How to Design a Persona-Centric Website Experience

Face it: your website isn't just about you. After all, the main reason you even have one is to attract visitors that you can market to and later convert into leads and customers for your business, right? So shouldn't you cater your website -- and the experiences you provide there -- to those very visitors? When people land on your website, they usually ask themselves, “What’s in it for me?” And as a marketer, you need to be able to deliver an experience that makes it clear to those visitors exactly what's in it for them, and why they should care.

That's why it's so crucial to craft your website's design, content, and experience with your business' buyer personas in mind. In fact, Gleanster research identifies a direct correlation between the amount of time a prospect spends on a company website engaging with relevant content and the likelihood that those interactions will lead to a sale. And according to survey data captured for the Q1 2012 Gleansight benchmark report Web Content Management, a majority of companies within the B2B realm are investing in technologies, capabilities, and resources to bring the concept of web content personalization to life, making it obvious that businesses are realizing that a "one-size-fits-all" approach is less effective than one that provides content tailored to specific segments of site visitors.

Here, we'll discuss how to design your website in a way that puts your buyer personas first, amplifying the effects of your already stellar inbound marketing.

The Importance of Buyer Personas in Website Design

Before you embark on a website redesign, one of the first things you should consider is your business' buyer personas (sometimes also referred to as 'customer personas' or 'marketing personas'). Buyer personas are the result of slicing your target audience into individual groups of people. These people are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.

For instance, if you're a marketing manager for a hotel that is looking to bring in new business, you might target five distinct buyer personas: an independent business traveler, a corporate travel manager, an event planner, a vacationing family, and a couple planning their wedding reception. If you think about it, all of these distinct personas have very different interests and needs. A website approach that speaks to these needs in aggregate, or in general, will fall short in its ability to answer the "What's in it for me?" question specific to each individual buyer persona. However, a website approach that directly addresses the particular needs of each individual persona will make the answer to "What's in it for me?" clearer and more personalized, contributing to a much more successful website.

So if you haven't already, invest the time into identifying your business' different buyer personas. Depending on your business, you could have as few as 1 or 2, or as many as 10-20! Consider the following when building your buyer personas, and for even more in-depth information on the topic, check out this checklist of questions to ask when developing buyer personas:

Segment by Demographics: Start developing personas by researching your existing customer base to identify the most common buyers for your products and services. You may have several different types of buyers, so give each one a detailed description, including name, job title or role, industry or company info, and demographic info.Identify Their Needs: What are the biggest problems they are trying to solve? What do they need most? What information are they typically searching for? What trends are influencing their business or personal success?Develop Behavior-Based Profiles: What do they do online? Are they active on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks? What kind of search terms do they use? What kind of information do they tend to consume online? Which of your products do they spend the most time researching? How do they use those products?

Spending the time to clearly identify your business' buyer personas is well worth it, as this information will also be helpful as you create content to fuel your efforts in other marketing channels such as social media, email marketing, and lead nurturing. When executing your various marketing campaigns, you'll need to adapt the messaging of your content to fit the needs of your different buyer personas.

How to Design Your Website for Your Buyer Personas

Now that you've got a clear understanding of your business' various buyer personas and what makes them tick, you can start to cater your website experience to the interests of these different customer segments.

Include Choose Your Own Adventure-Style Links on Your Homepage

That's right; choosing your own adventure isn't just great reading for preteens. Consider including links on your homepage or in your website's navigation that allow visitors to self-select who they are to receive the most relevant content and website experience possible. This eliminates any question of what the site visitor should do next, and it allows you to more easily channel your visitors and expose them to certain content on your website, giving you more control over their actions.

In the example below, which is a screenshot of the HubSpot homepage from early 2011, we asked new visitors to self-select their persona choosing from HubSpot's two main buyer personas -- business owners and marketing professionals. Clicking one led the site visitor to a landing page with content tailored to that persona's specific interests and needs.

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