What Role Does The Buyer Have in Your Website Design?

Despite the misconception that the web is the greatest sales tool, websites don’t sell; they help people buy. This simple but fundamental shift in thinking puts your buyer at the center of design.

Putting the buyer at the center sounds easy but in actuality not all buyers are at the same point in the buying cycle and not all personality types buy in the same way. This is a complex system and that’s why a human sales person is better at selling than a website. But don’t worry most websites don’t make it easy to buy and this is where you can leave your competition in the dust.

It’s not simple enough to have a product detail page and a buy button with a good shopping cart. That’s just the minimum to get into the game. If you want to double your online sales and blow the doors off of your competitors your web design needs to go beyond the surface and dive deep into the psychology of your buyer and the buying cycle.

At any one point in time your website has four different types of buyers, browsers, evaluators, purchasers, and customers. Each type has a combination of different personality types in their subconscious that drives their decisions partly based on where they are in their buying cycle, not your selling cycle. This is why it is so important for the two cycles to match and support each other.
Or in other words, help people buy.

Different buyer types have different needs

• Browsers need help finding what they need.
• Evaluators know enough to be dangerous and need more detailed information to help them decide if your product or service is right for their needs.
• Purchasers have made the decision to buy but still need to feel safe while going through your buying process.
• Customers have already completed the purchase but you need to make them feel satisfied so they will purchase again.

The different buying types closely mirrors the steps of the buying decision process.

• Identify the problem
• Search for a solution
• Evaluate alterative solutions
• Decide to purchase
• Purchase
• Reevaluate the purchase

Reprinted from a recent MarketingSherpa post:
Less than 4 out of 10 (38%) B2B marketers say they tailor their content to specific stages of the buying cycle, according to MarketingSherpa’s 2008-2009 Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide.

That means that you can gain a big advantage over 62% of your competitors when you create high-value content that addresses the different needs and questions the buying committee asks at different stages of the buying cycle.

In summary, your site needs to design paths and provide supportive copy, images and taxonomy for each buyer type and each step of the buying process. Design is so much more than simply look and feel when you put your buyer in the center of the design process, after all shouldn’t a website be more about them than about you if it’s going to accomplish your business goals?