The best digital marketing strategy is grounded on the user and their needs.

In fact, people go online not just to get some form of entertainment, but also to answer the questions in their head – whether a trivial “who played this character in a movie” or the burning ones like “how to use a fire extinguisher” (pun intended).

This explains why a user-centric approach is a core element of growth marketing. Growth happens when people find value in what you provide them. When you answer their questions through your content or solve their pain points through your product, they’ll keep coming back.

A good rule of thumb for growth marketing? Start with the user in mind.

What is user-centric marketing and why it’s important for growth marketing?

The digital landscape has changed how we access information. I look back into my grade school days when I had to do homework on plants. To complete my homework, I had to either spend a few hours in the library or check the encyclopedia at home.

Fast forward to the present. If I need to know how much sunlight a monstera needs or why some of my Birds of Paradise leaves are turning brown, I only have to type those same keywords on the Google search bar. Even better, I could use a mobile app that takes a photo of the plant and it identifies what type of plant it is and if there are any problems. I could have the answers I’m looking for in literally seconds.

We now live in the information age, a double-edged sword. It could work for us in terms of access to information and being able to provide solutions for our customers. It’s a level-playing field for everyone regardless of company size or geography. As marketers, it could also work against us – too much content on the web. There’s incredibly stiff competition, not just in terms of product availability, but also landing your solutions on the first page of Google’s search results.

The key to providing relevant information and making it more accessible for customers is to ground it on their needs.

This is what user-centric marketing is all about. It’s obsessing on:

• who the user is, their profile and customer journey
• what their needs and pain points are
• how you can solve them with your products or services

This requires an in-depth user research. And navigating the process of user research involves knowing the right digital tools, as well as the techniques for user profiling and validation with the user.

CXL’s Minidegree on Growth Marketing dives deep into user-centric marketing. Paul Boag walks us through the various tools, techniques and processes for the following:

• Going in-depth into a user’s profile
• Involving the user in the product design process
• Refining campaigns post-launch

Identifying customer persona, and why empathy mapping is a better user-centric approach

For many marketers, a customer persona is an effective way to know your target audience. I first learned about this through Amy Porterfield, who talked about identifying your ideal customer avatar here.

Essentially, going through this process will lead to output similar to this:

But when we talk of growth, sticking to just the demographics and socio-economic profile of the user isn’t enough. Growth marketing is all about conversion, which is a result of knowing the user’s journey.

And when I say customer journey, I mean a series of steps undertaken by a user from knowing very little about your product, all the way to deciding to make a purchase or subscribe to your channels.

A customer journey covers so many touchpoints – from awareness, consideration, all the way to purchase or clicking your Call-to-Action button. So knowing how they behave each step of the way will help get you through to conversion.

In this sense, empathy mapping is a wide-ranging and more in-depth way of knowing your user. Here’s an article by Paul Boag on empathy mapping, and a sample below.

How to be user-centric: know your user, customer, or client in-depth

There are several ways to dive deep into your customer’s profile and their needs at each stage of their customer journey. Here are some of them:

Through your front-liners

Sometimes you don’t need to spend a single cent to know more about your users, customers, or clients. You can start with the people who interact with your target audience on the daily, i.e. your sales or customer support team. Front-liners have a deeper familiarity with who your audiences are, their objections to buying, their challenges after getting your product or service, why they love your offerings so much (testimonials), and other insights about them. They also know the frequently asked questions (FAQs), which can feed into your messaging and product development process.

Your social media managers will also be able to have information on your target audience’s comments, questions, as well as analytics – valuable data on how to walk with your users, customers or clients throughout their journey of knowing and advocating your offerings.

Analytics

Social media platforms offer analytics now. Facebook Insights, Twitter and LinkedIn analytics, and even Pinterest now offer information about how your audience finds and engages with your content. Google Analytics also gives a full picture of how your audience reaches your pages and their actions within your website. This includes:

• What search terms they used to find you
• Which pages on your website get their attention (most popular pages, pages with the longest time spent, pages where they exit your site)
• Shares, likes, and other actions done with your content (did they click your call-to-action button?)

Surveys

Survey is perhaps one of the oldest tools in marketing. Thankfully now there are digital versions that can be done through tools like Survey Monkey. You can also have surveys within your website, which is a great way to capture feedback from your visitors.

Some pro tips:

• Explain why you’re doing it.
• Keep your surveys as short (and less arduous) as possible. Sometimes, 1 question is enough.
• To make it easier for your respondents, use more closed questions, i.e. yes or no questions, rating scale.
• Keep to one subject or topic only so as not to confuse or overwhelm your respondent.
• Provide incentives when you can, say a free digital product like a downloadable checklist or template, free use of your product, etc.

Top task analysis

There can be so many questions and concerns your audience has about your products or services. The key to providing relevant and valuable information is prioritizing which ones to address.

Top task analysis involves brainstorming every possible objection, question, or concern your offering has. Shortlist these objections and cluster similar themes together. Simplify these themes in a way that anyone can easily interpret them, i.e. “Access” or “Cost”. Then run a survey among your users and let them rank the shortlisted themes based on what’s most important for them.

The results of top task analysis can feed into your advertising, what call-to-action to prioritize, and your information architecture.

Customer journey mapping

As earlier explained, empathy mapping is considered better than the traditional persona because it captures where the customer is at each step of the journey. (A traditional persona is only a static, snapshot in time and only gives a view of one part of the journey.)

A customer journey map is a visualization of the customer’s journey – from becoming aware of your offering through to conversion (i.e. purchase, subscription). It’s especially helpful for budgeting and prioritizing marketing efforts, getting a brief about the customer, and framing your marketing campaigns vis-à-vis the journey.

It outlines each step of the customer journey (Discover, Research, Purchase, Delivery, Post-sales) and matches it with various information about the user, i.e. their questions, touchpoints, feelings, objections, etc.

If you’d like to know more about the customer journey map, what it looks like, and how to run a workshop, please feel free to get in touch with me@tinasendin.com or connect on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed this article and would like to read more about this topic, would also love to hear from you in the comments section below.