User Centric Marketing & Identifying Growth Channels
Growth Marketing is user-centric and we are going to see what it means in this blog. It is not just focussed but obsessed by the customer because digital has given a lot of power to the customer. She is spoilt for choices, has a lesser span of attention & can complain in a blink of an eye by writing a review.
In effect, user centric marketing allows us to solve problems by drawing on user research, user experience design, allows us to use digital tools to better understand our users and design our marketing strategy around them. Even once we launch our campaigns, we can adapt them to how people are responding to maximize their impact. Never before did we have such power, agility and ease with which to manoeuvre our marketing strategy.
According to the CXL Institute Growth Marketing Mini degree program, we need to understand more than a few data points like how many children they have or what cars they are driving, personal tastes, etc
Empathy Mapping WITH:
- What questions they have
- What tasks they want to complete
- What are their pain points
- What are their goals
By understanding customer journey, we will know which message to put across, when and on which channel
Primary User Research is done with the help of:
- Sales Team (questions & testimonials from customers)
- Customer Support (pain points)
- Social Media (personas)
- GA / Hotjar (search terms on google + website + good SEO tool
Understanding our customers
The first step in understanding our customers according to CXL user centric marketing course, is to look at existing data and resources which we currently have, if it’s a startup or a company that hasn’t yet started to collect data on its customers, they should talk to the front line staff such as sales and customer service teams who have the most contact with the customers. We can also begin by understanding our customers with the help of surveys, but unlike traditional market research surveys, you shouldn’t focus on who your customers are, instead we should focus on what they want to achieve, their goals and their objections.
Top Task Analysis
A great method to truly understand what your customers are trying to achieve; you should rely on the importance of top tasks. Top Task analysis allows us to understand what task a user wants to complete on a website or app, what questions users wanted to ask and how can we address those questions before customers can take action. If we focus on the wrong thing we will lose them, since User attention is limited.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey maps address some of the problems with using customer personas. Whereas customer personas are static and are like a snapshot in time of who our customers are, customer journey maps are fluid and the journey changes depending on how our customers interact with us. Although like personas, they are a story of our typical customer, but that story will be different for each of our customers. Moreover, the journey for every business may be different, depending on what they sell or do but the information is somewhat the same in every customer journey map.
How does a customer’s emotions change throughout a holiday booking? Going from excited initially to researching into our options, having certain questions in our mind like is it a long-haul or a short-haul flight, what will we do when we get there, how much is it going to cost, to narrowing our choices, to the point of purchase,suddenly being apprehensive about the amount of money we spend. We want to know when we’re going to get our tickets. So, the journey has different characteristics along the way. We know that the journey changes,as a customer interacts with us,and goes through to the point of making a purchase. A customer journey map is a visualization of that journey. Of course, it’s not going 100% accurate but it’s going to be fairly simplified,because we can’t show how every different user goes about interacting with your company.
A customer journey map consists of two components:
First, the steps in the journey, and, secondly, the information about the user that you want to gather at each step along the way. So, think of it like this grid,that you can see on the screen now, okay? It consists of columns,which are your steps on the journey,and rows, which are the information you want to collect on each of those steps.Now, the steps in the journey will be very much dependent on what your customer’s journey is.So, for a typical eCommerce journey, it might be realizing that you’ve got a need to buy a particular product.Then, it might be researching into that product.Then, it might be purchasing the product, getting the product delivered,and then after-sale support.But, for your particular product or service,it might be completely different.
Optimizing user research
Every time they have a meeting at Amazon, they leave an empty chair to represent the customer.
It is certainly true that most marketing campaigns are someone’s idea of what might work. This causes a lot of uncertainty and leaves several questions unanswered. So how do we get the most out of our user research to ensure we are getting the best return for all our marketing efforts? The simple answer to this is to remain focused on the user.
Involving user in your campaign design
Digital has allowed us to involve our customers in our campaign design process using tools and resources which we can use to have one on one conversations with our users. These conversations and exercises allow us to extract the keywords from our users which establish the tone of voice for designers and copywriters. I can also relate this to the Brand Identity Model first introduced by David A. Aaker
Identifying the growth channels
What varies across growth models is the channels that you use to influence the metrics, but there are very few examples of businesses that have different growth models.
The answer to the question: what is the channel that amplifies growth?like any other expert answer: it depends.
Generally, there are 5 main growth channels that can amplify your business growth: SEM (PPC), SEO, Social and Display Ads, Email Marketing, Content marketing.
When picking channels consider grabbing them by shared patterns. For acquisition, there is SEO, SEM, paid ads, content marketing, and for activation email marketing, push notifications.
Key takeaways for picking the growth channels when implementing the growth marketing process:
Study the channels where users already spend time and exclude channels that are a big mismatch
- Facebook works great for B2C
- Linkedin is usually for B2B
- Twitter can work for both most of the time
- Instagram is great for eCommerce
When in doubt, pick SEO and social media marketing
- always start with keyword research and content gap analysis
- targeting the right keyword is more important the highest volume keyword
- there is an overlap with SEO, UX, and CRO
- link building guide: https://backlinko.com/link-building
Main types of PPC campaigns
- awareness campaigns
- lead generation campaigns
- pre-awareness
- awareness & trigger
- consideration
- engagement
- pre-sales
Content marketing is not just about writing articles, it is about all of the content that a company and brand puts out there.
Try new channels like mobile devices, apps, and virtual reality systems when you get to have fatigue channels.
