Power to the Users: User-Centric Marketing Review

The second week of the CXL minidegree in Growth Marketing was all about users.

Paul Boag, User Experience Consultant, Conversion Rate Optimisation Specialist and expert in digital transformation, shared with us his in-depth knowledge in the field of User-Centric Marketing and its role in Growth.

Starting off, it is a fact that today, users have the power in their hands' thanks to search. Exposed to a range of options, there is a myriad of choices to buy products or employ diverse services.

Search has disrupted global markets. Smaller players, with a low to medium budget, can compete with and at times outperform the big corporations. If they know how to play the game of search right and mainly if they pay close attention to what their users say and do online.

Progressively companies realised that it is not about them anymore and how great the products or services they offer might be. Instead, in order to win the long game, they should become more user-centred.

This has come to be known in Marketing as User Centric Marketing.

USER CENTRIC MARKETING - BASIC CONCEPTS

Let’s imagine user-centric marketing as a planet in the bigger marketing galaxy. If we suggest that this planet is blue, its pit, its core is red and represents the users.

On planet user-centric, the focus is on the users, and all actions circle around this axis.

By focusing on the users and not only on what is offered, marketing professionals are more likely to provide users with true value, the value they seek.

Through empathy mapping, research, surveys and other means, marketing teams now have the right tools to understand the needs of their users and their expectations, capable of using these insights to inform their campaigns and overall marketing efforts.

Instead of guessing what the users want to read, want to hear and see, user-centric marketing involves the users in the process of planning and setting new marketing campaigns. That way marketing turns into a dialogue between a company and the end-users, instead of one-way broadcasting of benefits and promises.

Thanks to User-Centric Marketing, there is a growing number of marketing professionals who realise, that if they don’t really know their users, all their marketing efforts are in vain.

• What do they try to achieve?
• What their goals truly are?

These are questions that can be better answered after close contact with end customers. To help them in this process, a set of different tools, deriving primarily from the field of UX research and design, are employed.

USER RESEARCH

Every project starts with research and user-centric marketing projects are no different. In user-centric though, research is not restricted to desktop research, but it expands to involve extra sources.

Marketing professionals can start their journey into unlocking the minds of their users, through existing research within their organisation. Reports from previous research, surveys, and interviews are some of the resources they can utilise right away.

Further, by reaching out to their sales team, which is in constant contact with customers, they can unlock insights such as customer needs, objections, fears and more. Similarly, the customers’ support team is definetely worth contacting for additional customer insights, including frequently asked questions.

At the same time, social media and analytics are gold mines for user insights. Especially in the E-commerce industry or other product-driven companies, social media and analytics hold the keys to further understanding their customers.

EMPATHY MAPPING 

Once research brings the first results internally, marketing teams need a way to map out the pains and gain, influences, feelings, tasks and goals of the users based on their findings.

This is where Empathy Mapping comes into play. This is a collaborative tool that marketing teams can use to better understand their users.  

It consists of an image of the customer surrounded by six sections. These sections are:

• Think and feel. What matters to the user? What occupies her thinking? What worries and aspirations does she have?
• Hear. What are friends, family and other influencers saying to her that impacts her thinking?
• See. What things in her environment influence her? What competitors is she seeing? What is she seeing friends do?
• Say and do. What is her attitude toward others? What does she do in public? How has her behaviour changed?
• Pain. What fears, frustrations or obstacles is she facing?
• Gain. What is she hoping to get? What does success look like? 

This is a very useful tool, that when designed properly can generate a real impact within a business. Many marketing teams chose to hang out the final design within their office, as a reminder of their ideal customer profile when working on existing and new campaigns.

DATA ANALYTICS 

In the age of digital marketing, offline activities such as focus groups can still be very effective, but we need to remember that no matter what, data is still the King/Queen.

Millions of users make daily interactions online through search engines or by searching directly on websites.

• What pages are the most important to users?
• What users share and like on their social media channels?
• Who they follow? What do they complain about?
• How about the sessions and scrolling levels on webpages?

These as few of the questions that marketing teams can answer by diving deep into their data, to enrich their collected insights.

Similarly, surveys are an additional tool for gathering further user insights.

SURVEYS

Visiting any website today, most likely either at the beginning, somewhere in the middle and mostly at the end of the experience, we are faced with a survey.

Surveys have been used by marketing professionals in different forms already for many years, but while they are a familiar tool to marketing professionals, it doesn’t mean that they are always used properly.

This is why it is important considering the following when designing a new survey.

• What questions do you want to be answered?
• What you want to achieve with the answered you get?
• Pick the right moment to ask.
• Keep it short!
• One question surveys can be more effective sometimes.
• Focus on a single subject for the whole survey.
• Use closed questions. (YES/NO)
• Explain why you ask.
• Don’t ask for personal information.
• Start your survey with an easy question.
• Offer users an incentive to fill in this survey.

The above are a few themes that marketing professionals review when designing and while running a survey. Surveys are indeed a very effective tool but only when a clear goal, well-thought questions and the right time are well determined beforehand.

TOP TASK ANALYSIS 

Most companies suffer from too much content. Different team members and stakeholders have their own opinions of what is important to the users. A landing page here, a glossary there, maybe some FAQ.

In reality, users needs are very different. There are few but important tasks that users want to accomplish with a product. Top Task Analysis gives a clear, evidence-based answer to the question of what the most important tasks and content for a website or application are. This enables marketing professionals to prioritize where the value for their users is the highest.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING 

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience customers have with a company. It helps to tell the story of a customer's experience with a brand from original engagement and into hopefully a long-term relationship.

It needs to be clear that a customer journey is not an accurate representation of a real journey. Think about it more like a conceptualisation, a storyline.

Therefore, in order to map a journey correctly, marketing teams use steps and questions to get the most out of this tool.

AN OVERVIEW

By collecting all the information from the different tools analysed above and involving users in the design of marketing campaigns (participatory design), companies can gain a clear advantage over their competition.

While most enterprises go for quick wins and look for the next hack to extra revenue, long term customer retention and continuous revenue growth come mostly by paying close attention to the needs and behaviours of users. 

Thanks to CXL institute, I am glad that I have the opportunity to get exposed into a plethora of user-centric methodologies and best practises which I can use to generate extra impact in my marketing career moving forward.