When at the recent VentureFest event in Glasgow Science Centre I met lots of interesting businesses: one of which was the The Wee Agency. The owner was there and projected a gregarious character giving me one of their booklets, which was an overview of data they commissioned regarding online consumer behaviour.
The number one point I will take away from this review, and you should too, is taking the time to make the personal touch regarding the use of technology. This relates to knowing your customers enough to communicate to them through the barrier of technology and getting them to then act.
Interesting communication, and the rise of it was mentioned, was said to be important to the future of your website. The content should be interesting and relevant to target visitors. This seems like common sense but it was shown that certain sectors do better than others in this regards. Sectors reported to be best at this were retail and leisure with the worst said to be agriculture and construction.
Thinking beyond the website was shown important in driving target visitors to your website. Search engines, social media channels, recommendations and the website usability were all listed as important issues to the overall health of your website and your Google Analytics. In fact the growing importance of social media was identified as a critical source of new visitors with offers and discounts reported to be the most useful. Then: relevant content, videos, friend referrals, quick responses to inquiries and up to date news all listed as important with decreasing value.
The offending issues of a bad website were listed to be: lack of information, poor design / lack of professionalism, difficult navigation, a lack of information about the company in general when searching, slow site loading speed, not able to see who are the people within the company, no social media links and being able to use mobile devices to easily use the website. So if you think any of these are applicable to your website please do something about it sooner rather than later.
The review also showed differences between B2B and the B2C online consumer behaviour with the main difference being B2B consumers less likely to use online shops and e-commerce; instead opting to get in touch via forms, email or telephone. This would indicate that those websites would be better suited crafting their content and visitor path to reflect this reluctance and view the website as a lead generation tool, rather than a direct selling platform.
I hope this short blog gives you food for thought regarding the current behaviour of online consumers. If you have a taste for more or have any queries to how my design services can help you in these matters please get in touch as I would love to hear from you.
