SECTION ONE: WEBSITE ELEMENTS
May 1st, 2009 |
EXERCISE ONE: CUSTOMER AVATAR WORKSHEET
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Points to Remember
- Your website is about your customer and his or her needs, challenges, fears, and hopes. It is NOT about your company.
- What is an Avatar? “It is an embodiment or personification of a vague concept or entity, such as a principle or attitude.” In creating your website, you want to focus your communication to an individual avatar that encompasses the numerous characteristics, emotions, perspectives, and needs of your customer base.
- Your customer seeks to feel UNDERSTOOD. How can you better understand your customer and communicate that within your website?
- Every customer is an individual and wants to be treated like one. Yet, as a company, we want to attract as many people as we want, and we unconsciously talk to the entire crowd.
- When a customer reads your website, the conversation needs to be between just you and the individual.
- On the following page, you’re going to construct your customer avatar. This way, when you write your web site’s content and you design your navigation and the process you want your buyers to go through, you’ll have a solid concept of the individual customer interacting with that content and process. This will help you better connect with and close each visitor to your website.
IDENTIFYING YOUR COMMON CUSTOMER’S REALITY
- Common Needs, Fears, Pain & Frustrations
- Desires, Hopes, Aspirations, & Dreams
- Ideal Experience They Want to Have w/ You
Now that you’ve gotten into the head of your customer a little bit, the next step is to create an individual avatar that represents the common perspective, experience, emotional state, and needs of your customer base.
Next, we’re going to name and describe your avatar and bring him or her to life!
CREATING YOUR CUSTOMER AVATAR Example Avatar Creation Step 1:
Let’s imagine that you sell weight loss coaching. Let’s list some characteristics that apply to your common customer:
- Overweight by at least 20 lbs
- Dissatisfied with physical appearance
- Dissatisfied with energy levels
- Primarily female
- Has failed at diets and exercise routines in the past
- Willing to invest $ and time into losing weight and increasing health
Now let’s have you list characteristics of your common customer. Use the brainstorming you did previously if applicable, but pay particular attention to “pressure points” you know trigger buyer response for your product or service.
List as many characteristics as you can. If you must, use additional paper.
Next, let’s consider how we would talk to someone with these characteristics. This is to demonstrate the importance of only talking to the common characteristics across your entire buying audience.
EXAMPLE A
Losing weight had always been a challenge in my life. Twenty five years ago, I was 125 lbs over weight, avoided mirrors as though no one else would notice what I was trying not to see, and worst of all, I never had any energy. I couldn’t exercise if I wanted to – and I didn’t want to.
And don’t even get me started on the dozens of diets I’ve tried. Nothing worked. Until I happened upon a simple system that worked with my body and not against it.
The above example could also be written at the customer, for instance, “Has losing weight always been a challenge for you? Do you find yourself avoiding mirrors and staying home more and more often?”
Notice that this example only discusses characteristics that are largely global across the weight loss audience. Now look at Example B…
EXAMPLE B
Have you ever walked into a sushi bar and felt that everyone was watching you because you were the only one who wouldn’t eat any rice or order dessert?
In this second example, we are definitely talking to an individual right? But we’ve gotten too specific. This isn’t something that globally applies to our customer base. So there’s an instant disconnect. Perhaps our visitor doesn’t like sushi, or doesn’t try to avoid carbs. Either way, we’ve lost them.
This example is to demonstrate the importance of developing a customer avatar that is an individual with specific characteristics, feelings and experiences…
BUT ONLY those characteristics, feelings and experiences found globally across your entire customer or audience base.
Obviously, you can’t ensure that every single person in your audience possesses every characteristic, but use your best judgement and don’t include characteristics that perhaps only 25% of your customers have (this is something you can do later when we create landing pages targeted to that specific 25%!)
Create Your Avatar
EXERCISE TWO: MAP OUT NAVIGATION AND BUYER PROCESS
Points to Remember
- You want to imagine that you are your customer avatar, and then figure out what key challenges, fears, or needs would inspire you to look for the solution your company provides.
- Then you want to list the initial questions you would have, and then match those with your company’s answers. Once an answer is given, what is your customer avatar’s response? Is there an objection, a further question, or additional fear raised?
- Continue through the process until the natural conclusion is to buy and there is absolutely no other reason not to.
- As you map out this psychological process, you’ll see how you will want to guide your visitor through your site to ignite their natural buyer process.
This doesn’t mean that a customer that wants to buy sooner, or who doesn’t have those objections or fears won’t be able to jump into the purchase – this is just to ensure that your website is easy to navigate according to your average buyer’s psychological process.
Take out a separate piece of paper or create a document on your computer and map out this process using the questions on the following page.
When you’re done, you’ll have a map of necessary pages your website will need, as well as the linking structure. For instance, if after you talk about your offering’s benefits, you anticipate three common objections, you can link to three different pages that handle each objection from the sidebar or bottom of your benefits page.
