User Centric Marketing
Wondering what to do to acquire users? How to extract more information about your users and get insights? How to go about traditional methods of trying to convince the users as opposed to the new age techniques? Let’s see these points below. I am doing this minidegree by CXL (www.cxl.com) on growth marketing and today we will be exploring more about user centric marketing.
Let me show you the differences between user centric marketing vs traditional marketing. The most prominent difference I find between traditional and digital is that digital is infinite times more flexible. Suppose you are a fan of traditional marketing and buy a huge billboard, book ad slots at the Super Bowl and display your vibrant ads there. Now what happens if you get a detail wrong or need to add some topical changes to the ad? How easy is it for you to implement the change? How cheap is it to adapt for the ad? Not very much. What if I tell you not only you can do these changes without a hiccup but also monitor the reactions to your ads and alter it based on your users’ behaviour? How about the super power to segment your users and audience and serve them different ads based on their persona tailored to appeal to their requirements and motivation? That is the leverage and kind of abilities you get using digital marketing and growth hacking. Let’s see how we can go about it.
The age of the internet and connectedness has given rise to unprecedented levels of data being. We are using and creating more data everyday than we did in an year 10 years ago. We can use this data to our advantage. This gives us the ability to track, monitor, analyze and iterate quickly. Today we can access our users directly and tap into their mindset and motivation. The internet and social media has levelled the fields and brought users closer to you providing an incredibly easy way for them to access anything. This is a double edged sword which can be used to your benefit. A happy user who tweets about your product or service is a testimonial and can serve as a social proof whereas at the same time one disgruntled customer can cause a major PR disaster on your hands. Thus companies must learn to adapt and respond quickly on however the situation arises.
Traditional marketing starts with a preconceived notion fixed already and you are looking for its validation whenever running a campaign. You don’t have any chance for iteration simply because that’s not feasible in traditional marketing. On the other hand, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, digital marketing offers you take a user centric approach by understanding user research and user experience. We seek to use digital tools to better understand our user, map their journey, validate our hypothesis and maximize the end reward. The moment a user types something relevant to your business in your search bar, you know that the user is interested. Unlike traditional marketing, you are not trying here to grab users’ attention and compete for it. Knowing that your users are already in search for something, it becomes easier to persuade them and compel them to take the desired action. You may argue that even in traditional marketing, the users are segmented and filtered based on various criteria like demographics, geographies, etc. But are these the right questions to ask? How will it relate to the user and map their journey? Instead what we should focus on is empathy mapping which is similar to personas. Instead of focusing on who the person is and how old they are, you should focus on what they are feeling and what's their mood. Users or customers take a series of steps and have multiple touchpoints which form parts of their customer journey right from the start till they finish their shopping or booking. These touchpoints include Facebook ads, google search at the start when a user is approached, then they are taken to your website or app and depending on your business then your salesforce or customer service team. Also social media has a lion’s share in this journey. Understanding this user journey and tailoring every step in order to optimize the results is what you should strive for. The first step in this process begins with user research. We will focus briefly on it in this post.
User research sounds fancy but you don’t need to commission a whole company for it. In today’s era of the internet and data being freely available, you get a lot of knowledge ready with your company already without spending a cent on user research. You can start with collating every bit of information available.
Check for any past research you have got. Then you can move on to reach out to your sales team. Sales is the first point of contact with the customers and they know every single customer being in contact with them everyday. They know what questions customers have, what are their motivations, and more importantly they know why they don’t buy something and what objections they have for not buying. They know what their pain points are and how they solve it.
Similarly you can talk with your customer support team which will know what are the frequent things which cause users issues, what are their frustrations, what are their struggles, etc. Then you can go for the social media team and see how your brand is perceived. See what kind of followers you have, what do they talk about, how your competitors are doing, etc.
Apart from these, you should consult your analytics team which will have important data and insights on how the user behaves on your site or app. Using services such as Hotjar and Google Analytics you can check out heatmaps, popular pages, where they click, and what frequent actions they take. Finally, go to any other customer facing staff who might have any information or insight on the end user. Once you have all this information gathered and accessible, we will look into how to act upon it in the next post.
Hope you find this useful, will discuss further next week.