Understanding Your Market Before Designing Your Website

What does house construction, putting up a business, and web designing have in common? They all require an analysis of who are going to benefit from result before getting them started.

In other words, they require an analysis of their market before the actual work begins. No one thinks of building a house without consulting the owners; the owners are the ones who commission the work in the first place. Also, no one puts up a business without having target customers who avail of the services or products of the business. Finally, no one should ever think about building a website without first considering the possible market. Knowing the target market is completely important in all three tasks described above. We outline below the things that could be done in the 2 tasks of market understanding and web designing.

TASK ONE: MARKET STUDY

First, we tackle the task of understanding the market.

What is your product?

Knowing your market presupposes means knowing well what your product is. If you are building a website to sell luxury items, then for sure, you should be targeting the society’s upper class, and your website has to reflect this. On the other hand, if your website is offering cheap, second-hand items, then your website has to cater to the lower-income class. Then there are products that are automatically targeted for certain types of market. For example, most beauty products are targeted for women. Similarly, most alcoholic products mostly target men. The list could go on. You have to remember that your product or service often times directly define your market.

What is your niche?

Your niche is the place where your competitors can’t reach you. So many companies have made well simply by identifying a niche and protecting it. Are you able to identify one for your own company? Do you offer anything that your competitors (if there are any) don’t? Is there anything in your company that makes it special or remarkable? Then, you could capitalize on this and direct your web designing effort into this direction. Your niche defines in more specific terms what your market really is.

Who are your customers?

A website is not created simply to provide content but to reach the right people. For this, it is necessary to know who your customers really are. If you could imagine your customers physically, then better. That means you truly know them; they are not just abstract numbers that enter into your financial statement or statistics.

If you are offering a new product or service, then it is most likely that you have already thought about the customers that you will be serving. If you are already offering a product or service, then you could do a research of the basic traits and qualities of your customers. According to those traits and qualities that you have observed in your prior research, you could direct the web designing team to directly address these qualities, identifying what could attract your customers the most.

TASK TWO: WEBSITE DESIGN

After identifying your market, then you could focus on directing the task of building the website. The paragraphs below suggest how the questions above could be translated into web design.

What is your product?

Having known what your product is, you could help the web development team to come up with a banner or identification that properly identifies your product. This idea then becomes ingrained in the mind of your site visitors that they begin to associate it immediately with your product.

What is your niche?

Develop a page in which you explain what you can offer that the others can’t. Business is, after all, addressing a need that has not been properly addressed before. Provide examples to further bolster this claim.

Who are your customers?

Stephen Covey advised, “Begin with the end in mind.” In a similar note, the web designing effort should be done with the customers in mind. This is because the customers are your “end”, “goal”, and “objective.” They are the ones you have to reach because you are offering your services or products to them. To further help in the web design effort, you could ask the following questions

What are they like?

If your market is sophisticated and well-educated, then your website has to have a certain elegance and style to the design, structure, and content. If your market is plain folks, you must not use complicated words and jargons, and the design of the website has to be simple.

What attracts them the most?

The design and the content of your website should contain aspects that more readily attract your target market.

What repels them?

Similarly, you have to properly address things that naturally repel or disappoint your target audience. Review your website and look for any trace of repulsion.

CONCLUSION

The extra effort that comes with understanding the market before building a website seems to be a disadvantage when it really is a necessity. Web designing done after a market study will ensure that you will build a website that people (i.e., your customers or your market) will visit.