How to create one website for two different audiences

Here’s a dilemma: Your business serves two different audiences. They each have different needs. They each are aware of the other audience—and may well be wary of them. 
 
Yet you need to serve them both. 
 
What do you do? 
 
Do you create two different websites? That is, one for each?
 
You could. But we think there’s a simpler, more elegant way.
 
A twofold dilemma
 
The situation we described above is common: 

• We’ve worked on websites for recruiting firms. They want to attract companies who need employees; that’s who pays them. At the same time, they need to attract candidates (i.e., potential employees) in order to serve them up to the employers. 

 

• We worked with a firm that serves HNWIs (high net-worth individuals), as well as a certain sector of professional-service providers who serve those HNWIs. The professional-service providers are often a gateway/referral source to the HNWIs, although sometimes the situation is reversed: The HNWI will come to our client’s firm, and will need the help of a professional-service provider. 

 

• We worked with a company that wanted to offer the world’s best computer coders to the internal departments at other companies. Just like the recruiting firms, they had to work both sides of the fence. 

 
So this is a common situation. Think about your client base, and the prospects you’d like to serve. Are they really all in one homogenous “bucket”?
 
The self-selecting gate
 
The simplest way to shepherd these crowds through your site is to give them a simple selection, right up front. Imagine a home page that is truly minimal. We’ll use the recruiting firm as an example: 

• You’ll see the recruiting firm’s logo and tagline. 

 
Below it, you’ll see two buttons: 

• “For Employers” 

 

• “For Candidates” 

 
There. Done. Simple as that. 
 
When you arrive at this site, you can’t get confused. You’re either an employer or a candidate, and there’s nothing for you to do but click one of those two big buttons. Thus you self-select your “side” of the site and enter it. 
 
As you might guess, each “side” of the site is similar looking, but different enough to avoid confusion. Imagine, for example, the exact same layout, but with different color palettes. 
 
Once the visitor is on their “side” of the site, it’s basically a self-contained experience. They land at “their” home page, where they get more-focused messaging and navigation. And they get the full panoply of options they’d expect: “Services.” “About.” “Recent Posts.” "Contact us." And so on. 
 
Some devilish details
 
As we’d mentioned above, the two different sides of the website are similar yet different. So just in case the visitor of one side accidentally stumbles onto the other side, they’ll know immediately that they’re on the wrong side of the fence, because it will look different. They’ll thus need to click their browser’s “Back” button to return to familiar territory. 
 
This leads to an opportunity, and a caveat: 
 
The opportunity: The “About” page content that you offer to one audience is likely 95 percent the same as the “About” page content you’ll be offering to your other audience. And aside from the color change, the layout is the same, too. 
 
This translates to a big bang-for-the-buck cost saving, in terms of content creation and site-development time. You can effectively copy-and-paste Version 1 to create the bulk of Version 2. So do this as much as possible. Start with the bigger/more difficult “side” of the site, and build it out. Then leverage its parts for Side 2. 
 
The caveat: You need to assume that members of Audience 1 will occasionally stumble onto pages designed for Audience 2, and vice versa. And since you want both of them as your clients, you’ll need to offend neither.
 
This is a messaging/copywriting challenge. You don’t want those HNWIs to think that you’re helping the professional-service providers to profit off of them. Similarly, you don’t want those professional-service providers to see anything that suggests you might interfere with their relationships—or revenue streams—with those HNWIs. 
 
So you need to craft the messaging carefully. And then you need to read each “side” through the eyes of each audience, and see if anything looks amiss. 
 
Making it happen
 
We recently worked with a web-design firm that was a vendor to one of our “two-audience” clients. The lead person at that firm was totally confused by our proposal of a “two-button home page.” They hadn’t seen a site like that before. They were scared it wouldn’t work. 
 
Now that that site is up and running, that person is totally sold on the idea. And so are our client’s prospects: The site traffic statistics confirm it. 
 
Here at Copel Communications, we also serve two broad swaths of clients: 1) consultancies, and 2) ad agencies and internal departments we call “Creatives,” since they hire us for creative services. 
 
And guess what? Our home page has two big buttons, too. 
 
Need help with that bifurcated website challenge? Contact us. We’d be happy to help. 

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