Developing a great website goes far beyond the visual appearance. Naturally, you want to create a website that is pleasant for users to look at and easy to navigate, but you also want it work for your business, drawing in relevant traffic.

Your website needs to revolve around your visitors and you need to identify who you are trying to reach and include it in your website development.

Creating buyer personas is a great place to start. Using your knowledge of your industry, including your customer’s challenges and pains, is incredibly important to your website design.

Including this in the development and layout of your website enables you to deliver quality content on your site. You can also reach out through their favorite social media platforms offering solutions related to their time constraints and priorities, giving you the power to speak effectively through your website to your target audience.

If you consistently provide what they need through your website, they will keep using it as a reference and a source. Developing it to their needs will help you move them right on through your sales funnel quickly and efficiently.

A buyer's persona is developed when you ask these three questions.

1.Who is your ideal customer?

2.What do they need?

3.What are their online habits and buying behaviors?

As you begin to develop your specific buyer personas, understand that they are used to make marketing decisions; where to place ads, what products or services to focus on, and which social media platforms to use to promote your business.

You will use them to build individual relationships with your customers, helping them by providing answers their questions, not to “sell” to them.

To do that, you can use your website planning phase to develop content based on their needs and motivations.

While buyer personas can be valuable in all forms of marketing strategies, they are essential to your inbound marketing strategy to connect with your target audience and offer them value for their business needs and challenges.

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As you begin to develop buyer personas, the data you gather about your customers becomes very important to connecting with the right audience on your website.

Here are some of the questions that need answers when you begin creating a buying persona to develop a website that delivers value to your website users and customers:

• Demographic info – What is your buyer personas age, gender, income level, etc.
• What is their job? What is their seniority level?
• What does a day in their life entail?
• What are their pain points? How do YOU (or information on your website) help them solve their problems?
• What are their goals?
• What do they value most?
• Where do they go for information?
• When seeking your products and/or services, what do they expect?
• What experiences do they prefer?

The answers to these questions will provide the structure to the personas you develop.

It’s more than a list, you will bring various personas to life, creating fictional characters based on these questions that will help deliver the right users to your website.

Using the information you gain from creating multiple buyer personas will allow you to identify the motivations behind your customers behavior, enabling you to deliver solutions to all of your potential customers, looking potentially for the same things, via a variety of ways (related to their individual preferences) of “researching” for solutions to their challenges.

Just like in real life, your buyer personas are never “complete”. They will continue to evolve, taking in new information, developing and changing, so it is important to revisit them, some suggest every 3-5 months, to adjust them as they develop.

Use your “buyer personas” to guide you on the layout of your site. Organize and highlight the content that is important to them.

Put yourself in the mindset of one of your personas and imagine arriving on your site. What would you be looking for? Services? Create a call to action that leads to your services page.

What if one of your personas is based on a demographic that is aged 45 and older? Like me, they may carry a pair of “readers” everywhere they go (especially low-light restaurants!). Make sure your content is easily readable and adaptable to any device by selecting a good font that is sized correctly (no smaller than 14px).

• Include buttons for call to actions that make it easy for your users to interact with your website.
  

Say you own a barber-shop, include a “schedule an appointment with your favorite barber” button at the bottom of the services page to increase conversions AND make it easier for them to make a decision to get a trim, while they are on your site.

Most people don’t think about it, but the psychology of colors is a real thing and plays a big role with resonating with your personas. Different colors and combinations have the power to evoke different ranges of emotions. Consider your buyer personas when choosing website colors, you want your colors to appeal to them.

Taking the time to create buyer personas will help you, not just with your website development and design, but also in every aspect of your marketing efforts.

Always keep your personas in mind when it comes to the design of any of your marketing materials as well as your website. What are your personas looking for? What will appeal to them? Does your website help them get to their end goal?

Listen to your buyer personas. They will communicate what their needs are and how you can meet them before designing your website.