Most business websites are designed to talk about the business and what it has to offer. You could think of this like a resume. If a visitor wants to know more about you, this is perfect. But that is not why most people visit web sites. This is the biggest mistake in web design. Your visitors visit your website because they want something. Maybe it is information, maybe it is to know more about you, maybe it is to buy a product, or maybe they want to solve some issue they are dealing with. Designing your website from the perspective of helping customers find solutions and make decisions about products and services is the goal. Put your resume in the about us section.

In this article, we are going to help you learn who your customers are, what do they want from you, and how to present your products or services to them so that they can make an informed buying decision. We are helping customers make decisions. This is a marketing method and it works for everything from inviting visitors to visit your church or helping someone buy a car. Customers have questions and concerns. You have answers and solutions. That is how your website helps your visitors and that’s how visitors become customers.

Who Buys What and Why?

Know your Products – Make a list of all the products you sell. For some companies, this is easy. But if you are a jack-of-all-trades type of business, you might not be able to articulate your products and services. That’s a real problem. Most customers buy one thing and they need to know you do that one thing. This is especially an issue when they are looking at your website or other marketing materials. They want to see the list somewhere to see if their problem is listed.

Know your Customer – Most businesses have more than one type of client. You can break that down as “small clients”, “large clients”, or “residential clients and ”commercial clients“ or you may break it down further. With Anything Internet, we have broken ours into more groups. We have prospects, large clients, small clients, referral partners, and a few others.

Match them up – Pair up your customers and products. If your ”large client“ buys ”super service“ and ”premium product“, then list those combinations as: ”large client / super service“ and next list ”large client / premium product“. You don’t have to find every possible combination, just get your main combinations listed. This longer list of clients and product pairs gives you a solid perspective of who your customers are and what they buy. A good start.

Why they buy – For each item on this new list of pairs, list why they buy. You can pretty much assume they buy for the following reasons:

1. they have a problem that needs to be fixed
2. they see the potential of improvement of some kind
3. they are emotionally attached to the product or service
4. they are afraid of what might happen if they don’t buy it

We want our page structure to include:

1. what do they want
2. what are they afraid of
3. we have a solution
4. why we are better than our competitors
5. testimonials, success stories, and endorsements
6. more about our solution
7. call to action – buy now – call us – fill in the form – whatever

If you can list some of the fears and benefits next to each customer/product pair, then your list has evolved into customer/product/why. The customer/product/whys list becomes the foundation for your marketing campaigns. Now you know who buys what and why. You are half-way home.

The Campaigns

Designing a full marketing campaign can be quite involved and is too much to cover in this article. What we can talk about is your web design. Ideally what we would want is a page on your site for each of those customer/product/why combinations. If you have ten customer/product/whys items on your list, then you need ten pages to cover those. We can call those ”landing pages“.

Each of those ten landing pages needs to be focused on the why, not the what. We separated all these because the why might be different for different types of customers. Each of these ten pages might actually have different whys listed even if it applies to the same product. We are not discussing the product. We are discussing the customer and what his needs are.

In addition to the whys, we need product information, product features, testimonials, or whatever else. Finally, each of these landing pages needs a call to action. We show the customer that we understand his needs, we have a product for that, and he should buy that product now. Of course this applies to service business or other types of organizations. You use the same structure, you just choose the wording that fits what you are promoting.

For example, if you have a website for your church, you could have a page for people who are from other denominations and you create a page to show them a way to visit your church and learn the differences and they ”why“ portion of the page reassures them that they are welcome to visit without any pressure or whatever. You already know who they are, that they are curious or whatever, and they have fears about feeling welcome. So you address all that, tell them you understand their concerns and fears, they are welcome to ask questions, etc., and invite them to visit. Same process.

Implementation

There are many directions you can go with this information. You can update your website, as we discussed here. You can implement a direct mail campaign, radio campaign, or whatever else. Every one of those approaches needs to be thought out. The work we did here was a foundation that can help you put together a marketing campaign. All we have done here is define our customers, what they buy, and why. There are many ”next steps“.

For your website, let’s say you created your landing pages and you feel good about them. Now you need to link them up on your home page. Depending on how many customers or products you have, you could do this in many different ways. Generally I suggest organizing your site around the customers needs and let the products land where they land. But what works for your business … we would have to discuss it. You can try product driven, customer driven, needs driven, or any combination and just see what works best. You will get the hang of it once you start focusing on building a website to help your customers instead of building a website to talk about yourself.

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