Many different types of buyers visit a business website – users of the company’s product, economic buyers, and influencers. But do business websites speak to the needs of their different constituencies?
What visitors usually see on a company’s homepage is all about the company – the features of its product, its value proposition, news about the company. Which is ok, but it’s probably not what most visitors are looking for when they first arrive.
One industry though consistently defies this trend. Organizations in this industry know that their customers are young and nervous. They are typically first-time buyers. It’s one of the most important purchases this buyer will make.
What industry is this? Colleges and universities in the United States. Colleges know that their first-time buyers (high school students), economic buyers (parents), and college counselors (influencers) are looking for different information. So the home page of most schools immediately guides these constituents to the information they are looking for.
The picture below from Johns Hopkins is typical of how these pages are laid out.
And here you can see some detail from the page that lists the category of visitor. Immediately these visitors are able to orient themselves and go to the information that interests them most.
Once inside these sites, colleges make it crystal clear to these nervous high school students exactly what they need to do at each stage of the buying process.
I grabbed these screen shots from the Hopkins site, but Hopkins is hardly unique. The layout for most colleges is very similar. It’s one industry that addresses the needs of different buyers and the stages of their journey.
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