Why we need a User-centric Approach In Marketing -Review

How digital has changed the customer relationship with the business?

How this has impacted on its marketing funnel?

What is user-centric marketing? and why we need a customer-centric approach to marketing? How to adopt a customer-centric approach and why Customer journey is important to understand?

In the current era of marketing digital has levelled up the playing field, irrespective of your company size, budget, brand, spend you can compete with the big player in the market and this is how digital has disrupted the various market.

Digital advertising has amplified word of mouth where you can spread about your product and services with minimal investment

Digital has given voice to the consumers with the reviews, opinion and thought with which the consumer is empowered because poor experience or negative experience can change the companies branding and image.

So it shows how digital can bring together disenfranchised, frustrated consumers and give them a collective voice to complain if they have faced something which has destroyed their experience with the brand.

So, in this digital era, you can alienate customers because it can damage your brand and quiet majorly. Why we need to approach things differently when it comes to digital because our existing marketing approach doesn’t utilize the full potential of digital.

There are two main characteristics of digital which makes it different from the existing marketing approach

1. It is easy to change things:- As compared to billboard ads, brochures because for these traditional ways it was very expensive and difficult to change things if there is a typo but with digital it takes a matter of moments and the only cost of labour comes in to do so.

2. An unprecedented amount of data: - Let's take an example of Printed Brochure Fb ad, you know how many times it got opened, how many times looked at it, you know which specific pages, Time spend on each page and getting responses when they have interacted with content Now, we all know these characteristics of digital.

But the problem here is we still approach our project in a traditional way and traditional marketing doesn’t have these characteristics

Traditional marketing is about broadcasting a message but digital allows you to respond it to the user's queries and questions and we can adapt on certain things on what we see them doing.

Traditional marketing is very campaign oriented as a result it has certain flaws in it begins with a premise for the campaign which is not validated enough maybe small market research. It is somebody idea that may or may not work.

Campaigns are really tested before release

No time to iterate a campaign once released we move to the next campaign off that's because the way we're approaching these projects is from a bygone era. We haven't updated the way we're working to make use of the media we're now working with 

So, What is User-centric marketing and how it helps to solve these fundamental problems

User-centric marketing is a strategy that consists in placing the customer experience first of everything the company plans to offer. Every process starts and ends with customer success in mind. How it does it helps

1. User-centric marketing draws on user research and user experience and design

2. It seeks the use of digital tools to better understand the user and their journey so we design our marketing strategy around them.

3. It always looks at different ways to validate our approach to a campaign at every step of the way

4. It aims to adapt our campaign once it is launched to maximise its effectiveness

Hopefully, you will now have a clearer understanding of how digital has changed the relationship between the customer and the business.

Then, of course, there's the fact that digital is different from other channels and offers us the ability to work in different ways.

Understanding the unique nature of digital and its impact helps us to understand why we need a more user-centric approach to marketing and how we need to understand our audience better. Learn more about Customer-centric approach - https://cxl.com/

How to Start to adopt a user-centric approach?

1. It starts by understanding your audience

Because it's very important to understand the user so that you can persuade them to take specific action or take a specific action.

The better we know the use or our customer the easier it will be for us to convince them to take certain actions. Marketers do research about the audience but are not up to date because consumer behaviour changes rapidly in this digital era.

2. Asking the right questions to the users. A marketer doesn’t ask the right question they only prefer to know the taste and preferences of the user and their influences. Users who search and land on a site have expressed an interest already, we've got their attention.

So what do we need to know about users?

One of the tools for getting to know users is something called empathy mapping by Paul Baog. In some ways, it's very similar to personas, but it has got some unique properties

This is a typical empathy map, something that's used all the time in user research and user experience design.

 Although it looks very much like a traditional persona, the information that it's asking for it's actually quite different.

So instead of focusing on who the person is? Their tastes, it's asking things like

What questions do they have?

What tasks are they wanting to complete?

What is influencing them?

What their goals and pain points?

It even looks at how they're feeling during this process and you'll actually find that these are much more useful for designing a marketing campaign than knowing just about somebody's personal tastes. The only drawback it has is the time it doesn’t take into an account that at what stage the user is in his journey.

So, coming to why customer journey is important?

A person who interacts with your product will not suddenly plan to Purchase your product They go through a journey with the series of steps

How they feel, what question they have

What concerns they have all these things change as they move forward in the journey

Even they like what touchpoint they have with your brand it can be:

The Facebook ad, Instagram ad,

Website, blog or your Sales team.

Google ads, SEO.

As these touchpoints really help to know where your consumers are at what stage of the journey. Understanding what channels our user use and when they use.

Once we understand this we can tailor our message according to where they are on the journey. By understanding this journey, we know what to say in each channel.

So, I would summarize in this manner. We need to understand their questions, their tasks, their objections, their goals, and their feelings.

But most importantly, we need to understand the journey that they're on, we need to understand the steps along the way and how to share the right message at the right time on that journey.

If this blog has added some value to your approach of user-centric marketing then do give a thumbs up. Thank you!