When it comes to driving results from your website, the key to success is a proper brand experience.
What your website visitors feel about your website, the content, and the usability of the site bleeds over into their entire experience. If they hate your website, they will probably be less than thrilled with the product. It's really that important.
That brings us to the first truth of effective websites: they aren't about you.
Your website is about your customer. It's to cater to them and give them what they want, not what you want them to have. If you can nail that experience down, your website will outperform your competitors every time.
Every. Single. Time.
Brand experience is everything, and it starts with your website.
Creating The Ideal Brand Experience
To create an awesome brand experience, you have to tap into what your customers actually want. You need to work through building a customer-centric experience that helps inform and educate your leads at the right time.
What Do Your Customers Want?
Sooner or later, all potential leads will visit your website.When they arrive, what do they want, exactly?
Clearly address the wants, feelings, and fears of your ideal consumer - that's the content and experience they’ll respond to.
When assessing what your customers, go page by page, including:
The homepage.
Your homepage is the most important page to help convert visitors into contacts and leads. Whatever content they’re seeking, your home page should focus on that and only that.
Nothing else matters.
Lead magnets.
What are you offering visitors? Is that what they want?
Lead magnets, such as top-of-funnel (TOFU) ebooks or white papers need to actually appeal to your target audience.
Blog.
During your buyer persona process, you should have established the core problems, likely searches, and frustrations of your ideal customer. Create that content.
How is that information translating into blog posts?
This customer-centric mindset should be applied to every other important page and section of your site.
When Do They Want It?
Every website visitor is not going to be at the same stage as the others. Your website and marketing need to understand what content your ideal customers want, and when they want it.
Your strategy needs to again, focus on the customer.
Determine where they’re at in the buyer journey, and be there to provide intentional content crafted to that particular stage, such as:
Awareness.
They’re starting to research a challenge. Be there with educational content such as blog content, and landing pages with TOFU lead magnets that enroll them in lead nurturing email workflows.
Interest.
You want them to think about working with you. Provide educational content, case studies, and webinars that present your unique value proposition build rapport, and help determine what leads are specifically interested in. Integrate retargeting ads to catch the visitors who haven’t returned to your site yet.
Consideration.
Give them reasons to work with you. Show them any benefits there are to working with your brand using competitor comparisons and expert guides.
Decision.
They’re almost sold. Make it really easy for them to become a customer with free trials, demos, and price guides that create a sense of urgency and deliver on your promise.
The right message at the right time makes all the difference. In order to really target your website visitors with what they’re seeking, your site needs to align to your website content and experience.
Already have a ton of content created? See how you can give all of your older content assets purpose with our Repurposing Toolkit: Why & How to Repurpose Content.
How Do They Want It?
Now that you know what your customer wants, and when they want it, you need to know how they want to get it.
Which types of content, marketing collateral, and channels will your ideal customer respond to?
While some people prefer the trendiest content mediums and platforms, such as podcasts or Facebook Live events, others might still prefer more traditional tactics, such as print over screen.
By understanding the particular demographic, you can narrow it down. Here’s a basic overview of ideas for content, based on the preferred medium.
Targeted Digital Ads
Seeing that 54% of millennials trust digital ads run on social networks, while 21% of time spent on Facebook is from individuals in their mid-40s and 50s, Facebook is a great place to experiment with ads and content for various industries.
Conversation
Twitter is best used for brand awareness, as the platform runs on conversation. Great for offering customer support, connecting with influencers, and hopping in on brand-relevant conversations.
Lifestyle Content. Instagram, which has a similar audience, can also be great for brand awareness in order to humanize a brand.
Education + Tutorials
For brands that want to conduct Q&As, how-tos, or create content that requires more of a personal touch and educates new audiences, leverage channels such as Vimeo, YouTube, and Medium.
Networking.
As a business-focused network, LinkedIn caters towards the mid-30s - mid 50s crowd. It is ideal for B2B businesses to share slides, engage in groups, and utilize the InMail messaging.
Niche Content.
Platforms such as Reddit and Pinterest are spaces that cater to very specific interests and hobbies, while podcasts cover specific topics. These platforms take genuine time and effort, and have discerning audiences.
This is why it’s absolutely crucial to go through a proper buyer persona exercise. You have to know as much as you can about your actual customer. The key is to know how your target audience wants to consume content, and deliver that content the way they want it.
Putting It All Together
To really master brand experience, it’s important to prioritize a customer-centric experience. By understanding your customer’s needs, you can create content to target them at the most impactful time.
Learn more about your buyer personas, and align your website to support their buyer journey, check out our Sprocket Rocket Strategy Kit. You'll learn the seven discovery and research steps to map our your personas, website architecture, and value prop.
