Who is this website for, anyway?
Clients, we love you. You give us insight. You give us knowledge. You challenge us on a daily basis. You continually set the bar for excellence higher and higher. You give us, as an agency, a reason to exist.
We create websites, apps and ads for your brands. We do this all day, everyday and we’re happy to do it. But at the end of the day we all, collectively, have to remember, those digital assets that we create BECAUSE of you are not actually FOR you.
Clients, you are not typically your own website traffic (unless of course we’re creating an intranet!). You’re not buying your own products through the web. You’re not reading your own articles and being influenced by your own marketing strategies, messaging and tactics. You’re not subscribing to your own newsletters and ECRM programs. Or if you are, your company probably shouldn’t measure those interactions as business goal success stories.
So if our success is not measured on the success of our clients’ interaction with their own projects why are so many projects driven by what ‘we’ –clients and agency– want? Shouldn’t we be delivering creative solutions based on what the target audience (AKA ‘users’) NEED?
It sounds simple enough. But it can require a lot of focus and perseverance on all sides. It requires everyone – all the way from the client, to strategy to account management to project management to creative to constantly ask some challenging questions from a different perspective.
Rather than asking questions like this:
• How do we get our marketing message across?
• Where should we display our multiple points of difference?
• How much of our product can we fit on the page?
Why don’t we start asking questions like this, early and often?
• Why does this digital project need to exist? What purpose does it serve to your target audience? Who is your target audience?
• Why will your users visit this website? (No really, why? Would you?) How will they get there? Will they return? Why?
• Why will your target find this content meaningful, beneficial and useful? (Not just will they but WHY will they?)
I promise you, once the focus is shifted towards your target audiences needs vs. what the rest of us want the solutions are smarter, clearer and often surprising. Above all it’s much easier to craft valuable content for your site visitors. Everyone is happy.
So rather than asking our clients, or ourselves what we want our digital projects to be, start by asking who the target is, what they need and why and keep the focus of the project centered around those questions. The answers will surprise you.
