Who’s your audience?
Let’s talk a little about your audience and what information they need. You’ve decided you want a website, and you looked a variety of kinds of sites over the years so you think you know what you want and you may be right, however you should first decide who your audience is and what information they need. Are you creating a web site for
- Existing customers as an added value. An added value site offers information about your product, industry, or service. Are you thinking that you want to do informational webinars, or videos to further inform your customer, further enhancing your relationship.
- Or perhaps you are trying to attract new customers that currently know nothing about you, your product, or even your industry and you don’t care if your current customers find the site or not. You have decided that your market should be expanded to nationwide or even worldwide.
- You’ve finally decided to broaden your sales market and you are now ready to sell your product or services directly online.
- Or do you really want to have a site that offers added-value to existing customer while attracting new customers and selling them a product.
In the last blog post I reviewed the elements of site and discussed the various kinds of sites you might find. Now that you have thought about whom your audience is you can revisit the previous post and decide what the site you are looking for requires. If you want to create a site with multiple targets and purposes it may be advisable to start slowly and build one section and then create further elements as time goes on. There is a cost in both time and money to building an all inclusive site right out of the gate. Building in sections, information or store first, allows you and your staff time to get comfortable with the extra demands a web site may make on your staff as a web site needs to be maintained and updated with new information on a regular basis so that it doesn’t get stale and so that it stays current in the search engines.