Most business owners understand the importance of visually stunning and functional homepage design.
A beautifully designed homepage is a great way to leave a positive impression on first-time web visitors. It’s crucial for engaging your target audience. It can help draw on-the-fence consumers into the sales funnel. And it’s a huge help in getting your sales up.
Yet, despite a general understanding of the importance of web design in facilitating positive business outcomes, many brands still fail to intentionally apply design tactics to reach their desired outcomes.
Do you want your website to play a more active role in your brand’s success? Here’s how to align your homepage with your brand’s business goals. Let’s dive in.
Defining Your Desired Outcomes
The first step toward optimizing your homepage to do whatever you want it to do is to define your desired business goals.
You see, a general idea of success — like improved sales and better customer retention — can be enough to guide your web optimization in the right direction. Nevertheless, exceptional results only come from strategic planning.
To develop an effective homepage design strategy, you need to decide what you want to accomplish, how you want to do it, and how much work you’re willing to put in.
Setting SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) is a great way to cover all the basics.
On the one hand, this type of planning can help you start thinking strategically about using homepage design to reach your desired outcomes.
On the other hand, this tactic can help identify performance metrics that matter, allowing you to streamline your activities and preventing you from wasting resources on web design tactics that don’t contribute to your overall vision of brand success.
How to Align Homepage Design With Different Business Goals
Now that you understand the importance of having a strategy to improve business outcomes, it’s time to start exploring potential tactics for reaching your objectives.
Elevating Conversion Rates
For most business owners, high conversion rates are the best indicator of doing something right. Moreover, remember there’s a direct link between conversions (namely sales) and profits. Hence, it’s no surprise that most brands focus their homepage optimization efforts on elevating this KPI.
But how do you optimize your homepage to boost conversion rates?
First, define the types of conversions you want to encourage.
If you want to make more sales, dedicate high-value homepage sections — like the first screenful, where web visitors spend 57% of their page viewing time — to highlighting value propositions, calling visitors to action with CTA buttons, and building emotional buy-in with visuals.
Check out how Orebella does it. Knowing its target audience wants innovative luxury skincare products, this brand optimizes its homepage hero section to encourage aspirational purchases.
Source: orebella.com
Of course, not all businesses can optimize their homepages for sales — especially not when dealing with a complex or lengthy sales cycle. In these cases, focusing on lead generation yields much better outcomes.
This is precisely what Start in Wyoming does. Ultimately, the brand understands that opening an LLC is not something its target audience will do on a whim. So, instead of wasting resources on getting prospects to convert right away, this business chooses to optimize for lead generation.
This helps quickly convert bottom-of-the-funnel prospects already close to a decision. It also enables Start in Wyoming to gently nurture awareness-stage prospects into qualified leads and customers through personalized marketing strategies and communication.
Source: startinwyoming.com
Achieving Branding Goals
How people perceive your brand directly impacts your ability to reach your target audience and convert new customers.
If you can position your business in a way that aligns with what your ideal customers want — whether that’s a reputation of exclusivity, trustworthiness, expertise, reliability, etc. — then you’ll have a much easier time getting people to buy into your solutions.
And the thing is, your homepage can play a crucial role in your branding efforts.
Seeing that it’s a digital calling card for your business — and oftentimes the first place people will interact with your brand — how you design your homepage will directly influence how potential customers think about your organization.
With this in mind, when optimizing your homepage to align with your business goals, pay attention to whether your design choices reflect your desired brand perception outcomes.
For instance, if you know that brand trust is an important purchase-influencing factor for your target audience, explore opportunities to emphasize your organization’s experience, expertise, and reliability.
Check out how Eden Emerald Buyers Agent does it with several homepage sections dedicated to establishing its credibility, showcasing social proof, and transparently communicating key info about its services.
Source: eebuyersagent.com.au
Or, if your branding goals consist of positioning your solutions as desirable luxury items, then you could do something similar to Maison Yoshiki, a high-fashion brand that aims to infuse the concepts of fashion and lifestyle with a glamorous rock-inspired approach.
Source: maisonyoshikiparis.com
Improving Market Penetration
Optimizing your website for conversions or investing in on-site branding are excellent methods of investing in your brand’s growth. But the simple fact is that market penetration is one of the most elementary prerequisites of business success.
That’s why it’s crucial that your entire website plays an active role in building brand and product awareness and that it’s easily discoverable by your target audience.
The easiest way to achieve this is, naturally, to invest in SEO.
By ensuring that your web content is easily discoverable by the people it’s meant to help, you can effectively improve your market penetration and even create a market for your products where there was none before.
And the thing is, you shouldn’t just rely on blog content to accomplish this goal. In fact, if you can incorporate valuable and educational resources into your homepage and landing pages, you can effectively draw qualified leads into your sales funnel and nudge them toward the mid-to-low stages of the sales cycle. Check out how Business for Sale did that with the extensive FAQ section on this landing page:
Source: businessforsale.com.au
Naturally, optimizing your homepage to maximize brand discovery and elevate market penetration isn’t something you can only do with written content.
Instead, prioritize addressing your target audience’s pain points, wants, or aspirations. Then find effective and efficient methods to remove their frustrations.
You can do this with educational video content that introduces your offer as a solution to a pain point that’s common yet often overlooked in your industry. This is what Real Estate Skills does with the short explainer on its homepage.
Source: realestateskills.com
Or, you could take an even more direct approach and develop easy-to-use interactive tools for your homepage that instantaneously solve web visitors’ pain points.
Something like the QuillBot Grammar Checker is a great way of elevating market penetration because it effectively resolves a common user need while leaving space for the brand to encourage web visitors to sign up for the Premium version of its product to access advanced functionalities.
Source: quillbot.com
Enhancing Customer Satisfaction and Relationships
Lastly, if your business goals consist of positioning your brand as the go-to in your industry, you’ll need to provide the best possible customer experience in your industry.
Fortunately, there’s plenty you can do to align your homepage with this goal.
For starters, make customer support extremely easily accessible.
In addition to multiple highly visible contact points on your website, consider adding a live chat/support hub button option to your homepage. This can make it easier for new and existing customers to request assistance. Plus, it’s a great way to efficiently resolve your customers’ pain points, elevating their satisfaction and improving their chances of becoming loyal customers of your brand. Take a look at how Cradlewise did it in the example below:
Source: cradlewise.com
Or, if you want to focus your homepage optimization efforts on nurturing loyalty, why not do something similar to Waterdrop? This brand incentivizes its customers to subscribe to automatic refills by offering 20% off as well as more affordable shipping options.
Source: waterdrop.com
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re looking for a complete overhaul of your brand’s homepage design or simply want to make a few small tweaks that will help you grow your business, the tips outlined in this guide are a great place to start.
To ensure the best possible outcomes, don’t just implement these tactics blindly. Instead, prioritize defining your primary business goals. Explore ways to support them without spreading your marketing and web design too thin by doing everything at once.
Finally, if you want to be 100% sure that your hard work is paying off, don’t forget to track and measure your results. Though it’s not nearly as exciting as making visually impressive design changes, analyzing web performance is a core indicator of the effectiveness of your design. More importantly, it’s a great way to uncover potential opportunities for growth or identify tactics that may not be producing the ROI you need them to deliver.
