Growing as a Marketer and as a User: Review
There’s always that one phrase you hear constantly when you work at any business: “ The customer is always right”. But in all the companies I worked for, be it B2B or B2C organisations, I knew this wasn’t an adage we followed and I never thought to question why.
In my journey to grow in marketing, my next step led me to rediscover the importance of user-centric marketing.
Most of us marketers are typically focused on one thing when it comes to growth — creating a more streamlined funnel for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue and Referrals (AARRR). We become so enveloped in the process of experimentation and analysing, that we sometimes forget whom we are targeting.
In this course in CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Mini-Degree, I was forced to take a step back and put myself in the shoes of my consumer. This is the heart of user-centric marketing.
So why do we need user-centric marketing?
Think to yourself, whom are you marketing to and what problems are you trying to solve? The answer is pretty straightforward, you need to know your audience, their interests, objections, goals and anything else relevant to your business.
But to get to the user, we need to hear from the users themselves.
This means that we need to constantly remind ourselves of our consumer and design our strategies keeping them in mind.
Conducting and Using User Research
Empathy Mapping
The first and possibly the easiest way to get into the mind of a user is by using something known as empathy mapping.
An empathy map covers all the necessary broad topics to help you identify your customer. It is an invaluable tool to help you design campaigns that are more user-centric rather than what your organisation might deem is best. Here’s a great article on how to conduct an empathy mapping workshop.
Audience Building through Surveys
A survey is a tool we’re all familiar with, but not many of us know how to use it correctly. Quite often a survey is designed poorly and doesn’t fetch you enough data. Here an important thing to remember with surveys is to always keep it short and to the point to make it easier for users to fill out. Offering incentives to users who partake in it can also be a great way to collect more data. With specific surveys, you not only create your audience, but you also gain valuable insights which can influence your design and copy.
Meeting people 1:1
The concept of meeting your daily users, one on one seemed ridiculous to me until I faced it myself. The manager of my local gym approached me to understand how I liked the product. From my experience, it’s hard to get users to actively critique a product or service. Therefore, you need to establish some trust and even perhaps offer some incentives. The result is eye-opening and worth it!
Customer Journey Mapping
Traditional persona-based marketing techniques always assumed that a customer who was identified under a particular bucket/audience group would never change with time. Here’s where customer journey mapping becomes important to cater to users at every step of the funnel. Organisations should typically conduct workshops with frontline staff and teams with user research to create a customer journey map that becomes the base of future strategies. With this simple 5–6 step map, you can create significant change in your user’s journey with your product or service.
Here’s a small example of one, but you can design it any way you like with your team!
Getting the Most Out of your User Research
Now that we know ways to conduct user research, we need to leverage the maximum amount of information that we can out of them. This starts with creating user story cards.
User story cards are symbolic representations of 3 main points to describe the user: Who they are, What they want to do and How can they do it?
These simple answers can shape your design and copy by helping you channel keywords for the brand message, personalisation in campaigns and dividing audience to target them better.
User Testing and where to use it
User testing, you might think is something you do only after you complete your website or product, but that’s not true, you can use user inputs for everything, and it is highly recommended that you do!
To Design Campaigns
User inputs to understand how they perceive your brand and message is very important in designing your campaign and copy. This saves you valuable testing time as well. Now when we say take inputs, it doesn’t mean you outright ask users what campaigns they respond to, but rather use subtle methods to understand how they perceive your brand and build from that information
To test prototypes
Before creating your website, usability testing through users is very important. Running both facilitated and unfacilitated tests can help you gain insights to uncover different problems you would not have even considered. Tests like 5-second tests or Word cloud survey tests are just a few to name in addition to prototype testing.
Are there any real benefits to this whole exercise?
There’s no doubt that many people do consider user research and inputs to be a time investment heavy process, one that does not produce an immediate return on investment, but this isn’t true!
Consider the current age we live in with digital media at our fingertips, it’s no surprise that our consumers have changed with the times and expect us to go along with the same. Consumers these days are impatient and quick to criticise. Just take the example of ‘DellHell’ that created a problem for Dell, all because of a single review that spread.
So the answer to this question is, yes, there are many benefits, most of which you don’t notice because it is not the drastic presence of new sales but rather the absence of negative reviews and bad publicity.
Of course, over time, you will see the impact of good user-centric marketing on your revenue, but in the short run, you will avoid setbacks.
To know more about user-centric marketing, check out CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing mini-degree. Most of the views and advice I have given in this article are by Paul Boag, an exceptional teacher.
