User Centric Marketing and Identifying Channels Review
TL;DR: User-centric marketing saves you money and time while leaving you with the happiest customers
As part of my CXL institute Growth marketing course, this week, I took both Paul Boag’s User-Centric marketing course and Sophia Eng’s Identifying and Amplifying Growth Channel . I’ll start off with User-centric marketing and then move on to Identifying Channels.
Section 1
I particularly liked Paul’s laid-back and practical approach to teaching. Since this is still early in the course, most of the things I learned this week are things you probably already know if you’ve attempted any marketing course or read articles around the psychology of marketing. However, it was a great refresher and I aced the test at the end of the section.
What is User Centric Marketing?
Like the name suggests, User-centric marketing is marketing that focuses on the user rather than the product. Your messaging is around solving the user’s problem, not selling your product. To do this, you have to build for your user. What pain point does my user have and how can my product solve it?
To answer this, you of course need to do a copious amount of user research and then craft your marketing strategy based on the result of the research.
As growth marketers(especially self-taught ones), we already know this, it’s like second nature to us but knowing this and doing this are two different ball games because while you might be in charge of messaging, you might not be in charge of product so the question then becomes, how do you convince other teams you work with to have a user-centric marketing mindset. A growth marketing mindset
Here’s how you can convince your team to be more growth-minded
Why User- Centric Marketing?
To begin, the world today is not what it was a few years back. Everything is digital and with that comes the additional (dis)advantage of increased reach. Everything is happening in real time! You have to take advantage of this to improve your product and your user’s experience.
Everyday, different products compete for the attention of the same users. Centering your users at every stage of your product is the only way you get to be the best and of course catch and retain their attention.
User Research: this is pretty obvious. To craft a marketing strategy that is user centric, you have to research into what your users like, what their pain points are. This goes beyond just basic demographics and knowing where they work or their financial level.
What are their habits?
Where do they spend time?
What are their preferences?
In carrying out user research you should talk to the users but not just them. Talk to people who have first hand contact with your users. This means you should have conversations with people in sales and customer service within your organization. They can tell you a whole lot about your users. Things you would not discover by just asking the users direct questions.
The best thing about this stage is that you can do it without cost.
One more thing that is important is mapping out your customer’s journey and looking at it from the viewpoint of the customer.
Customer Journey Mapping
A customer journey map is a visual representation of the processes a customer takes to get to a goal. Goals differ depending on your product. It could be signing up for a newsletter, adding card details, making a purchase. A typical customer journey map outlines the key events, friction areas and motivations in a customer’s journey to using your product. Having this helps you know how your customer thinks and how they interact with the product.
What next?
Armed with this knowledge, you can go back to the table and come up with experiments and theories to test.
The course also touches on Customer personas, empathy mapping and prototyping. Overall useful stuff to help you in user focused marketing.
Tools you should check out:
- Serpstat
- Usability hub/Hulio
- Optimal Sort
- Lookback.io
- Maze
- Hotjar
- Zoom
Section 2
Up next, is Sophia Eng with Identifying and amplifying growth channels. This part of the course is also pretty easy if you are already into marketing but if you are not, here’s what I learnt:
Major Growth Channels:
- Search Engine Marketing/Pay per click
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social and Display ads
- Email marketing
- Content marketing.
There are more channels than these but these are the major ones. It is important you find a channel that works for your audience and product and zero in on that. It is quite rare for any company to be great at all channels. You might end up spreading yourself too thin and not getting the right results because you want to operate at a 100% in all channels.
If you are yet to find what channel works for your product, you can start out with one channel at a time and measure the results until you find what works.
How do you decide what channel to start with? Easy! Go where your audience is and engage with them. In deciding what channel works for you, it is important that you look at the data and not what others are doing. If the numbers are telling you, Email works better for your product, don’t sink in your budget in social ads because everyone is doing it.
One important thing Eng mentions is to always look out for emerging channels. The world is always changing and you have an advantage if you are still a startup and not yet covered in all of that red tape. So explore. Try out channels your bigger competitors are not seeing yet. You never know what you might find.
This week, I have touched on User-centric marketing and the need for your entire team to have a user focused mindset. Also, the benefits of user centric marketing and how to go about it. I also addressed how to identify growth channels and the best way to choose what to go with.
Next week, I will be reviewing some parts of the Running Growth Experiments track. We are getting into the technical stuff. Can’t wait!
