User-centric Marketing
Search has redefined the way people acquire both products and services. It has created a bit of nightmare — choices. We’re so spoilt for choices most times, that we are overwhelmed with our decision-making process. Also, in the same vein, access to digital media has amplified our reach and availability of these choices. On one hand, as a startup, you’re able to compete and even displace incumbents, on the other hand as a user/customer, you can literally reach anyone, have your voice heard by anyone at any time, galvanize people to your cause(s).
As part of my course requirement, I’d be sharing with you lessons learned from my ongoing Minidegree on Growth Marketing. Today, my focus would be on User-centric Marketing.
But my interest here is how traditional marketing pales in comparison to digital marketing, from their motivations, to their approaches. So, while the traditional marketing is about persuading the customer to buy the product, the best digital marketing strategy is as much about persuading the business to adapt the product to the customer. Because consumer behavior is rapidly changing, as a result of multiple options available, traditional marketing’s approach to targeting customers, becomes static in the face of marketing expectations.
But what exactly informs the decisions that birth these strategies? How do we gather market research? Now more than ever, I realize how wrong we’ve been approaching market research all wrongly, from how we budget tons of money for it, to how we exactly carry it out. There are tons of information about and from customers sitting duck around us, only if we know where to look, from the sales team to the customer support team, who have information on customer testimonials, goals, pain points, frustrations, struggles; then social media, what your customers are talking about you, your competition, your products. Your analytics are not forgotten too, as they tell how your customers are interacting with your site, the keywords they’re using to search for your kind of product/service. Social media is another important tool to help understand the customer better, as your customers are always sharing information about themselves, their motivations, the kind of things they say about topics relating to your product/service; who they’re talking to, who they’re following, what community are they joining, what are they saying about your products, etc. These and many more, are ways we can gather good data for market research.
While we’ve shared some avenues of getting primary data on customers for user research, there exists another way to understand your audience/customers better — surveys. I’ve come to learn that I’ve been doing surveys all wrong. I’ve been undermining my user experience and conversion rate by my approach in surveys. The most important thing is to have a clear idea of what I want to achieve, going into the survey. Too many questions will spoil the broth of the survey. Asking few questions, with specific goals, that are not open-ended, will get you better results than many open-ended questions. Timing the survey is another key factor in getting the desired results from surveys. You’d want to time the survey for the users is either performing the last task in their user journey or middle of their task or at the end of their task, just before they exit your platform. You definitely don’t want to be brandishing your survey in the customer’s face, few seconds into arriving at your platform, it’s a guaranteed way to get ignored. That said, incentivizing users with gift cards or some other digital bonuses is another way of getting users to participate in your survey. There’s a psychological undertone to this. Normally, users wouldn’t be expected to be incentivized to participate in a survey, so having such, is a wow factor that also motivates them to spread the gospel of your survey.
PS: This knowledge has been made possible, by the good people at CXL Institute.
