There are numerous benefits of defining a niche for your business. It helps differentiate your services from competitors, attract your ideal clients in terms of profitability and specialization, and guide your marketing strategy.
Once you’ve defined your niche, it’s critical that your website clearly caters to that audience in both the messaging and design.
Use Visitor Profiles to Identify Your Niche
In order to make a site relevant to your niche, you need to first understand the goals and needs of your ideal clients.
At the beginning of our website projects, we spend a lot of time talking with our clients about their target market and creating what are called “visitor profiles.”
Most businesses and websites have about 2-3 different types of web visitors, and the visitor profile process helps us dive deeper. As part of each visitor profile, we discuss the psychographics and their goals and needs on the site.
The psychographics are very important because they hone in on your visitors’ mind-set, concerns, objectives and priorities as they are using your site and considering your services.
This process can help you understand your niche, and it then guides all of the website and marketing decisions.
Create a Strong Web Value Proposition
One of the challenges for any website is that web visitors typically stay on a web page for less than 30 seconds before deciding whether to stay or bounce.
This means that you need to give web visitors a really good reason to stick around.
Creating a strong web-based value proposition for the home page of the site is the best way to very quickly communicate what you do and engage your niche.
A web-based value proposition is different from a mission statement, and it typically includes:
- Who you are as an organization
- What your company does
- How your company differentiates itself from competitive options
- What’s the next step or call-to-action for visitors
The web-based value proposition is quite a bit different than a typical value proposition because it resides on a website and it must be incredibly clear and succinct. It also must be supported by compelling imagery.
There is an entire art and science that goes into crafting an effective web-based value proposition and it’s actually one of the most important components to any web project.
Our team works closely with our clients in this process, and we have significant experience in creating effective web-based value propositions.
Build an Emotional Connection in Your Design
The design elements and interactive components should also build an emotional connection with web visitors. The emotional connection is really important because it’s subliminal in many cases.
When a visitor is engaged with a website on that level, there is a transference of that feeling or connection from the site to your firm and it can set the tone for any future interactions.
In order to engage visitors on an emotional level, our designers focus on creating a unique visual design identity in order to help differentiate your firm from competitors. This visual identity ultimately defines the personality of your brand.
Some of the important components are branding colors, imagery selection and font types, but the visual identity is much more than just these elements.
Our objective is to set a tone, create a mood and to tell a story to your visitors. We can do this by also using interactive design elements in order to enrich the overall user experience.
