It is always tempting to design something that appeals to you – but are you really your target audience?
Who is your target audience? Where do they shop? What do they buy? What appeals to them? If you are making guesses based on your gut feeling you may be losing the opportunity to connect with your target audience effectively or worse – at all.
Spending the time and money on researching your target consumer before you start designing, can save hours in redesigns and changes in the future.
Who is your target market?
When starting any marketing materials or a website design, make sure you identify your target audience before you begin. Following a simple UX Design exercise can allow you to develop personas to represent different target customers. Keeping these personas in mind will allow you to design for different people who may find value from your business in different ways.
If you have more time and a larger budget, following a full user experience process can give you valuable information before you begin. The key to successful UX Design is user testing, testing, and more testing. Map out user flows for different personas who may want to achieve different tasks on your website and have people test these flows out while you are still in the UX phase of your project, so you can address issues early on. Spending the time and money on researching your target consumer before you start designing, can save hours in redesigns and changes in the future.
User personas based on your user research.
User flow to achieve a specific user task on your website.
What are your competitors doing?
I recommend that all our clients check out their competition too. Identify 3-5 competitors and take a look at their website or marketing materials. What do you like? What do you dislike? By gaining a good understanding of what your competitors are doing, you can identify what they are doing that is working, and where there is room for improvement. It also lets you know what your ideal customer may expect when they visit your website, trade show booth, or when they pick up your brochure. Keeping this valuable information in mind while working on your own project will make sure you address any shortcomings you noticed, and it will ensure that your piece stands out against your competition – for all the right reasons.
Does your design work for your audience?
Choices about your colour scheme, fonts, image choices and the overall tone of your design piece should reflect the trends and values important to your target audience. If you are a B2B company targeting financial institutions your website should have a very different look and feel than a B2C company selling to Gen Z.
Children’s Garden’s website needs to appeal to the parents of young children, so bright colourful images and a fun use of fonts and colour works well.
The 100 Steps 2 Startup website needs to appeal to entrepreuneurs and educators, so colours and fonts that communicate trust and their professional expertise are essential.
Does your design work, period?
Your design needs to work for your target audience, and it also has to work, period. If your audience includes anyone over 40, make sure you are using fonts that are large enough to read and have enough contrast against their background colour. Using the WCAG guidelines for colour contrast is good design for any website regardless of your audience. The old website trend of using small light grey text over a white background will frustrate your visitors and have them abandoning your website.
It’s tempting to use all the latest design trends in an attempt to look like you have done your research. But you need to really do your research if you want to appeal to your target audience. If you focus on trends (hello Pantone colour of the year, and ghost buttons on websites) instead of what works for your audience AND your content, you will end up with a flashy website that is disconnected from the messaging you are trying to communicate with your audience.
At the end of the day your how your audience consumes information and how you present it will be key in communicating effectively with your target audience. Take the time needed before you begin to get to know your audience.
Need help understanding your target audience? We can help! Let’s jump on a call and we can prepare a no-obligation estimate for your project.
