4 Ways Your Customers Can Make Decisions For You

If you’ve spent any amount of time undertaking marketing or design activities, you know that the audience is king. Everything you do to entice a purchase is built around the specific needs and wants of your audience. These needs often change dramatically between similar groups and will always shape how your website looks. Here’s a look at the key factors that turn what your audience wants into an attractive, usable website!

The intersection of demographics and content

Only the big companies can perform this type of market research, right? Wrong! Recently, changes in market research techniques have made it possible for even very small businesses to undertake some research. Even if you don’t want to get into actual ‘research’ there are plenty of handy tricks you can do in less than an hour to build a demographic profile. From there, a quick search of trends for those groups can provide a great baseline with which you can create a more refined design approach.

Obviously, your demographics are going to dramatically affect the content of your site. Thongs are VERY different things in Australia compared to USA and getting it wrong could be a potential PR disaster.

At TestMate we use Australian testers and remote and moderated testing to ensure that if you’re an Australian company, you target your site to the right people.

Decoding the concerns of your customers

Different demographics have different needs. When you’re looking at the most important things to include on your website, there are a few questions that you need to answer. Who are your customers? What are their most urgent and pressing concerns? What factors are they focused on in terms of making a buying decision?

Answering these can quickly get you on track to making a great, user-friendly site. For example, your demographics might be primarily concerned with price. If this is the case, prominently display price information or content related to costs (or lack thereof), to reassure your customers and ensure that the most important information to them is easily available.

The path less traveled

If you’re stuck at figuring out your demographics, feel free to take a step back and see what companies around you are doing! In fact, copying certain elements from competitors can be a great way to capitalise on existing brand preferences to gain a small advantage. Similarities between brands are called points of parity.

Of course, being an exact copy of a competitor makes you look cheap and unoriginal (and can be illegal depending on what copying occurs). Make sure that the majority of your branding and marketing is original and separates you from the rest of the pack. These are called points of differentiation and are what make you stand out!

The more detailed your demographics are, the easier it will be to spot those unique needs your customers have so you can implement unique solutions. Maybe your customers want brutalism! Perhaps they want an amazing mobile experience. These are the small things that will show your brand’s personality and influence customer opinion.

Don’t overdo it!

You can track just about every aspect of your business. But trying to analyse all of it, especially for a small business, can be impossible or so time-consuming that no action is ever actually taken. Take our advice. Use the least amount of data you can to make strategic decisions. Determine what data you will even use when you plan.

If you can collect and analyse your customer data efficiently, you’ll be able to react sooner to demographic changes, trends, and mishaps.

Do you want to know the behaviour of your customers? TestMate can help! Get in touch to see how we can tailor our user testing to your demographics.