#3 Actionable Tips To Make Your Marketing Strategy User Centric
A Quick Recap from my earlier post, An Essential Guide To User Centric Marketing , where we talked about how we fail to harness the full potential of the digital ecosystem and fall in the trap of the traditional marketing approach. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you check it out and then come back to read this one out.
Now, before we begin, I would like to point out that this post is also a review of the user centric marketing program by CXL.
In this post we are going to learn 3 things you can do right now to make your marketing strategy more effective & more user centric.
You would agree, whenever we want to create a digital marketing strategy we always start with building Customer Personas and end up ignoring them. All our assets, websites, campaigns, email newsletters are manifestations of how we perceive the world and not how our customers or users perceive it.
This is the first and the biggest reason we see those really grey conversion rates. Take a look at the following example:
“Michael Went To The Bank”
Now from above statement, you can draw a few conclusions like below,
Michael Went To The Bank to Make a deposit.
He went to the bank to get a loan.
He went to the bank to withdraw money.
Pretty neat & easy right?
Now think, if Michael was a river rafter or kayak. In that case, Michael might have gone to the river bank.
Now, we can see how our earlier assumptions can be totally flawed.
This is the difference between marketing strategy & a user centric marketing strategy. We think our customers might be using the same words, same notions to discover products or services similar to what we offer, but in reality. It might be totally different.
This is a problem we will be solving in this article, by finding what exactly our customers want from us. By the end of this article you will be able to:
- Know what your customers really want?
- How To Prioritize Tasks On The Basis of user experience
- How to keep user experience at the heart of your strategy.
Let’s get started!
Unleash The Power of Surveys
Surveys are a powerful tool marketers can use to identify the gaps between the marketing strategy and the user experience. But there’s one problem with it,
70% of them do it the wrong way!
Probably more than that. Let’s do this one exercise, what came to your mind when you first read “Surveys”.
I bet the word is “boring”.
Why do we think surveys are boring? Maybe because they are too long and consider a lot of questions and involve a lot of typing. Also you need to put in your personal information.
All these humongous efforts leave the surveys abandoned.
The best way to get the most value out of your survey is to keep it simple, short & sweet. Most of the time it is just one important question you want an answer too.
If you really want to harness the power of User Centric Marketing, you can’t avoid surveys. Everyone does it, even Google. You can see just one question on youtube with multiple choice answers where they ask you if you have heard about this brand!
If you are selling online course and have a low conversion rate, you can conduct a survey, with one question like this,
“If You Didn’t Purchase The Course Today, what would be the possible reason”
And in multiple choice options you can have all the objections you feel are keeping the customers from buying your product.
Such as,
If You Didn’t Purchase The Course Today, what would be the possible reason
- I don’t know the Author
- I don’t trust this website
- The course is too expensive for me
- The checkout process is too complicated
- I don’t trust giving my data to this website
- Other
Once a good number of people answer the above question, you now have a load of information that tells you what gaps exist between your customer and your product. You can then work on building solutions.
Now, the other mistake brands make while conducting the above Could Have Been a “Perfect Survey” is by adding contact collection fields such as name and email address.
I know, collecting data is important, but in this case it isn’t. People tend to give their opinions honestly when there is anonymity in the opinion.
Your goal here is to identify how you can make your marketing efforts more user centric and NOT COLLECTING DATA. SO SKIP IT.
The other type of survey where you need to ask more than one question?
The trick to craft longform surveys is to keep them closely questioned with answers as multiple choices and start with easy questions first.
According to statista, chances of a user completing the survey go up by almost 60% when the first two — to three questions are easy to answer.
Whenever a user answers a question in the survey, it gives him or her a sense of achievement which then motivates them to answer the next question and next question and next.
If you ambush them with a serious question from the beginning, they will simply hit the back button & never come back.
You can learn more about conducting effective surveys by enrolling for Paul Boag’s User Centric Marketing Course at CXL.
Use Top Task Analysis Like a Pro
Top Task analysis was invented by a guy named Gerry Mcgovern, who used to find out what are the most important tasks users want to complete on any given time at the website, so that these tasks can be prioritized on the website essentially referring to them as “Top Tasks”.
Marketers can use this same technique to identify which questions their users are having and most importantly which of those questions are deal breakers.
Why Do We Need Top Task Analysis?
To focus on the right questions to solve for your users so that the conversion rate goes up significantly.
How To Do Top Tash Analysis?
It’s pretty simple.
Step-1
Brainstorm about what questions or objections you think your customers have while they are using your website. Come up with a list of all the questions you think of. Tell your team to do the same.
Step-2
Strike away all the questions that are similar or those you think may be least important.
Step-3
Convert the questions to simple one word or two word statements. For example: Is the user experience bad? You can make it simply “User — Experience”
Step-4
Put all these one word objections in a survey, in a way, the user can rate it.
Step-5
Ask Your Users to rate all the tasks on a 1–5 rating scale or may be 1- 10 Rating scale.
Rules remain the same, don’t ask users to give their personal information.
Once you do this, you now have a new load of data that tells you what tasks are really important for your users when they come to your website.
You can use the results of the Top Tasks Analysis to do the following,
Once you have conducted the TTA you now know that only a handful of tasks out of 30 or 40 are important for your users. Like 4 or 5.
You can convey your marketing & design team to focus only on those 4–5 top tasks and get rid of all the distractions they might have.
You can also use the results of Top Tasks analysis to build a visual hierarchy of the information on your website, where the important things appear first when a customer comes on your landing page.
You can use the top tasks to build a better communication throughout your marketing campaigns
Pretty Neat Right?
Use Insights from Sales Team
Now you have learned how to harness the power of surveys & top task analysis to identify the real objections your customers are having.
It’s time to have more information on the personal perspective of your users!
The best way to understand your customers personally is to tap into the insights your sales team is having.
Your sales team meets your customers on a daily basis. They know realistic expectations of your customers, sometimes they also find out what your customers’ personal objections are when it comes to your product or service.
You can note them all down, or tell your sales team to note them down. You can then tell your analytics team to find out all the common objections your customers are having on different levels such as personal, professional etc.
Once you have all these common objections, you can add them to your user research and build campaigns & copies that can communicate these problems to achieve cohesiveness with your customers’ psyche.
This is a pretty great strategy you can use to optimize the effectiveness of your marketing approach!
Conclusion
To conclude today’s post, we have learnt,
How to conduct effective surveys that generate actionable insights. We have also learnt how to conduct top task analysis to prioritize information architecture on our landing pages.
We have also learnt what insights to access from our sales and support teams to find out a common pattern of objections our users might be having.
In the next article, we will learn how to integrate all of the above tips into customer journey maps to effectively design campaigns that generate better results every time.
Everybody in the digital marketing ecosystem knows the importance of User Centric Marketing, but only a few companies are able to do it effectively. These are the only companies that have better conversion rates, better user satisfaction ratings and better ROI.
If we do not start adopting a user centric marketing approach, sooner or later we will be outrun by other companies that do it.
A competitor is always a click away!
What points would you like to add to the above post?
