How to Adopt A User-Centric Approach in Your Marketing
Your audience is your secret recipe.
Welcome to another article on my Growth Marketing series. This is the 2nd article on User-Centric Marketing, and it is a natural continuation of the first part that you can read here.
In this 2nd part, I will be covering all that I didn’t cover in the first part, and that includes:
- How to start adopting a user-centric approach in your marketing.
- Why understanding your audience is important.
- How to understand your audience without spending a dime.
Have a good read.
How to start adopting a user-centric approach?
Here is a simple truth: It’s impossible to convince somebody to do something unless you know them. Think about any time you tried to persuade a person personally to do anything. The better you know them, the easier it is to convince them. So unsurprisingly, we need to really know your audience if you want them to take any action. And that means you really need to get to know your audience, not just what their tastes are, not that they have 2 cats, but you need to understand what they’re trying to achieve, what their goals are, all of those kinds of things. And that’s where user-centric marketing starts.
Now you are probably asking yourself: “Don’t I already research my audience? Isn’t that what I am paying Samantha to do?” Yes, but is it up-to-date? Consumer behavior is so rapidly changing. Also, are you really asking the right questions about your customers? Users who search and land on your site have expressed an interest already, you’ve got their attention.
So what, then do you need to know about users, and how? User personas? Good answer… But, let me introduce you to a concept called EMPATHY MAPPING. It’s something I learned at the CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing mini degree program. In some ways, empathy mapping is very similar to personas, but it has got some unique properties that are worth just spending a few minutes looking at.
So 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 is actually quite different. Instead of focusing on who the person is and their tastes, it’s asking things like what questions do they have, what tasks are they wanting to complete, what is influencing them, and what their goals and pain points are. It even looks at how they’re feeling during this process. You’ll actually find that these are much more useful for designing a marketing campaign than knowing about somebody’s personal tastes. I would really encourage you to give empathy mapping a go, it’s really easy to put together. You can learn how to adapt empathy mapping in full details, here.
Why is understanding the customer journey important?
Buying takes a series of steps, and the answers to the questions on your empathy map will change as your customer goes on this buying journey. It used to be so much simpler, but now we have all of these social media channels, we have Google Ads, SEO, etc. You can’t spread yourself thin by trying to stay on top of all of it. The best way to know where to put your efforts is to really understand your customer’s journey. Understand what channels your users are using and when they’re using them. Once you understand that, then you can start to tailor your message appropriately for where they are in your business journey.
We need to encourage people to take action but to do that, we need to know them.
How to understand your audience without paying a dime.
One of the significant barriers to audience research is the perception that it’s expensive, but, it doesn’t have to be, especially when you’re starting out. For a start, you’ll find that you’ve got a lot of knowledge about your audience already within your business. So, very quickly, in this, I want to explore how to dig out that knowledge without spending a cent, and how to leverage the huge amounts of data that people share about themselves online, and quite very freely, I must add.
How do you start to better understand your audience? Well, the first thing you shouldn’t do is immediately hire a user research company. That would be an enormous waste of money. You already have a large amount of information within your business. Some things might have crossed your mind, like, “I don’t” or “I do, but it’s not up to date” or “I do, but it’s not all that relevant”. Trust me, it’s okay if it’s not up to date or relevant, but you need to know what you have before getting anything new.
So where should you look for this information? First of all, your sales team. If you are your sales team like me, or most starting businesses, then good for you. Your sales team (or you, as the case may be), has contact with the customer every single day. So they will know in their heads a huge amount about your customers. Most significantly, they would know what reasons they give for not buying? Because those are the kinds of things that can be addressed in your marketing and sales strategies. They’ll also have things like testimonials from customers, and all kinds of insights into who they are, and what they’re trying to achieve. The sales team is a great place to start. So, have a chat with them (or yourself), see what you can find out.
After that, talk to customer support people, (again, it’s okay if that’s you as well). These are the people that answer the phone every day. They can have amazing insights into existing customers too. They probably have even got a database of commonly asked questions as well that they’re constantly having to answer. If you can address some of these questions upfront in the sales process, you can close a sale faster, and reduce the load on the customer support team later.
Then, talk to whoever’s running social media. Because those social media feeds will tell you all kinds of things about your customers.
Take a deep dive into your analytics. If you aren’t tracking your business, you should start doing that. Google Analytics is completely free and very helpful. All kinds of insights can come from looking through your Google analytics. From your analytics, you can look at what search terms brought people to your website. You can collate what you know about people, from other people within your company, and these are your starting points. These will give insights about the questions that people have, their pain points, that kind of stuff. Also, if you’ve got something like Semrush or some other SEO tool, then you can look at that to see what kinds of questions people are searching for relating to your product or service. The other thing you can learn from analytics is where people are giving most of their attention when they visit your website. What are the most popular pages? What pages get the most time? This will give you an indication of what areas of your business people are most concerned with. There are lots of places you could look at, maybe I will write a different article about that sometime.
There was a time when you would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get market research done. These days, all you need to do is look at your audience online and you can find out everything they care about. Who are they talking to? Who do they follow? What do they post about? What do they share? What kind of things do they say about topics relating to your product and service? All of these are absolutely invaluable sources that you really should be paying more attention to.
Adopting a user-centric approach to marketing doesn’t mean spending a lot of money on user research. None of the suggestions that I’ve made involves hiring a user research company. You can start by simply collating what you know and what is easily available. Your colleagues, data sources, and social media are all valuable sources that you can use to start patching together insights about your customer. Not to mention previous research that you’ve probably already done and has ended up in a drawer somewhere and never gets looked at. However, don’t think that by doing this you’re going to get a complete picture, there will be gaps and some insights that you need to confirm are still relevant and up to date. It doesn’t mean that you have to spend a lot of money, as you will come to discover.
