User-centric marketing — Review
N°2
Foreword
In the first week at CXL Institute, I was covering the growth mindset together with its marketing foundations by introducing the essence of building a growth process (find the full review via the link). The second review is an extension towards the User-centric marketing following by a next review for the upcoming week, identifying and amplifying growth channels. These three reviews will give you a holistic overview of the foundations of Growth Marketing.
User-centric marketing
The course of user-centric marketing is taught by Paul Boag who is expert in user experience, conversion optimisation and digital leadership. You can find more about his projects on his website Boagworld. Through my review, I will refer a couple of times to blogs which will expand insights toward the theory and tools. The essence of this review will highlight the importance of changing perceptions of how business relationships are in the business world, which has a direct impact on your sales and marketing funnel. Also, I want the reader to be aware that using old approaches to running marketing campaigns are far away from the current, which result as inefficient. This objective of this blog will give insights on how to improve conversion through digital innovation by doing user-centric marketing. The evidence of these results will affect your clients by increasing their engagement, which automatically refers to satisfaction and referral potentials. In conclusion, I will give my personal opinion of how I am experiencing this course together how I approach it to increase insights into this theory.
Reference:
Do you want to know more about user experience?
Find out the 7 factors that influence user experience from Claire D. Costa on the UX collective.
To introduce this marketing approach
It is common sense that the objective of a marketer is to “know their customer/user”. However, this classical model of being a marketeer has shifted into new dimensions of the digital age. The two major main difference are simple based on FLEXIBILITY, and DATA. First, Flexibility allows the easy change, correct, adapt and accelerate innovate. In contrast with the classical printed marketing folder, once it is printed with a type, everything is lost. Second, generating data allow you to create many opportunities such as extracting users experiences and their preferences. More importantly, the opportunity for data gives a continuous possibility to adapt and optimization. I refer to my first review blog by mentioning the Lean Methodology.
What is User-centric Marketing?
- Is a combination of user research and user experience (UX) design.
Objective?
- The purpose is increasing the effectiveness through the funnel.
How does it solve the fundamental problems?
- The ability to design a customer journey around the user, not on yourself.
Let’s get started.
Before starting with the customer journey, it’s mandatory to know your audience which starts with user research. Generally speaking, a persona should be generated. However, I learned that the persona is a fixed moment. As a result, Empathy mapping is recommended for a continuous adaptation.
Empathy mapping
Paul Boag introduces in the course of growth marketing foundation the purpose of doing empathy mapping. The powerful collaborative tool for helping teams to visualise and understand the audience/user. The tool is surrounded by six sections covering thinking and feeling, hearing, seeing, saying and doing, pain and gain. See the full visual here below. In his blog, Paul goes more in-depth about some drawbacks and his own adapted empathy map.
Reference: Paul Boag Blog has a full explanatory about empathy mapping on his website boagworld.com.
𝘐𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘦s 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘺 𝘰𝘧 © 2021 Louis Buysse
#1 — The fundamentals of User Research
Start the user research by understanding the audience/user’s objectives by gathering information from sources that have a direct link with them.
Checklist of direct links:
- Sales & customer support (CS) teams
- Social media manager
- Obtain qualitative data — Analysis
Note:
Try to analyse what people care about.
Advice for social media:
I consider social media as an important angle to mention here to push forward the understandings behaviour from your audience. Therefore many platforms provide are community centralised according to the segment that you want to research and interested in. By doing so, it is necessary to analyse your online audience as follow:
- Who are they following?
- What do they share?
- What do they say?
- What questions do they ask?
- Who is following them?
- On which content are they commenting?
- Etc…
#2 — User Testing
Conducting user testing allows you to map out several ways of constructing your audiences/users persona. However, the starting point is by defining the question that you want to be answered.
Where should you focus on?
There are several approaches to narrow down, according to the checklist.
Checklist:
- Survey
- Top task analysis
- Meeting in person
The survey should focus on one single task that you want to have complete. By defining your survey, it is necessary to understand and question the goals, pain points and objections.
The Top task analysis focusses on evidence-based answers toward the question. The analysis narrows down to the most important tasks and content for your website, application or product. The purpose is to prioritize value at the highest point for your users.
Explanatory:
Many websites have too much content. As a result, the value proposition gets vague, which result in low conversion. In other words, a client wants to accomplish a certain task to get what he wants. The top task analysis is based on evidence-based answers to the questions customers take as the most essential on your website.
#3 — Customer Journey mapping
What is customer journey mapping?
It is simply a story, a visualisation of a roadmap/journey your customer is taking throughout the funnel. This starts with five touchpoints your potential client gets in touch with your organisation starting with the discovery of your product following by their research, purchase, delivery and post-sales processes.
Source boagworld.com for full explanatory.
#4 — User Research
User research helps you basically to focus your campaign on real needs and real questions, when and how you should reach them. Everything starts to make an overview by visualising the customer journey mapping. A good idea that is recommended by design your campaign is to involve the user, which his calling “participatory design -or Co-Design”. This allows you to create the opportunity to generate the right tone of voice. The tone is based on the right keywords you will use to in designs and copywriting to inform your target audience. A recommended tool is the “book cover exercise”.
I listed up here below one of the most straight forward tools to testify to your users throughout your research:
- Design testing
- Card sorting
- prototype
Design testing is simply setting up a mock-up to testify which is the most appealing to your audience. Recommended tools are UsabilityHub and Helio.app. For testing the aesthetics a preference test can be executed or word cloud survey. The last one is the most straight forward by having your design with a collection of words underneath it. Similar is the semantic differential survey, which shows the user the design. The metrics are in contrast to using words, a scales slider will visualise one extreme to another.
Card sorting has two different approaches, closed -and open-end sorting is an exercise to better understand, reflect your customer’s mindset, the mental model of the world. In this case, we consider by questioning how they see the world, important how we communicate in certain words. Recommenced tools are Optimal Workshop and Miro. The results are to find common patterns, which you can label.
Prototyping is an interesting phase that can generate lots of information. However, it can cost a lot of money and needs good research in advance. There are many tools to test your prototype out there. Although, the course focusses on digital solutions rather than physical.
Simple rule
Place your user/customer central not your product/service. By saying so, work around them and adapt changes depending on your findings.
Personal advice for e-learning:
If you are thinking or already taking the course at CXL Institute for Growth Marketing, I highly recommend applying my strategy to cover and revise the theory. I use the review blog as a revision practice of the courses I finished. This allows me to repeat the theory in a cohesive manner.
