Get started (part 1)
To learn Growth Marketing skills, you need to get your hands in the dirt and get practical. That’s why I created 6 easy steps that help you to really understand your customer/user and define focus on the right metrics to grow your business. Let’s get started!
Step 1: Create a fictional customer
Regardless of the phase you’re in, if you are at the starting point of creating a product or campaign or you already have a product and you are eager to improve and grow it, you always start with really understanding your customer. Why? You want your customer to take action, to use our product. In order to convince them, you need to get emotionally connected and therefore really know them.
The objective is to make a mental representation of your customer, of the way they’re thinking and behaving. This way you can put yourself in the shoes of your customer and be able to understand exactly what their problem is and how you can help them.
How? By creating a psychographic persona canvas. This canvas helps to create a memorable fictional person in a visible way. It is not only based on demographics and geographics, but it also defines personality essentials such as personality types, activities, patterns, etc.
How to create your personas using the persona canvas? There are a few steps to take.
- Gather demographic information (demograpic and geograpic)
- Gather psychographic information (Activites, attitudes, feelings, thoughts, etc.)
- Behavioral information (Patterns, interest based on behavior, etc.)
- Define their pains
- Define their goals or jobs to be done
- And define the current solution they use for their goals
And don’t worry, some aspects like behavioral information can be hard to define. It is ok to start with assumptions based on current insights, observe real customer behavior or start with your gut feeling. Make sure you validate these assumptions with experiments later, test how your users respond to your content.
Template: [Within a few weeks you can download the Psychograpic Persona Canvas here. This is a Persona + Empathy map in one]
Step 2: Do research and gather customer insights
Now that you know who your customer is, you need to dive deeper in their current behavior relating to your product or service. There are many ways to do research, but I suggest you start extracting data sources you already have. See the list below.
- Gather data from within your business. For example from consumer service, this data comes directly from contact with your consumers. Think about testimonials, most frequently asked questions, goals and pain points. You could also get buyer behavior from your sales for example.
- Check out your analytics. What is your customer’s online behavior? What content do they view and what pages have the most dwelltime? What do they search for?
- How do customers interact with you on social media? Check out their profiles to gather information on what they like, follow and post.
- Use existing tools that help you gather more information on search terms, competitors, questions about your products online. Be smart and let the tools work for you.
- And one of the most important ones, simply spend time with your users. Only when you spend time with them, you will get to know them. Ideally, based on I suggest you spend time personally and on a regular basis of a few hours every +- 2 months.
- Lastly, map out the Value Proposition Canvas. This will help you visualize the goals, pains & gains of your customer and how your product or service is relieving this pain and creating gains for your customers. Adjust your value proposition based on the insights you gained, think about how to achieve product-market fit.
Template: [Within a few weeks you can download the Value Proposition Canvas here.]
Tool Tip: https://www.lookback.com/
Book Tip: Rocket Surgery Made Easy – The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
These insights can be used later in the process when we are going to map out the customer journey.
Step 3: Identify your consumer’s top tasks
Did you know that you only have +- 5 seconds to provide users what they want? For example when a potential customer is visiting your website you have +- 5 seconds to be clear and convince them to not click away but continue exploring your product? That’s really short and therefore it is extremely important to know exactly what users want so you are able to communicate that in a simple and short manner.
To be able to do so, you can use the power of top tasks analysis. This exercise identifies what tasks your users most wanted to complete. You will understand their questions and concerns they have before they take action. And you will be able to prioritize what matters the most to your users. How to run a top task analysis? Follow the following steps.
- Start brainstorming every question or objection users might have
- Combine/remove questions and come up with a list of 30-60 topics
- Create a list of categories and structure the topics. For example: pricing, features, etc.
- Create a survey in which you ask people to rank a top 5 topics out of the list. And yes, the list is very long, but that is with a reason. A long list will force people to think first and then search and choose from the list.
- Analyze the results and define the top tasks of your users. These can be used as input when creating content for you landing page, SEO and marketing ads.
Step 4: Create a Customer Journey
The journey of your customer can feel obvious to you as you are working everyday on your product from closeby. However, mapping the complete journey is extremely valuable as it gives insight of what’s going from beginning to end. It provides not only clear goals and actions within each phase, but it shows emotions, influences and touchpoints for each step in the journey. Based on your journey map you can identify weaknesses of the journey and frame what communication on which channels will help your customer in the right direction.
There are a few takeaways when mapping your journey.
- Simplicity is key. So keep your journey simple with ideally 5 or 6 steps. If you feel your customer journey is a lot bigger than that? No worries! Choose a scope, make it concrete what your journey will cover and zoom in to that particular process, for example the check-out process.
- If possible, involve colleagues and users in this process (customer service, sales, marketing, data analyst, etc.) This way you reduce bad assumptions and you create ownership and the same mindset within the team.
How to map a customer journey? Follow the steps below.
- Brainstorm what steps will cover your journey,
- Write down for each step what goals, activities, touchpoints, emotions your consumer can have and write them down.
- If you are with a bigger group, you can break down the group in smaller groups. Every group can focus on a particular step in the journey. Later you could check in and create a holistic view of the journey together.
- Point out weaknesses in the journey. This can be based on the emotion, questions, etc.
- Add an expiration date to the journey so you remind yourself of checking in on the journey once in a while.
Tip: print posters of your personas and journey and hang them at your workspace. The most common pitfall of businesses is that they start with a persona and customer journey when starting a business, but they forget to make time for this practice along the way. You are continuously developing and growing your product or service to improve the experience and grow your business. The customer behavior and tasks also change over time. It is important to keep your persona and top tasks up to date and visible.
Step 5: How is your business running now?
Now that you have a clear view on who you customer is, what your customer wants the most and how you can help them in each step of the journey, it is time to focus on your business and identify opportunities. Herefor we use the Pirate funnel, also known as the AAARRR funnel.
The Pirate funnel is a framework used to identify the weakest point of a business. The funnel consists of 6 steps your customer flows through (Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention and Referral). By filling in all the steps one-by-one, you will see where you’d need to focus your efforts in improving your business growth.
- Awareness
- Acquisition
- Activation
- Revenue
- Retention
- Referral
