When your website is failing to connect with your audience, there are some big red flags. Few site clicks. No social sharing. Poor sales. Customer complaints.

So what’s the problem? Why isn’t your site resonating with your audience and keeping them engaged?

The answer is often found in poor website design that hasn’t kept up with the times. What worked 5 or 10 years ago simply doesn’t work today. In fact, at 11outof11, we’ve noticed 5 trends in digital marketing that tend to separate the good websites from the bad.

Good websites:

1. Break through the noise of the internet with personality and creativity
2. Offer streamlined content that connects with the right channels
3. Keep a laser focus on what the audience wants
4. Track and refine site success for maximum benefit
5. Are redesigned annually to stay modern and relevant

Let’s zoom in on #3: focusing on what the audience wants. It’s a critical part of running a website that captures customers’ attention and supports the long-term success of your company.

Get to Know Your Unique Audience

No other company has an audience exactly like yours. Although you might have competitors in the marketplace, nobody else has your exact set of site visitors. They’re special.

That’s why your website is actually a vault of valuable data. Although it’s easy to think of your site as sort of an advertisement or salesperson, it’s also a wealth of important information about your very special audience members.

Take some time to look through your website data for helpful insights. Explore the numbers behind your site. Look for key indicators of your website’s performance like:

• Time on site
• Time on individual pages
• Which pages are getting the most first views
• Which pages are getting the most clicks
• Which individual links and photos are getting clicks
• Which blog posts are most-viewed
• Whether you’re getting likes and comments on your posts

The numbers might make your head spin at first, but after a while you’ll start to see patterns emerge. You’ll see what your customers are doing, and it might just shake up some assumptions about how well your website is performing.

Go a Few Steps Deeper

If you take your audience analysis a few steps further, you can gather even more valuable information that will help with your web strategy. You can learn more about your traffic sources, understand the topics your audience tends to enjoy, or even explore remarketing, which is reconnecting with your highest value audience members.

By digging deeper into analyzing your audience, you learn things about your audience like:

• Which messages on your site caused them to take action (or not)
• Which sites they visited just before yours
• What types of other messages they’re interested in across the internet
• Which social media they do and don’t use
• Which devices, browsers, and apps they use

This is extremely valuable information to have on hand as you consider a site redesign. Use it to develop new blog post topics, product offerings, and customer promotions. Create tailored messages that instantly connect with specific members of your audience.

For example, you might see that many of your customers are visiting a well-known competitor just before visiting your site. That’s great news! It means your competitor is doing something to lose their attention, which is an opportunity for you to offer those specific customers a special offer.

Give Them What They Want

It may sound obvious, but it’s amazing how often this advice is ignored: Give your audience what they want. Don’t just brazenly push a certain product or service because you want to sell more of that item. It doesn’t work that way.

In their day-to-day lives, your audience isn’t thinking in terms of, “What vendor should I hire today?” They think like problem solvers. “How do motivate my employees?” or “Where do I get help making sure we’re 100% compliant?”

To look at it another way, think of your all-time most popular blog post (or site page, or social media post). What was the topic? Did it surprise you? What did it tell you about your audience?

Let’s say you’re a portrait photography studio that also does a few wedding photography gigs a year. But your all-time most popular blog post wasn’t about your primary business. It was something surprising, like, “7 Reasons Your Winter Wedding Photographer Sucks.”

What does this tell you about your audience? Well, it certainly says there’s opportunity in the wedding photography market. It also hints that “winter wedding” could be a great SEO keyword for you to use. The word “sucks” suggests that your audience might be unhappy with a current or past photographer. That can all be very informative information, from a marketing perspective.

Is your mind racing yet? If you can start thinking this way - like your audience thinks - you’ll find it easier to present meaningful information front-and-center on your website.

Make it Easy to Take Action

Maybe you have lots of interesting content on your website, and you’re getting lots of traffic, but your sales are low. People browse through your content, but they don’t stay to make a purchase. What now?

It’s time to take a closer look at your overall site design and CTAs (calls-to-action). Maybe there’s a problem with your site’s user-friendliness. Here are a few questions to ask:

• Is there a clear, intuitive logic to using your site?
• Wherever you are on the site, is it easy to see the next step?
• Can you jump from a blog post to an ordering page with one click?
• Do you have a big, bold “shopping cart” button or other eye-catching CTA?

If you’re answering no to these questions, you need some web redesign. Your audience is struggling to use your site, even if they’re really interested in what you’re offering. Work with a website design and marketing company to analyze and improve your website performance.

At 11outof11, we tackle many different types of web design. Our passion is making it easy for our customers to do business successfully. We have affordable website design and development services that will make a dramatic improvement in how you connect with your audience.

Connect with us now for an energizing discussion about refreshing your web design. We’re ready to turn your site into a bold, memorable experience for your audience.