Market Research: Before You Start Building Your Website

You are on your way to creating a website as an initial step to establishing an online presence. Congratulations! You’re on the right track! But wait, hold up! Designing a website does not only consider coding knowledge. Before hiring a Web Development Company in Reno to go technical and set up the site, you have to sit down and do an important step that businesses should do before entering the world of digital marketing.

This step is called market research, and it should never be underestimated. Market research is an effort to get to know one’s target markets and competitors to determine if your product/service or website will be feasible and successful. Therefore, it would be best to integrate market research as an essential business strategy when creating a website.

Here in Stack Mode Marketing Group, we create 100% custom and highly effective websites for our clients to generate more business. Through market research, we learn about your business and your goals, helping customize your website to your specific needs.

Having a good website does not only mean having a visually aesthetic one but also invites your target audience, delivers well, and solves real-life problems. Another thing to consider is your online visibility. Will your website reach your target audience in the middle of a thousand other similar websites? Market research can help you with that. It provides a sturdy archive of information to serve as the foundation for all your website design and development strategies. It gives insight into many things that will help you develop your website, attract your target audience, and engage and drive conversions.

Three fundamental aspects to include in your market research assignment

1.Target Audience and Demographics

First identify a particular group of people who might be interested in your products and services. It is not enough to just know who they are, but also to know their personality, their problems, and desired solutions. In this aspect, imagine being tasked to get a present for a person who is a stranger. Imagine also that despite not knowing the person, you want to put extra effort into getting a gift that he or she will appreciate, which is practically useful and meaningful. How do you proceed? You will have to research about this person. You might want to know their gender, age, hobbies, likes and dislikes, what they do for a living, and other relevant questions. In the process of learning about your target audience, you would like to develop a customer persona. A persona in digital marketing terms is a fictional character that serves as a proxy for your target audience. It represents the user type you expect to engage with your website content. The more you understand your persona/s, the more you can develop your website that directly targets them.

• To learn more about your audience and develop your persona, start your market research with the following valuable questions.
• Who are your target customers?
• What are their key demographics?
• What are their problems? What are their needs?
• What solutions do they need solved?
• What are their interests? What do they value?
• Why would your business be relevant to them? How can you help them?
• Where do they search online? What websites are they using? What social media platforms are they present on?
• Who and what influences their purchase decisions?
• How do they make transactions?

These are some of the fundamental questions required to get to know more about your customers. Your goal is to develop a customer persona that will enable you to connect with your real-life clients personally. Understanding your audience’s wants and needs will help you design and create a website that will naturally appeal to them. Learning about your target market is the most important and one of the primary steps in business, whether it be creating a website or a product. Here in Stack Mode Marketing Group, we especially have experience in working with start-up businesses, and we have helped many before you in terms of target market research.

2. Competition

Competition is fierce in whatever industry. Your business might still be new, but it does not excuse you to start shy and lay low in the competition, which is why your market research should have information about your competitors as well! Identify first your main competitors and then do your research. Apart from knowing how much they earn, here are a few key points that you should know about your competitors:

• How did they create their website?
• What content are they putting up on their website? How does it look?
• Does their website look well-maintained? Is their website SEO optimized?
• What strategies or campaigns are they doing to attract customers?
• How are their clients responding to their websites?

Apart from this, the best way is to evaluate your top competitors’ websites and experience it from a customer’s perspective. Is it user-friendly? Is it engaging and interactive? Is it appealing? Are you enticed to buy it? Research about your competitors will give you insights into why customers are buying from your competitors. If you are still new in the business, you don’t necessarily have to take a competitive approach and perspective if that would seem overwhelming for you in the first place. Instead, you can take a more “friendly” approach and conduct this research with the mindset that you are looking up to these more popular or mainstream businesses as your role models in terms of goals for success. Later on, you can level up your market research to stay competitive in your industry. Get professional help from a Reno Web Development Company with a solid team of researchers who know what, where, and how to research other business websites.

3. Conversion Strategies

Another vital aspect of market researching is conversion strategies that your website can use to transform lookers into customers. Your website will contain basic information about your company and your products and elements of conversion strategies.
Essential webpage elements that can help you score leads include:

• SEO optimized keywords/content
• Powerful headlines
• Call to Actions (CTAs)
• User-friendly features: fast download speed, accessibility, mobile compatibility
• Reviews and testimonials

Knowing which conversion strategy to use will also depend on the information you obtain from knowing your target and competitors. In this aspect, let us focus on SEO. SEO is currently one of the best digital marketing strategies to integrate into your website content. The purpose of SEO is to rank up your website on search engine results to increase the amount of traffic that comes in and out of your website. What’s the use of your newly made website if there is no opportunity for people to come across it? Researching about SEO strategies and implementing them is essential. Many companies even have a designated job position for this! Indeed, SEO is another field of expertise that you should invest in. Simply throwing in keywords will not do. To compile a list of effective keywords, you must know your audience and what topics are relevant for them. You can also use what keywords your competitors use. Or you could hire a Reno web design company who have a team of designer and SEO specialists that can work together to make sure your website is designed to be conversion-ready and SEO optimized.

These are just a few of the basic things you have to include in your market research assignment. Conduct your research well and apply what you have learned in website design. However, you don’t stop here. Don’t make the same mistake as other businesses do. Market research is a dynamic and continuing process. You are learning about a relatively volatile market. Your audience’s interests adapt to trends, and your competitors’ strategies also change. Consumer problems become louder over time which is why your marketing strategies are not here to stay. Even after successfully setting up your website, you still have to conduct research continually. Regular market researching allows businesses to remain competitive and relevant for an extended time. Get in touch with web development services in Reno where a team of researchers can be tasked with regularly conducting market research and website maintenance for you, from pre-launch of your website and beyond.

Think before you act.” This famous quote applies to businesses as well, “Research before you act.” Market research is an essential step before building your website. It allows you to identify your target customers, what your competitors are doing, and what strategies you can integrate in your website. Additionally, market research is a continuing process. If you do not know how to start, get professional help from a web development company Nevada such as Stack Mode Marketing Group. Our team consists of many specialists from web design to research to SEO to make sure that everything is taken into account before and after your website has been established for our website development services.

Can’t wait to create your new business website? Contact us now! Let us see how we can help you start establishing your online presence!