Website Goals: What Do Customers Want From a Website Online

If you’re a marketing or business leader, your website goals include wanting customers to engage with your website and buy your products or services.

But you’ve probably learned by now that you’re good at getting in your way of success. I’m speaking from experience here.

When we communicate with customers on our website, we have our “business hat” on; which means we do everything backward from how the customer wants to see, hear, and experience it.

In short, we communicate what we want to say—not what they want to hear.

We do this by using photos of our team or our office building instead of photos of our customers using our products or services.

And we explain our services in the most detail but leave out the details that matter most.

And people leave. Never coming back and never buying.

It’s because they’re looking for two things you never give them.

These things aren’t complicated. It’s so stupid that you’ll kick yourself after I tell you.

Here it is…

They’re looking to understand and be understood.

If you give them these two things, no matter what you sell, they’ll want to buy from you. And there’s no better place to communicate those two things than on your website.

Let’s look at how you can use your website to accomplish your customer’s goals, starting with their desire to be understood.

Website Goals #1: To Be Understood

To be understood, your customers must know you care more about their problem than your product. 

Most business leaders can’t seem to make their customers feel understood because they have the curse of knowledge. 

This is something you and your company need to avoid at all costs.

What is the curse of knowledge? The curse of knowledge happens when someone like you knows so much about their products and services they project that knowledge onto their potential customers. You care, and you genuinely think you are doing them a service.

The problem is most customers will only give you a couple of seconds to make your pitch on your website. That means it needs to be easy to understand. And the best way to be easy to understand is to make your pitch less about you and more about them.

Less about your product and more about their problem.

When you do this and communicate with empathy and authority, they’ll trust you and feel like you understand them. 

This works because your competition isn’t doing this. They’re over there strutting their stuff, and you’re over here caring for customers. While they may look better, you’re doing better.

And as I’ve mentioned before, what’s better than padding your pride with a website that stuns impressive is padding your pockets with one that sells.

Now, don’t leave out your product or service from your website altogether because your customers need it to win the day—make sure it’s in its place. 

So before you present your product or service, present your understanding of your customer’s life and pain. They’ll feel understood and want to buy.

Website Goals #2: To Understand

Second, they want to understand HOW your product or service will help them overcome their challenge.

In our website design planning work with clients, I teach much about the difference between information and transformation.

We go super deep in the process, but I’ll distill it into a fundamental principle here for you. 

People will get bogged down and lost if you list all your products and services on your home page. 

Most agencies would tell you to break down your products and services into bite-sized categories so it’s much easier to digest what you sell. That’s good advice and would probably be helpful in many ways. But that advice only touches the surface of the subject.

Your customers aren’t just looking to understand better what you sell or how your product works. They don’t need more features or facts. They don’t need to be bogged down by new releases.

Not that those things aren’t cool because you worked hard on them, but your customers want more. Your customers want much more than that.

They want to understand how your product works for them.

All you have to do is explain it to them.

Let me get practical. 

You know the Skittles tagline, “Taste the rainbow?” Skittles isn’t stupid. That’s precisely what your customers want. They want to taste the transformation they’ll experience when they buy from you.

So, on your website, do this: talk less about your products and more about how your products help your customers.

Make your website an engaging marketing tool—not a painful one

You know your website could be making more money for your business. But when customers don’t understand how your products or services help them, they tune you out and take their dollars elsewhere.

Watch our free video training on How to Build a Really Attractive, High-Converting Website That Makes You Proud.

I’ll guide you through a simple process that will help turn your website into a sales machine because you remove the obstacles that are stopping people from buying from you and implement automated and sustainable sales systems that could actually DOUBLE or TRIPLE your revenue.