MAPPING OUT YOUR CUSTOMER’S BUYING PROCESS
Consider the following questions as you create your map. We recommend using free idea mapping software so you can easily create multiple links between ideas.
www.personalbrain.com (free downloadable edition)
www.bubbl.us (free web application)
1. List the common challenges, questions, or needs that inspire your audience to actively search for what you provide
2. Now take each item in your previous list, and map it to your response or answer that addresses that particular concern, question or need. If there’s more than one key way to address an item, map that item to each answer.
3. Now look at each answer you have across all concerns, questions and needs. What is the response your customer avatar will have to that answer? Create a new tier of questions, fears, and objections and map them to each answer they would naturally develop from.
4. Now answer each of those questions, fears and objections.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you feel you’ve successfully exhausted all customer objections, fears, or reluctance and you’re confident that they will have no other choice but to buy.
When you’re done, you’ll have a dizzying, perhaps very large map with several bubbles interlinking and cross-linking to other bubbles. That’s good.
Now you know what pages your site needs and which pages should link to them. When we go over your landing page template (which should apply to every single internal page your site has since each one can potentially be a landing page), we’ll show you how to organize your pages to easily interlink to related content without confusing your visitor. Rather it will help guide your visitor through this optimal buying process.
EXERCISE THREE: DESIGN OR RE-DESIGN YOUR HOME PAGE
Points to Remember
- Your home page’s sole purpose is to drive your visitor deeper into your site within the first five seconds.
- Only have one primary action you want your visitor to make.
- You can have up to three additional secondary actions you want your visitor to make if he or she is uninterested in your primary action.
- Design your homepage layout to have a main central area for these calls to action. Then have a sidebar on the right or left side (or one on each!) to include other important elements.
- You’ll still have a main site menu that links to your main pages. Be sure to add your Primary Call to Action to that main menu.
Next, we will show a basic homepage layout that you can model your homepage after. You don’t have to adhere exactly to this template, it’s just to show you conceptually how to properly construct a homepage designed to drive visitors deeper into the site, increase conversions, and launch the buyer process.
Again, this is not a hard-fast rule for how your homepage should be designed. But it’s an excellent guideline for you and if followed exactly, it will definitely increase your homepage’s effectiveness.
EXERCISE FOUR: CREATE YOUR INTERNAL AND LANDING PAGES
Points to Remember
- Every page on your website is a potential landing page. The only way to prevent a page from being a landing page is if you prevent search engines from indexing it. You can do this by creating a robots.txt file and uploading it to your server. We’ll explain this later.
- The purpose of your internal pages is to carry your visitor through your buying process and educate them in a way that subtly sells them while addressing their questions and needs and convincing them that your solution is the best.
- You’ll also want to create landing pages specifically for pay-per-click campaigns or for specific segments of your audience. In this case, the purpose of your landing page is to tackle the exact issue, challenge, benefit, etc. that your visitor searched to find that page (most likely the keyword you optimize the page for or the ad group you are driving to the page through Adwords.
- Design your homepage layout to have a main central area for these calls to action. Then have a sidebar on the right or left side (or one on each!) to include other important elements.
- You’ll still have a main site menu that links to your main pages. Be sure to add your Primary Call to Action to that main menu.
Next, we will show a basic landing page layout that serves as an excellent secondary page to the homepage layout we just shared with you. Again, you don’t have to adhere exactly to this template, it’s just to show you conceptually how to properly construct a landing page designed to take your visitor through the buyer process.
YOUR LANDING PAGE LAYOUT TEMPLATE
How to block a page from being indexed in the search engines (you probably don’t want to do this, but if you want to hide a certain page from the search engines):
Create a text file and name it: robots.txt (do not use Word, use Notepad). Put the following text, filling in as many directories or pages as you want to block. Then save and upload.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /directory_name/
Disallow: /page_name.html
CHECKLIST: CREATE OR UPDATE YOUR PRIMARY WEBSITE
- IDENTIFY YOUR CUSTOMER’S REALITY
- LIST COMMON BUYER CHARACTERISTICS
- CREATE YOUR CUSTOMER AVATAR
- MAP OUT NATURAL BUYER PROCESS
- IDENTIFY YOUR CORE SITE CATEGORIES (YOUR SITE’S MAIN MENU) BASED ON YOUR MAP
- MAKE A LIST OF ALL PAGES YOUR SITE NEEDS TO HAVE BASED ON YOUR MAP (THEY DON’T ALL HAVE TO BE LINKED TO FROM MAIN NAVIGATION OR MAIN CATEGORIES – THESE ARE “RELATED PAGES” TO HANDLE BUYER QUESTIONS
- CREATE YOUR HOMEPAGE USING OUR TEMPLATE
- CREATE YOUR ADDITIONAL PAGES USING OUR LANDING PAGE TEMPLATE
- BLOCK ANY PAGES YOU DON’T WANT IN THE SEARCH ENGINES
