User-Centric Marketing: Why It Matters And How To Adopt It.
This article is the third in a series of weekly articles that detail what I learn in my currently ongoing Growth mini-degree scholarship with the CXL Institute. You can read the first here and the second here.
Why do we need a user-centric approach to marketing?
Let’s start by making the case for user-centric marketing. It’s a commonly agreed fact that digital has affected how consumers relate and interact with businesses and has left an impact on the sales/marketing funnel.
The simple existence of the search button has radically changed how people discover products. Before, people used to count on local newspaper ads, radio & TV ads to discover products and the brands that could afford to position themselves in those mediums and had enough money for a proper distribution system were usually the market leaders.
But now, using the internet, when people search for products. They get access to tons of options and this has led to a new kind of problem — people now get easily overwhelmed by choice — where the problem in the past used to be too few options. Now it’s way too many options for consumers.
If you are trying to visit a site and it’s taking too long to load, you’d probably turn back and move on to other options, the same as if the value proposition is not immediately clear when you first visit a site.
The upside to this is that the advent of digital has greatly leveled the playing field. That means that whatever the size of your company or the size of your marketing spend. You can compete with the bigger players and that creates an interesting dynamic, it’s why we see so many industries being disrupted these days.
However, there is another flip side to this because digital has also given customers a voice to complain. A simple tweet from a customer summarizing a negative customer experience they had with a brand could spark a major PR disaster.
What all of these tells us is that in this new age of marketing, we can’t afford to alienate customers because they can easily damage our brand and majorly so. There is a need to approach things differently when it comes to digital, an approach beyond the usual traditional marketing approach.
For starters, there are two unique characteristics to digital that make it different from the traditional marketing approach;
- It’s really easy to change things: If you were to print a brochure and order a thousand copies and upon distribution, you find out that there is a major error in the brochure. There isn’t much that you can do again but with digital, it’s super easy to effect changes.
- Digital provides us with an unprecedented amount of data: Imagine if for every brochure you printed, you knew how many people opened it, what page they dwelled on the most, etc.
These are opportunities that digital offers us and while a great many marketers are aware of these opportunities, we still approach projects like it’s a piece of print material.
Traditional marketing doesn’t factor in these unique characteristics of digital. It is still very campaign-oriented which has some fundamental flaws. It all starts with a hypothesis that isn’t validated and is usually rarely tested and there is no time to iterate on these projects because it’s usually on to the next one.
Having made the case for a different approach to marketing given the impact of digital on both consumers and marketing. Let’s talk about what user marketing itself means.
User marketing draws on user research and user experience design to better understand our users and their journey so we can design our marketing strategy around them. It’s aiming to understand customers better so we can provide more value to them and meet their needs not just through the product but also through marketing as well.
How do we start to adopt a user-centric approach?
A user-centric approach to marketing starts by really understanding your audience. You need to know more about your audience beyond things like their taste and background.
Think of it this way, the more you know someone, the easier it is to persuade them to take a course of action, so there is a need to really know users to get them to take the desired action we want from them, not just what their tastes are but what they are trying to achieve.
It means we need to understand their questions, their feelings, their tasks, their objections, and their goals and more importantly, we need to understand the journey that they are on, understand the steps along the way, and how to share the right message at the right time of that journey.
How to better understand your audience without spending a cent.
One of the great barriers to user research is the perception that it is expensive but it doesn’t have to be.
A great place to start collating data when trying to understand your audience is within your company. You’d easily find that there is a whole lot of data within your company and here are a number of awesome sources to collect data from;
- Your sales team: They always have amazing insights into who your customer is, the kind of questions they ask, what their pain points are.
- Your social media team.
- Your analytics team.
In fact, any customer-facing staff you have is a potentially great person to talk to because they deal with customers on a day-to-day basis and as such are bound to understand them better.
Now, we can’t rely solely on data when trying to understand our audience because data mostly focuses on BEHAVIOUR — what users did but we are trying to go beyond that, we are trying to understand their MOTIVATIONS as well.
There are things our analytics can give us some insights into like the search terms that people are using;
- Search terms that brought them to your website.
- Search terms that they are using on your website.
This will give you some insights into the questions people have and their motivations.
Another great tool to use is surveys.
Some things to keep in mind when it comes to using surveys is you need to have a clear idea of what you want to know going in(ask the right questions). Another thing is to pick your moments to ask eg don’t ask immediately someone lands on your website rather ask at the point exit. Another important thing to do to encourage people to complete a survey is to keep it short.
This part of the course was taught by Paul Boag — one of the three original founders of Headscape-a digital agency.
