User–Centric Marketing – ConversionXL, Paul Boag

Even if you are convinced of the need for a more user-centric approach to marketing, others in your company might not be. That is why in this first lesson, Paul will lay out the case for a user-centric approach and what exactly that means.

A user-centric approach to marketing starts by understanding of your audience. In this lesson, Paul will explain why traditional personas are not enough. He will tell you what questions you should be asking about your audience instead.

One of the significant barriers to user research is the perception that it is expensive. That is not the case, especially when starting. For a start, you will find that a lot of knowledge about your audience already exists within the company. In this lesson, Paul will explore how to dig out that knowledge without spending a cent.

Surveys are a powerful tool in better understanding users, but we often use them in the wrong way. In this lesson, Paul will show you some techniques to extract valuable and applicable information about your audience.

Convincing people to take action mostly comes down to answering their questions and addressing their objections. But some questions or objections are more relevant to users than others. We need to know what these deal breakers are, to make sure people can easily find the answers they need. That is achieved through top task analysis, as you will discover in this lesson.

If we want to understand people so we can persuade them, we must spend time with them. Meeting with users is essential to marketing success. In this lesson, Paul introduces you to some different approaches you can adopt to this most central of principles.

What we learn about the customers from our research needs to clarified in our minds and then clearly communicated to colleagues across our organisation. Often this is done in the form of personas, but customer journey mapping tends to be a more effective approach as Paul explores in this lesson:

One of the best ways of mapping the journey of customers is to run a customer journey mapping workshop. In this lesson, Paul will take you through the process of running this kind of workshop and what exactly that involves.

Too many companies carry out customer research only to leave the results in a drawer somewhere gathering dust. If we are going to adopt a user centric approach to marketing we need to make sure we are using what we have learned on a daily basis. In this lesson Paul will show you how to do exactly that.

Knowing who your users are and what they want will help create more compelling campaigns. But involving users in campaign design ensures they also strike the right tone.

You make many decisions when planning a campaign, but how do you know if those are the right decision? That is where testing should come into every campaign. In this lesson, Paul looks specifically at how to test design mockups of things like email templates or landing pages.

Your website is a crucial part of most marketing campaigns. Yet often we structure those sites around our world view, rather than the user’s perspective. If you want users to act on your website, it needs to reflect how they think.

Building websites that support your marketing strategy can be expensive and time-consuming. If you get it wrong, it can be a costly mistake, leaving you with a site that fails to convert. That is why, in this lesson, Paul recommends building a prototype you can test, before committing to a final build.

Usability testing will dramatically improve your conversion rate, but it is not without its difficulties. In this lesson Paul will explore those challenges and show you how unfacilitated remote testing might be a more practical solution for some organisations.

As marketers, we tend to move from one campaign to the next and never take the time to reflect on how a campaign is performing once launched. However, digital channels allow us to monitor how our campaign is performing and adjust it as it runs. In this final lesson, Paul introduces us to some techniques for making that happen.