This is the second in a series of blog posts detailing the design and development of our new agency website. While we will continue to evolve the site over time, I wanted to write about the process and what we’ve learnt along the way. If you missed part 1, check it out.

Having established the business goals that we, as an organisation, want to achieve, it was time to focus on our target audience. Everyone who runs a business has an ideal customer or client – the super rich, frivolous spender, who is willing to try out any of your suggestions – but it would be unwise to tailor your website to this user persona if, in fact, that type of customer is out of reach. With us, we wanted to be realistic about who our target market is currently, and also in the next three years. The following characteristics are what we look for in potential clients:

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs)

We have to be honest with ourselves that none of the big names in the world would hire us now because we aren’t an established brand yet. If we were to try and pitch for work to O2, Tesco or Sony, it’s unlikely we would be hired. The more realistic clients for us are small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) with annual turnovers of £250,000 to £3million. We are particularly interested in the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), which is a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange. It includes businesses that are successful and growing, which means they have the marketing budgets that would allow us to carry out our in-depth process.

E-Commerce businesses

The best part about working on e-commerce sites is the opportunity it gives to measure success. With other websites, testing whether it is doing a good job at garnering interest in a product or generating leads is not an exact science. E-commerce sites can show us success for the business down to the last penny, and using analytics we can track the customer journey from the moment they enter the site, until they have checked out. E-commerce clients also give us an opportunity to tie our income to performance, where we can take a percentage of their increase in profit.

Companies that are required to have a website by law

Some organisations must have a public website for legislative or regulatory reasons, much like the AIM companies mentioned above. It would be unwise for us to ignore these types of customers because the argument about the need for a website has already been won. There will be no resistance from the stakeholders who don’t believe a website is necessary for their organisation, and so the time is better spent on discussing new site features and functionality.

Companies that have a marketing department and allocated budget

In our experience, businesses that do not have a proper marketing department with an allocated budget, are more reluctant to spend the money required to make a website redesign worthwhile. By working with a marketing department, they can often be used as an ally when negotiating the need for certain website functionality with the businesses owner. Often, marketing professionals have a greater understand of the power of a website to generate business, and will give weight to discussions on return-on-investment.

Companies seeking long-term website evolution

We also want to work with companies who appreciate the need for long-term monitoring and evolution of a website. When a website launches it is the beginning of something, not the end, where an iterative cycle can begin to improve its weaknesses, and capitalise on its strengths. Working with such a client is ideal for us because it shows their understanding that success on the web isn’t free, it takes time, patience and money.

Companies involved in film, music and home entertainment

Strictly from a creative output perspective, working with people involved in pop culture will give us opportunities to build really visually stunning, artistic websites. It might even boost our street cred, too.

Conclusion

Establishing characteristics of our target market allowed us to make decisions on our website structure and content. In the next post in this series, I will discuss our users’ goals and how they dictated what content we included on our website.