User-Centric Marketing

How do we start to adopt a user centric approach?

we really need to know our users if we want them to take action. consumer behavior is so rapidly changing so we need to keep up to date.

What do we need to know about users

using empty map helps you focus on what questions your customers may have, what task they seek to complete what is influencing them and what their goals and pain points are. it even looks at how they are feeling during this process. This steps are more useful for designing a marketing campaign than knowing about their tastes.

The only drawback with empathy mappings and traditional personas is that they are just a snapshot in time. They don’t take into account that the user is on a journey and the fact the a person goes through a series of steps which is crustal to understand.

The only way to put our effort is to to really understand the customer journey. We should understand what channels our users are using and when they are using them. once that is well understood then we can start to tailor our message appropriately for where they are in the journey. By understanding the journey we know what channels to support and what to say on each of these channels.

Adopting as User-Centric marketing approach doesn’t mean spending a lot of cash on user research. you can start by simply collecting 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 customers. Not forgetting previous research that you may have done but just ended up in a drawer somewhere and no one bothers to look at.

When wanting to understand your users, surveys are an invaluable tool for understanding your users, but we normally don’t utilise them. To avoid that be very clear about what you want to learn from the survey you plan to conduct, and exclusively focus on it. secondly pick the right moment to ask people to complete a survey. Third explain why you asking the people to take take the survey and if possible, offer them some kind of incentive to encourage them to act. Most importantly, keep the survey short and focused and easy to complete. When it comes to user research, one question is more than enough to point you in the right direction.

convincing your potential customers to take action mostly comes down to answering their questions, and addressing their objections. But some questions or objections are going be more relevant and pressing to people that others. It’s important to know which of these are deal breakers, and which are nice to be answered. To achieve these you need to conduct a a type of survey called top task analysis.

From a marketers perspective a Top Task Analysis is a tool that helps you understand what questions and concerns a user has, and what questions they need to be addressed before they commit to taking action. The tool also helps us understand which of those questions and concerns matter to the most. So top task analysis is an invaluable tool for better understanding what it is that people really care about

Top task analysis has its limitations too since it only focuses on one specific thing, which is enabling you priortize your messaging by understanding what questions and objections matter most to users. Unfortunately it doesn’t help you understand what those questions and objections are in the first place, you just have to rely on user research. But it is invaluable when it come to working on what you should be focusing on in your campaigns, because sales and marketing mostly focuses on answering peoples questions and dealing with their objections. And if you are answering the right questions, and the right objections you will find that your conversion rate increases.

The problem with personas is the they are static, they are a snapshot in time and they don’t reflect the journey that the customer goes on, to the point of conversion beyond that point where they become a customer. The customers always have different questions, concerns and feelings, that all change over time.

The journey changes as a customer interacts with your service, which goes through to the point of making a purchase. In this context a customer journey map is a visualisation of that journey. A customer journey map consists of the steps in the journey. and the information about the user that you want to gather at each step along the way. So customer journey map is a tool for visualising what we know about our audience, and how they interact with our your organization. It also helps to frame your campaigns, enabling you to see how they fit into the broader picture and support the journey. Customer journey maps helps us tell a story to help us understand our the users better. Customer Journey map is in other words a story that helps us conceptualise what the journey is.

When running your customer journey map workshop it worthwhile mapping it with others since, it reduces your chances of making some bad assumptions. Also getting your colleagues thinking about users is always a good thing, so involving other people is a good idea from that point of view as well. it also increases the chances that those people will make use of the final map, because if they are involved in creating the map with you, then they’re going to feel a sense of ownership over it.

Inviting users into a room with you to create a customer journey map. The other group is people who work with users everyday for example people in sales and customer support, those who manage social media channels since they have a lot of insight. You should also consider any person who has done some user research and IT department who have some data on users. You can as well include some from the senior management.

You need five or six steps when making a customer journey map, this limitation gives you a choice. Either, you can map the entire experience in a very superficial way or alternatively, you could map a part of the journey in more detail, for example taking the actual buying process in an eCommerce and break it down in to five or six steps that you then explore.

It is important to visualise the user research and to integrate those visualizations in to your working process. There is no point of carrying out user research that will end up being ignored. You need to allow it to dictate the projects that you undertake, and shape how they’re executed. Even bette, is that you need to involve the users in the creation process.

involving users in the design of your campaign can ensure those campaigns also strike the right tone of voice. When involving your users during the process you can conduct several exercises with the users. The first one you can conduct is the famous person exercise. In this exercise you ask a group of users if your company was a famous person, what famous person would it be and why?

For us to understand the thing about our products or services that resonate with customers, it not always best to ask direct questions, because in such a scenario you might end up getting extreme answers like they either hate it or love it. There is no in between.

Getting people to write either a love letter or breakup letter to your company. This is a useful way of understanding what people like or hate about your company. Alternatively they can do a book cover exercise. Participatory design campaigns have a better chance of resonating with users because they have the right tone of voice and focus on the key selling points that people most care about. Its ideal to recruit people who have not signed up for your product or services to be involved in you campaign design.

With so many great tools available testing a design is really incredible straightfoward these days. You can do preference tests, word cloud surveys, first click tests, and five-second click tests, that will give you the confidence in your design direction. Not only does it lead to campaigns that are better targeted to the audience you are trying to reach, but this kind of testing can also save you time, which may feel slightly counter-intuitive, but that is because designing a campaign often leads to a lot of debate and discussion about what the right approach is. Testing is a way of cutting through all of those endless meetings and getting definitive evidence that tells you you are heading in the right direction.

Card sorting is an exercise that you can run with users to better understand their mental models of the world. A mental model is the association we make between things. Card sorting is a methodology that enables us to begin to understand the user’s mental model and to organize information around structure that makes sense to them. It basically involves arranging individual cards into piles that makes sense to the user.

There are two ways of doing card sorting, open card sorting and closed card sorting. With open card sorting the user is being asked to organize the information, those cards, into any buckets that make sense to them. So they can organise those cards in any way that they want.

In closed card sorting people organize those cards into predefined buckets, into predefined categories. So you have decided up from what those containers are and people just put the cards in the associated containers.

Card sorting doesn’t give you a definitive information architecture for your site. However it will challenge some of your preconceptions about how you think your audience think. card Sorting will help you understand how your users see the world. With closed card sorting, it will provide a framework for testing any information architecture you’re considering