Marketing on Internet Road 

Most websites are built from the perspective of the business owner or web developer.  This means that even if it’s done right it will only sell to one type of person.  Take into account the fact that your prospects are different. Using Conversion Architecture helps to set a path to customer profiling and getting the different prospects to find what it is they are looking for, resulting in more business to the website owner.

When customers come to your website they are looking for a specific piece of information or they have a specific problem.  If you are able to address that specific problem for them, and then help them solve it, you will get the business. 

All of your prospects are potential customers, but...:

• They want different things
• They have different problems and/or needs
• They are at different points within their buying cycle
• They will make the buying decision in a different way

it is important to understand this concept: every single prospect is different and should be treated differently. 




While each individual is unique, it is not possible to directly appeal exactly to that unique person, so we group customers into categories.  Each category represents a profile of who a typical customer from that category is, and what they are looking for.  Every business should have at least 2-3 categories, but should try to have no more then 12. 

Beware of the average website visitor! Referring to all of your visitors (prospects) as the same will probably cost you in losing conversions you could have had.

Your Home Page as the Tool for Customer Profiling
The main purpose of a home page is to identify (profile) and categorize your prospects and funnel them through the section of the website that has the information they are looking for.

You start with a large pool of prospects who enter the home page.  Then you allow them to qualify who they are and they choose which path they would like to go down.

With the importance of search engines and the fact that many of your visitors (if not most of them) will get directly to your internal pages, the home page had become less important page. However, if you got traffic to your home page (either directly or from someone that landed on an internal page and wants to check the home page), use it correctly to reflect the answers of your customers profiles so they can easily find what they are looking for and continue their visit in the website's most suitable page or section for them.


Ways to Profile Your Customers

• Some of the ways to profile your customers will include:
• The problem they are having
• The solution they desire
• The products/services you offer
• Geographically
• Demographically
• Who they are/how do they see themselves
• Where are they in their buying cycle

You can profile your customers by more then one of these but you should avoid having too many profiles on your home page as this will only confuse the customers.  Probably the best way to profile your customers is by the problem they are having because most people will be able to identify with their problems. 

The key is to get the person to say "that’s me".

It is also possible to profile them and then profile them again on the next page to make the information more specific.  An example of this would be what country are you from, then on the second page what service are you interested in. 


In conclusion, use customer profiling as part of the conversion architecture in your website design. Start with identifying your customers' needs, create categories and present them with the correct options that will drive them to the pages that are most relevant for them, aiming at getting conversions.