The Role of Discovery in Developing an Effective Website Design

One size does NOT fit all! Make sure your website design delivers a pleasant user experience for visitors, or you could lose out on leads and sales.

Business success has taken many forms over the years, but it has never been a “one size fits all” concept. In 2018, this is proving true again as the changing trends require marketers to “craft interactions” with their customers, instead of simply focusing on generating new business leads. This means steering the buying journey more subtly than ever before, encouraging customer engagement at every touchpoint to build trust and improve the user experience. Developing a website that can accomplish this is no easy task. For this reason, our brand design company in Raleigh conducts an extensive discovery process with every new client during the onboarding process.

How Discovery Works

The role of discovery is critical to creating an effective website design, because it enables your developer to understand your current business situation, the challenges and opportunities you face, and the landscape of your industry and competitors. This typically requires at least one in-person meeting between the marketers and the business owner or executive team, as well as supplying a range of documentation that helps build the picture. To deliver a website that engages the right visitors, your design team will need to take specific steps.

Review Your Brand Personality

It’s surprising how often companies that have operated successfully for a number of years aren’t completely certain of their brand personality. Also, the management team (and employees) don’t always share the same understanding of this principle, which can result in the website presenting a different picture from the one offered by other sales and marketing literature. When they factor in employees’ personal approaches and potential media coverage, it’s entirely possible for an otherwise-successful organization to display a complete brand identity crisis.

The development of a cohesive base for future branding activities is one valuable result of a good discovery process, enabling the design of a website that matches the business offering to clients’ needs in such a way that the visitor’s interaction is spot on.

Understand the Psychology Behind the Need

With statistics showing that 73% of purchase decisions begin with online searches leading to website visits, it’s important to know what your target audience is looking for. Developing a website that caters to this need is how you’ll bring them into your circle of influence. To learn the psychology driving their needs, the discovery process delves into information such as customer feedback, complaints, correspondence and data generated by former sales.

Use Storytelling to Build Connections

Getting visitors to a company website is one piece of the puzzle, but once they are there you have to capture their attention. “Storytelling” has captured humans’ interest for thousands of years, and stories matter in both real life and in marketing because they make people feel something. The emotions generated by a good story can create powerful connections between your brand and the audience. Through discovery, the web development team learns what resonates with your target market, what genres are more likely to appeal to them, and how best to deliver the stories to reach them.

If you identify social media as the best way to generate customer engagement in your market, for example, then it’s vital to optimize website content for shareability across your profiles. For companies selling products with a more technical focus, case studies might be the best way to reach the ideal client.

Engage Prospects Emotionally

It’s not enough to just tell a story through your website. To generate results, an effective website offers a carefully-orchestrated user experience. This requires access to data, personalization of communications and advertising, which can be driven by artificial intelligence (AI) functionality. Research from Capgemini shows emotion plays a definite role in building engagement, and that once consumers reach this level of emotional engagement with a brand they are likely to spend more. They also expect more from these brands in the form of two-way interaction, starting with the company’s website and online presence.

These factors show without a doubt that long before you embark on designing or revamping your company website, a marketing agency needs to conduct exhaustive discovery processes to gather all the information required.

Please contact us for more information on how our brand design company in Raleigh carries out the discovery needed for an effective website.