Nov 30, 2020
This week, I learned a lot about user-centric marketing. The courses at CXL are just packed with information. The following is what I learned this week.
Being user-centric is important for the following reasons:
- manipulative techniques will win for a short period of time
- manipulative techniques can be damaging to the business in the long term
- being user-centric will lead to long-term commitment
- it will build customer loyalty
- it will also build brand reputation
A more user-centric approach starts by getting to users and engaging directly with them. Your organization can be user-centric without spending money by understanding its audience. This doesn’t require immediately hiring a researching company to do the work. You can find existing research, it might not be all of it is up to date or relevant, but it is there. To figure out what we got, go through the following:
- meeting with the sales team (who have contact with the customer)
- learning about where your users work
- learning of what questions they have
- what reasons they give for not buying
To gain this information, go directly and meet with your sales people, who will have enormous insights. They will also have insights to your customers goals and your customers pain points.
Next, you can talk to customer support people. Customer support will know about your users frustrations, what are their struggles, what do they wish the product will do, that it doesn’t do at the moment. Customer support will probably have a database of commonly asked questions that they’re constantly answering.
Knowing your users and using this data that is already in your organization will help you address some of the questions upfront in the sales process that your users may have. It will also help you close sales faster. Next, you can work and talk with your social media team. The social media team will know what customers are asking online about the products and services. It is also important to know who those customers are that are talking through your social media channels. Next, you should talk to the analytics team, who can use platforms/services such as Google analytics to provide you additional information. A software program that is good to know and familiarize yourself with as a growth marketer is Hotjar.
You should talk to any other customer-facing staff there is within your organization. These are your starting points where you can collect data from other people within your company. After, you can start collecting data on your audience and learn the following:
- understanding your audience’s motivations
- their behaviors
- what they do
When it comes to analytics:
- you can look up what search terms people have used to get to your service/product
- what search terms have brought them to your website in the first place.
- what search terms are people entering to get into your website
These all will give you insights about the questions that people have, and the pain points that they want help dealing with, and what their ultimate goals are. Another software program to get familiar with is called Serpstat, which is a search optimization tool. If you don’t use Serpstat, it is great to atleast get familiar with another search optimization tool. This way you can look at what types of questions people are searching when relating to your product. There could be different terminology that your users are using compared to what is on your website..
From analytics, you can learn:
- where people are giving most of their attention to
- which pages get the most dwell time
- which pages get the most likes and attention
When it comes to analytics with your social media campaigns, don’t just look at what people are sharing and liking. But look at what your users or audience is liking and sharing in general. This way you can get any idea of their underlying motivations. It can also be important to know what your followers are pushing out into the world, and you can find out everything they care about, who they follow, what do they post about, and what do they say about topics related to your service or product. Look at what your audience and users are moaning about, monitor mentions of your competitors, monitor any questions related to your products, if you sell web-design services, what questions do people have through social media? You can start to simply collect what you know and what is available, such as previous research. Keep in mind that there will be gaps in your data when doing this.
In order to build a picture of your audience using surveys, you need to learn how to extract valuable and applicable information of your audience. You should know what you should be looking to discover when you use a survey, how to avoid the common mistakes of running a survey, and how to avoid surveys undermining the user experience and your conversion rate.You need to have a clear idea of what you want to know. Keep in mind that people won’t complete a long survey. It is best to only go in with one question that you want answered because you want to achieve something specific in regards to that question. Don’t focus on your audience, focus on what they want to do. What tasks do they want to complete? What questions do they want to answer?What’s their goals? What’s their pain points? Are there any objections that stop them from acting?
Next, think about how you can encourage more people to complete a survey? Pick your moment to ask, for example, should you ask the user to complete the survey immediately when they go on your website? It is best to let people complete the task that they came to the website to do first, and then ask a survey at the end. Keep the survey short, one question is often enough. It is best to ask a one question survey, that will be triggered on exit.
For example, a one-question survey was run that was triggered on exit, saying, if you decide not to enroll today, which of the following reasons stopped you? And a list of reasons was provided, and at the bottom, it had the option for “other.” A one simple question survey like that transformed a whole marketing approach.
Again, make sure that the survey is focused on a single subject. It is best to use close ended questions because open ended questions will have people thinking too much, and this will most likely not get a response. Also, it is best to explain why you’re asking this question, why do you want this information, what are you going to do with it. Do not ask personal questions. Start with a simple and easy question and keep in mind that people don’t like thinking when they are asked to complete a survey. If you can get them to answer one question because it’s an obvious question and really simple, the chances of them answering the rest of the questions will go up significantly. I realized after learning this that I always answer the survey as to why I am canceling my subscription or membership service, it is because there are predefined answers for me to select from. You can also offer an incentive to complete the survey. Companies often struggle because they don’t have money to pay for an incentive. But instead of buying gift cards, you have a raffle or competition.
There are also free incentives, like giving the user/customer something for them to download. Offering a free month of your product or service that doesn’t necessarily cost you a lot of money. You can even offer a certain discount, such as offering a 15% discount. By offering them a gift at the end to thank them for completing the survey, you trigger a psychological thing that is called reciprocation. Like the gift was a delightful surprise, people will often feel the need to give back.
Getting a surprise award after completing a survey can also be an excellent word-of-mouth marketing strategy. People will ask their friends if they knew that after completing the survey, you will get this surprise at the end.
In conclusion with this lesson, when running a customer-centric survey be very clear on what you want to learn about and focus on that exclusively. Secondly, pick the right moment to ask people to complete a survey. Third, explain why you’re asking, and if possible, offer some kind of incentive to encourage people to act. Keep that survey short and make it easy to complete in order to get people to complete it. One question is more than enough to point you in the right direction.
A type of survey can be known as task analysis. Task analysis is identifying what tasks users most want to complete on a website, this way those tasks could be prioritized. We can use a task analysis survey to understand what questions and concerns a user has, and what questions and concerns they need answered in order to take action.
How do we know which questions and concerns will make a difference and matter? A task analysis will help answer this. Normally, we only have eight seconds to prove to users why they should use our service or platform and become our customer. We need to know what people want to know, and what is most important to them. People end up struggling to find the things that are really important to them. Essentially, what you do is you start brainstorming every question, every objection that a user might have about your product and service.You can use the user research that you collected. You will most likely end up with hundreds of questions, you can start taking those questions and remove or ignore questions that are very similar to each other. This is a great approach to conducting a task analysis.
I can’t wait to learn more next week!
