Adopting a User-centric Approach

A User-centric approach.

From my previous article, did you wonder what approach was best for growth marketing? In this article, I will talk about User-centric approach and how we can adopt it.

So what is a user-centric approach an why do we need it?

A user-centric approach is simply an approach to marketing that is focused on user satisfaction, understanding their pain points and objections to your product, brand or marketing channel strategy. It seeks to use digital tools to better understand customers and their journey so that a marketing strategy can be designed around them. Okay, so why then do we need a user-centric approach? If you can answer this question, then you should be able to convince others around you and within your workplace about why this approach should be adopted because there are some people that just believe the users do not really matter as long as you are probably making sales and an okay amount of revenue. Well the core reason why we need to adopt a user centric approach to our marketing is because no business can alienate itself from its customers. You have probably heard the phrase “customer is king”, its very true and the digital age has given strength to it. Now all a reputable brand or business needs is a bad comment or feedback from an unhappy customer or maybe not even a customer at all and the brand or business could have a massive PR problem to deal with and if its not properly managed, then it could damage the image of that brand or business. You also need to understand customers pain points and objections about your business because if you cannot identify those pain points, customers begin to get tired and uninterested towards your brand and that will lead to decreased returns on revenue and conversions begin to take a nose dive. So user-centric marketing helps get happier customers and increased sales.

How do we start to adopt a user-centric approach?

We need to start by getting to really know our customers. This is the first thing to do. You need to get to really know your customers because you cannot convince a person you do not know. The better you know your customers, the easier it will be to convince them. Customer behavior is also changing rapidly, so we have to keep up to date and ask the right questions.

So how do we better understand our customers? Avoid the perception that this would be expensive because it involves user research, no, you do not need to spend so much. Start by looking for any existing research within your company even if it may not be up to date, talk to your sales team and other frontline employees that relate with your customers daily. A lot of them have vital information about customers, their objections, comments, expectations etc. Do some analytics, study the data gotten from user’s engagements with your websites, their dwell time and visits. This will show you what they care about and also study the analytics associated with social media, what they post about and share about your product, what questions do they ask and be quick to answer those questions.

Using surveys!

You should also build a picture of your audience using surveys. When running a survey, there are some mistakes you will want to avoid like asking too many questions. Don’t make a survey that is asking too many questions, you will end up with data you don’t even need. Do not as personal questions about your audience instead ask questions about their goals, on your website, their pain points, their objectives, what questions do they want to answer, what tasks they want to complete. Also ask your questions at the right time, don’t just throw a survey at the face of users once they land on your website, allow them to complete their task and then choose the right moment to ask you put out your survey.

Some tips on building a good survey:

·        Use close end surveys. In close end surveys, you set predefined options for the user to select from.

·        Don’t ask personal questions.

·        Be clear what you want to learn so you don’t get the wrong data.

·        Choose the right moment to ask your audience to fill a survey.

·        Offer incentives. Like a giving them a gift for completing the survey.

There you have it with some tips on how to build a good survey. Now, there is a type of survey called top task analysis. A top task analysis is used to identify what tasks users mostly want to complete on a website so that those tasks can be prioritized. It was originally created by Gerry McGovern. It is said that you only have eight seconds to prove to users that that your website is invaluable or else they move on to a competitor. So it is important to run the right questions on your website so people can find questions to answers that they need about your business. How do you run a top task analysis, you first start by brainstorming every question and every objection a user might have about your product and service, combine the questions that are very similar, then simplify those questions into a very simple statement, then run the questionnaire on your website, email, social media or what ever channel you use and then ask people to rank that list by one to five. This will help users think about what they want and then look for it on the list.

It is also very important to meet your audience in person for at least two hours once every few weeks. This will help you understand them better and feel they have a personal relationship with your business.

Customer Journey Mapping

After conducting your user research and learning a lot about them, you will need to communicate that to other colleagues in the organization. This leads me to Customer Journey Mapping. A customer journey map is a visualization of the customer journey, how the customer interacts with you to the point of making purchases. It is almost impossible to make an accurate customer journey because users are different. So to make a good customer journey map, you need to run a customer journey mapping workshop which is where you invite colleagues that interact with the users on a daily basis, any person that does user research and a person that has some valuable data on your users. Once you are able to come up with a good customer journey map, test it with an actual customer to know their views about it.

You can also reflect on your customers mindset using card sorting. Card sorting is an exercise used to understand users mental model of the world. There are two types, open card sorting and closed card sorting. With open card sorting, you ask the users to organize the information on the cards into any buckets that make sense to them. And with closed card sorting, you organize the cards into predefined buckets/categories and customers just put the cards into the associated containers.

Before you run a website, ensure you test a prototype to ensure the website success and then you can test your website at scale with unfacilitated usability testing. Unfacilitated usability testing is a testing type where you set the task for the use to complete by themselves without you being there in person. But you can record their screen and record them with a web camera. It has it’s pros and cons too like testing can be done over a long distance, and it takes a lot less of peoples time but you cannot prompt users to speak if they are quiet and you cannot ask questions about what they are doing.

That’s it for this article, I will be posting more articles in the following weeks with more knowledge and insight about Growth Marketing.

If you want to learn more in detail about growth marketing or any other marketing course, feel free to visit CXL Institute website. They have a wide range of marketing courses and top 1% professionals in different fields of marketing that impact first class knowledge. You can also apply for their mini-degree scholarship programs just like i did.

Catch you later!