Now that we’ve had an overview of what customer-centric design is, let’s discuss how it can be used to create leads.

Providing Valuable Information

Having a reason for customers to visit your site is the first step in creating leads. The most important aspect of customer-centric design is providing your customers with exactly what they are looking for.  Think about everything they might come to your website to look for and make sure the information is easy to find.  It should also be easy for customers to contact you with questions or concerns.

A Place to Connect

By providing a place for your customers to connect with each other and with you, you can help your customers get the information and support they need.  More importantly, you’ll be able to get information about who needs help and where they are in the buying process.

Enticement

Do your customers have a reason to give you their contact information?  Is there some useful information or service you can provide for free in exchange for contact information?  Enticement to create leads can be very effective for you and provide a useful service for your customers.  Remember to keep information gathering to a minimum. (name and email work best).

How do you use customer-centric design to create leads?

(photo by Just chaos @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: customer-centric, design, customer-centric design, usability, customer service, brand, brand management

We’ve mentioned customer-centric design in several of our recent branding and customer service posts.  Using customer-centric design on your site is extremely important to your customers.  Why?  Because they only care about what is important to them - getting whatever information, services, or products they came to your site for.  If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll simply go elsewhere.

So what is customer-centric design anyway?

Customer-centric design is design centered around what the customer wants (as opposed to what the company wants).  To do this, you have to always keep in mind why the customer came to your site and make it as easy as possible for them to accomplish their goals.

Ok play nice with customers, but what about my goals?

Your goals are probably concerned with increasing sales and leads (if not, they really should be).  Here’s the best part.  Customer-centric design actually makes it easier to accomplish your goals.  Customers who can find what they’re looking for are much more likely to make a purchase or return later for more information and services.  Most importantly, they’re likely to recommend you to their friends and colleagues, which is one of the most powerful ways to increase sales.

I getcha, now what?

Take a look at your site from your customer’s point of view.  What are the most important functions (for them, not you)?  Are they easy to find from anywhere on the site?  When a customer is in the middle of a process (finding support information, making a purchase, etc.), are there places for improvement by making things more clear and removing unnecssary steps or clicks?  Put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

Solicit feedback

Sometimes only your customers really know what they want.  So ask them.  It’s an easy and cheap way to get good feedback and by listening to your customers, you can increase customer satisfaction and brand awareness.

How have you used customer-centric design to help your customers?

(photo by ralphbijker @ Flickr CC)

Technorati Tags: customer-centric, design, customer-centric design, usability, customer service, brand, brand management

As we’ve been discussing, sometimes businesses get caught up in the need to increase traffic to their website.  This “traffic” often equates to the number of visitors to a website or the number of total pageviews.  But, as Traffikd discusses, there often is an opportunity to increase the time on the site and the number of pageviews per visitor.  This obviously will increase the number of total pageviews, but it also means that visitors are spending more time on your site - which gives you more time to sell to them.

For bloggers and social media marketers, the desire to increase numbers of unique visitors to a site often overshadows an effort to increase the average number of pageviews per visitor… In reality, the blogger and the designer do have some influence on visitors in terms of encouraging extended visits, and even a small increase in average pageviews per visitor can result in significant gains in overall pageviews. - Traffikd - Increasing Pageviews Per Visitor

Before beginning to strategize, you need to create goals for your business.  In order to create goals you need a solid grasp of your current situation on the Internet (your current web presence). To get an idea of your current internet situation take a look at:

Website - Ideally your website is the hub of your Internet presence with customer-centric design and content.

• Analytics - How well is your website performing?  Basic statistics such as page views, visits and uniques are useful.  But more importantly, how many leads and conversions are you getting?  Where is your traffic coming from?  How useable is your website?  Are people getting frustrated?
• Usability - Can visitors find what they are looking for on your website?  Is it easy to use?  What could be improved?
• Content - Great content provides your customers with the information they need to succeed.  Creating content should be a continual process.  What content do your customers want to see?  What expertise can you provide?
• Design - Your website needs to be easy to use (usability), but also should be eye-catching and professional.  Are the fonts need to be easy to read and does the layout should draw visitors into your message?

Community & Brand Reputation- Your customers are talking about you both online and offline.  Find where your customers are and join the conversation to get key insights into improving your business.

