Customer Research: Recipe for Successful Marketing Growth.
By: Richard Tosin Israel
Tags: Customer Centric, Growth Hacking

Customer Research: Recipe for Successful Marketing Growth.

User research and user experience have dominated the analysis of digital marketing. They have been generally accepted as a model for a customer-centric approach in digital or online marketing. So, getting the best use of the two approaches requires garnering data that reflect customers’ journey. However, user experience and user research are hinged on different methods that have scientific validation and industry lingo.

Having the research done in this century is far cheaper than ever imagine, and are many ways you can achieve that. Customers have more things about them posted every second across social media; data can be scooped from there. Also, Google analytic or Hot jar is another data gathering platform that provides ample information about online visitors or users. Google analytics can provide you with the search term people use and the search that makes entering into your site possible and the channel from which your site is linked. The portion of your site that receives the highest attention and the page that gets the most dwell in time. These are insight relevant to design for customer behaviour for conversion.

Obtaining high quality research data is important to growth marketing since it can be used for behaviour design, as well as planning and executing customer-centric design that fosters accentuation on customer’s journey in respect to empathy mapping. Starting with empathy mapping, that is better enhanced through research and survey, is also one the key areas of a broad spectrum of interests to growth marketing specialist. This precedes every area covered, or research tools used by growth marketing specialist.

The early marketer or traditional marketing did not pay much attention to these as much as growth marketing specialist because of its research oriented and psychological approach. These approaches validated A/B testing, empathy mapping, user Google analytics, experimentation, growth metrics and channels specific.

Empathy mapping, which is very similar to traditional persona but has unique properties that have to do with spending time in designing to understand the pain point, factor influencing customers and their goals rather than focusing on the taste and who the persona is. These properties differentiated empathy mapping from the traditional persona.

Besides the fact that empathy mapping focuses more on psyche of customers, its embraces user research that helps designing for behavioural change. It contains four insightful quadrants – Say, Think, Does and Feels that further expatiate on how to approach research questions that capture the totality of customers’ journey.

The Says Quadrant contains what the user says out loud in an interview or some other usability.

The Thinks quadrant captures what the user is thinking throughout the experience, that is what occupies the user thought and what matter the most to them.

The Does quadrant encloses the action the user takes. What the research say about what the user physically do and how the user go about such thing.

The Feels quadrant, which is the last quadrant, has to do with user’s emotional state. This often being represented with adjective and a short sentence for content that worries the user and what the user get excited about.

Channels are also expedient to growth marketing. AAs discussed in the previous article on growth marketing, growth marketing entirety is based on leveraging channels that bring better retention and conversion after testing. You may need to test different channels for your campaign to be able to determine that’s worth giving more attention to. Although, many big do well across different channel, it is sometimes rare to achieve the absolutism of success across the channels. The bottom line is to understand where your customers are and what they do. You should not spread yourself too thin because you may likely successful in any. Therefore, it’s important to identify the even one or three channels that are working for you.

As explained earlier, after knowing where your customers are, experiment the channels before picking ones that work for you. Then you can develop a coherent messaging strategy and how you as a brand speak to your customers across the specific channels that work for you. This will help you have better understanding of what your customer is like. Customer journey map is a great tool for visualising what you need to know about your customer and how they interact with your site. Customers’ journey map consists of only two components: (1) step in the journey and (2) information about the user that you want to gather at each step along the journey.

Growth marketing boils down to seven essential things that you need to take note of when developing sales campaign online.

You need to know your customers and what they want

Experiment across all channels before deciding which channels best for you

Test your message

Which channels they frequent on

Constant user research to determine exactly what they want

Creating top test analysis to know message that resonates with them

Analytics software that can help you being specific on what they search for