Google rewards quality over quantity also. More and more each year.

It’s easy to make assumptions about your customers, and that’s why it’s so important to test your website with real or prospective users to understand how they use it. Take these learnings and keep improving, keep optimising, keep adapting to your customers’ needs. This will beat off the competition and keep you on top.

Summary

So hopefully you will now be thinking about your customer and what they need from your business.

To recap, these are the top 5 things to take away:

1. Customers only care about what they’re trying to do on your website. They don’t care about your business.
2. Put your customers first. Find out what they need and what they want from your business and design your website for them.
3. Do your research. Identify and focus on your priority customer group. Track and keep learning about your customer through online data.
4. Grab your customer’s attention quickly and convert them through the purchase funnel / business goal with an exceptional user experience.
5. User test, iterate and keep doing it. Your website is never finished.

Think customer. Think needs. Think experience. Got it?