• Blog - If you have a blog, what feedback have your readers given you? What are other bloggers saying?  Who has linked to your blog and what have they said?
• Forum / Discussion Boards - If you don’t have discussion boards on your website, find places where your customers frequent.  Listen to concerns and join the conversation with suggestions for improvement.
• Social Networks - Your customers are probably on social networks already (if they aren’t they probably will be soon).  Find social networks where your customers frequent and see what they are saying.  Join the social networks to give them an opportunity to connect.
• Reviews - Have there been any reviews of your products and services?  What can be improved?

Search Engines - Many potential customers will find your website through search engines so it is important to understand how search engines currently crawl and index your site.

• Keywords - What keywords do the search engines see on your site?  Where does your site rank for various keywords?  It can be helpful to pick the top 100 to monitor at first.  There are a number of free tools available to help (Google Webmaster tools, Rank Checker for Firefox, SEO Quake for Firefox and Internet Explorer).
• Indexed Pages - How many pages on your website (and blog) do the search engines include in their indices?  (SEO Quake and Website Grader can help).
• Incoming Links - How many other sites are linking to your website?  What are they linking to?  What are they saying? (SEO Quake and Website Grader).
• Outgoing Links - What other websites are you linking to? (Google Webmaster tools, SEO Quake).
• Cache - What pages are the search engines displaying in their results?  What do they have saved that may be old content?  (Google Webmaster Tools).

Marketing - What is your company trying to say to customers and potential customers?  What are the current marketing messages your company is using?  What is the status of any advertising or sales campaigns?  What is the return on investment (ROI) of any campaigns?

• Advertising - It is important to understand how any advertising is impacting your bottom line and helping to reach your goals.  Besides budgets, clicks, and impressions, it is important to measure leads, conversions, or sales - what return you are getting on your investment (ROI).
• Competitors - Who are your competitors?  What are their web presences?  What marketing and advertising are they doing?  What are their strengths and weaknesses?  What opportunities and threats exist?

There is quite a bit of information to gather, but once you have it you’ll be able to get a good overview of what your current Internet presence is.  You should be able to find opportunities to improve and be able to formulate some business goals. As you can see, Internet business strategy merges into traditional business strategy by using the Internet to collect information and feedback and to further business goals.  Next we’ll talk about vision and goals.

(photo by argenberg @ Flickr CC)

Related Posts:

• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Introduction
• How to Create an Internet Business Strategy - Methodologies
• Vision & Goals for your Internet Business Strategy
• What are the Requirements for your Internet Business Strategy to Succeed?
• Creating an Internet Business Strategy - Implementation

Technorati Tags: internet business strategy, internet strategy, internet strategic planning, internet strategic plan, internet strategy consulting, internet business consulting

What type of information do you need to start redesigning your site to be customer-centric and usable? You need to understand why your visitors are coming to your site and what they’re looking for. This type of information is going to come mainly from your analytics software. If you don’t have any analytics software, you need to get one to improve your site. Google Analytics is offered for free or you can have someone set it up for you for minimal cost. (I go over analytics and a few packages to explore in the post Measuring Your Success in the B2B Marketplace.)

You’ll need some information from your analytics package to begin with: the keywords people are typing into search engines to get to your site, what people are clicking on once on your site, and where people are leaving your site.

• Keyword information is sometimes called keywords, sometimes referring sites. Collect a list of your top 100 keywords for the previous six months categorized by search engine. Are there products or content searched for specifically by title or name? These are should have links accessible right from the homepage to make them easy for people to find.
• To see what people are clicking on once on your site find a report of your top pages. If your analytics package offers a site overlay, this will be particularly valuable to see where people are clicking on each page.
• Where people are leaving your site gives you an indication what made them leave. This information is often under exit pages and sometimes in path information. Are their exit pages where people consistently leave your site?  These may need to be redesigned to keep visitors on your site longer.

Google’s Webmaster Tools can also give you valuable information about how Google’s search engine looks are your site - with information about the top keywords, pages that Google has in its index, and the top queries from Google to your site. Yahoo has a similar, but not as robust tool, SiteExplorer, which can also give you some valuable information.

If you have a search function on your site, take a look at the logs. Visitors often search for things they cannot find on first glance. If you have important products or content that are constantly being searched for, they should have links on your homepage.

Next step - basic layout lessons in B2B Website Usability Basics - Part 2 - Layout

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, usability, design, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting