As you can see from my brainstorm there are a few areas in which I need to cover in initial research before I can start considering the technical requirements. A lot of the elements in the brainstorm I have already covered in my blog such as typography.
Something I found interesting was the flow of content, from a sales background I recognise there five major steps to closing a sale with a customer. I understand that it is different on the web as you can’t hear what they’re saying and you can’t talk to them, but you can still apply the same principles. The five steps to closing a sale are:
1 – Making sure you understand your customers needs, and making your service relevant to them. This is done by understanding your target audience which I have already done in my research.
2 – Come across as confident and trustworthy, as they will only put trust in you if you trust in yourself. In normal situations you would build rapport with the customer so that you become friendly and someone they can trust. As I can’t do this through the web, I will have to use other resources that available such as using colour, typography, content and design to create such an experience.
3 – Pitch your service/product to the customer, and as we don’t know anything about the specific customer I have to be very broad in how we approach this. This has to relate to everything single customer, essentially we are pitching blind, with umbrella phrases and statements that will relate to vast amount of people visit the site.
4 – Objection handling is usually where the customer would present their reasons for not wanting the service/product and you turn round and use hard facts to win them around. Again this is not possible on the web, so we have to consider alternative methods such as a FAQ page which is easily relatable and maybe a testimonial page.
5 – Closing the sale is the most important of all steps but also relies on the previous steps being completed properly. You sum up all relevant information, relate to the customer with the information you know about them all while making them feel like your doing them a favour, they are getting something valuable.
Using this approach you could turn a casual visit to the site into a lead for the company, and potentially a sale. Once completing all five steps you provide the customer with the telephone number so they can call the company.
So, explaining how the flow of the page works, I also need to work out the actual content of the site. Firstly the most important thing is the homepage with the contact detail, secondly the portfolio of work for the customer to be able to look at and see the quality of the service provided, this should have rollover images with before and after shots with feedback from the customer. Lastly there should be an about us page for the customer to read a bit about the company so they can decide themselves if they like the sound of the company. The about page should contain details the company, how many staff they employ, what year they were founded, their values and vision.
In line with certain sales techniques that I am aware of from a previous job, offering a guaranteed better rate than any competition is a good way to win over customers, also offering free incentives will mean the customer will feel like they are getting a better service.
Design elements that I need to consider are colours and typography, I need to make sure they are relevant to the client needs and appeal to it’s audience.
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