ConversionXL Growth-Hacking Mini-Degree Week 2 Review

In Week #2 Review, I will be focussing on user-centric marketing and talking about effective campaign design to better understand our customer experience.

Marketing has to be user-customer oriented. We all know that. It has to speak to our customers and target market.

However, more often than not in corporations and large companies… marketing becomes product-oriented or company-oriented.

Departments and teams get entangled in their idea of marketing and they start ignoring their customers because they start prioritizing their own personal or organizational preferences.

In Week 2, I will talk about my learnings from the CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree taught by Paul Boag on achieving happier customers and increased sales with user-centric marketing and by Sophia Eng on identifying and amplifying growth channels.

So, let’s dive in…

The Motivation of User-Centric Marketing:

The internet has transformed the relationship between consumers and businesses and the impact it has on the Sales and Marketing Funnel.

In short: Consumers now have the following changes:

• They are exposed to more choices than ever before.
• Are less patient.
• Will reject an option on the slightest problem.

As marketers, we have to understand what the users are trying to achieve, what their goals are and what are the pain points. To help in this process, Paul introduces empathy mapping which is a level deeper than user persona.

This is so as Traditional User Personas doesn’t take into account the changes of user behaviour through a customer journey as opposed to an Empathy Map.

Understanding Consumer Motivation:

To first understand Consumer Motivation, we’ll have to first analyze a few things:

1. The search terms: What are they exactly searching for which got them to the website so we can find out more about their goals, pain points and core issues.
2. The most popular pages and dwell time: Your users might focus more on some pages and a combination between dwell time and pages will result in understanding what is popular with the users.
3. Social Media Engagement: Observe what content gets the majority of engagement. Also, try to understand what kind of content your users like in general. Who do they follow, what do they share.
4. Customer Digital Journey: We can track their screen time through heatmap tools such as HotJars to better understand what they visit and what are the actions they take.

Crafting Surveys:

Surveys are an amazing tool to understand what your customer’s goals and challenges are. However, surveys tend to be unnecessarily long and off point.

Paul argues that for a successful survey one needs to follow these three points

1. Needs to be concise, closed question oriented.
2. Pick the right moment to ask people. — Let them finish their top task first, then ask them at the end (I’ll define Top Tasks below).
3. Explain why you’re taking a survey and if possible, incentivise the user.

The Power of Top Task Analysis

Top Task: The most important task which users prioritize when they access a website.

Top Task Analysis is important because we have very little time to capture the user before they move along the chain. Paul explains the way we run a top task analysis that involves brainstorming, combining questions, simplifying the questions and running the survey.

Should You Spend Time With Your Customers?

Yes. Paul recommends one-on-one personal meetings to understand your target market. This gives you a great insider look into the challenges they face while using your product, service and will help you really understand them.

Moreover, you can ask them questions and find out why they’re doing certain things. Marketers should aim to do this once every two or three weeks to keep in touch with their target market.

Next, let’s talk about the Customer Journey Mapping:

Customer Journey is important if we want to understand the customer’s experience as they progress through the funnel. A Customer Journey Map is a visual representation of that journey evolving with the customer’s journey within multiple stages.

There are two important stages:

First: The different stages in the journey: E.g. Awareness, Research, Purchase, Consumption, Retention.

Second: the information about the user that you want to gather at each step along the way: Tasks they want to complete, feelings they have, pain points, or touchpoints they encounter (can be online or offline).

Paul explains what is required to have a successful customer journey map — a successful workshop. This includes:

1. Collaboration: This helps in removing any bad assumptions and also provides a sense of ownership to everyone involved in the process to use the map.
2. Participants: Ideally, involve customers, customer-facing teams, user research teams, senior management, IT teams with customer data.
3. Simple approach: We have to keep the map simple and not over complicate it. Limit the number of stages to five or six and use the group to define the scope.
4. Scoping: You can either map it across different stages (superficial way) or map it for individual stages and divide it further into five or six steps/stages.
5. Filling the grid: Fill every cell in the grid stage where you can brainstorm ideas. For eg: What questions (row) people have during discovery (steps/stage)?
6. Vote and Prioritise: With so many cells and brainstorm ideas you will end up with a lot of questions. You can then vote and prioritise on these questions and determine which ones you need to map.

So at the end you will have a massive big grid with your steps running horizontally and your information that you’re collecting running vertically with Post-it notes in each one of those cells. After this, you would need to transform this into some kind of a persona with the help of a designer.

A simple CMJ for a Tour Guide Business.

How to Implement and Execute an Effective Campaign Design:

1. First of all, User Research. Our campaign design should be guided by what our user and customers need and want. Hence, Paul suggested creating User Stories so we know what our users and customers are trying to achieve and why.
2. Involving users in campaign design. This helps to refine the tone so it resonates with users and customers. Hence the user could co-design the process with the company, copywriters and designers. There are two ways in which we could do this:
3. Extracting keywords: These keywords will represent the tone of voice the company should be adopting. You can choose to conduct the famous person exercise where they associate your company with a famous person.
4. Key selling points: Asking direct questions might not result in extracting the correct information. One can use exercises like writing a love letter to your company or a breakup letter or the book cover exercise where the users have to decide what goes on the cover of the book, what goes on the spine, what goes on the back, and what goes on the inside flap.
5. Prototyping: Building a simple Prototype: It could be a wireframe, mockup or design. We want to understand if people understand what we’re offering and if they find it useful. Prototypes don’t have to be time-consuming to build or expensive.
6. Testing the Prototype: There are multiple ways of testing designs and mockups. Here are a few:

a) First Click test: Focuses on discovering the first click of the user. First Click Testing examines what a test participant would click on first on the interface in order to complete their intended task.

b) Five second test: Focussed on the messaging of the website. Can the users or customers understand what you do and how you’re different from your website in just five seconds?

c) You can use multiple tools like UsabilityHub, Ethnio, Balsamiq HQ, TestingTime, UserInterviews etc.

d) Card sorting enables us to begin to understand the user’s mental model.

Using this process of campaign design, we can better understand how to create an effective Customer Journey Map which helps us understand our customer experience better.

That’s all for week 2! In Week #3, I’ll be sharing about Growth Channels such as SEM, SEO, Paid Media, Email and Content Marketing.