When you visit your local supermarket you probably take for granted how easy it is to find things. Everything is easy to read, highly visible, legible and in easy to understand language. Want olive oil? Third shelf down, next aisle. Special offers? On the corner near the entrance.
Did you know, however, that sending you round counter-clockwise can add a pound or two to your bill? Or that separating mum from dad can increase the chance of a spontaneous purchase?
Supermarkets know this from careful study and research into their customer’s behaviour, along with empirical investigation and testing. They’ve gained insight into their key customer groups and can therefore take advantage of this while providing an easy and convenient shopping experience. They are masters of this user-focused sales strategy.
Now transfer this approach to a digital marketing context, where it would be called user-centred design (UCD). In B2B digital marketing, UCD can make huge improvements in effectiveness, targeting and conversion across the whole of your site. Maybe it’s obvious, but knowing your user and their needs and building your digital communications around them can pay dividends.
Standing up to the HIPPO
‘No shit Sherlock,’ I hear you say, ‘that’s the way we already operate.’ Actually, the chances are that you’re creating digital communications based on a range of assumptions. And the chances are equally strong that it works like this. A colleague comes up with his insight, and so do a couple of others. Then, it’s survival of the fittest as they wrestle each other in an effort to prove their theory right. Who comes out ahead? It’s all down to the HIPPO Principle: Highest Paid Person’s Opinion wins.
We’ve all done it. Made decisions based upon what we think the audience will want, that is. Add designers and writers into the equation, and the result is a subjective mishmash. What UCD does is to bring objectivity into the decisions we make about the people we market to.
UCD is a discipline in itself, with its own set of tools and methodologies – all easily in reach of any B2B marketer and a firm set of principles:
– Business results depend on users
– You are not your user
– They have different goals than you
– They don’t care as you do
– They aren’t alike
– You learn about users through direct contact – not assumptions
– Knowledge about users must be actionable
– Your decisions should be based on user knowledge.
By investing a little more time up front, you can build an objective and undisputed view of your audience that you can utilise for all future marketing work – but building a strong business case is essential since it can sometimes be too easy to see UCD as non-essential, making it first thing to drop off the budget. Too often it’s seen as an optional extra, a tactic, rather than a total approach or a strategy.
Selling it to the organisation
So here are some statistics that will help you defend it. The average improvements across a web project with UCD according to useit.com are:
– Sales/conversion rate – 100 per cent
– Traffic/visitor count – 150 per cent
– User performance/productivity – 161 per cent
– Use of specific (target) features – 202 per cent.
They’re figures that make the time, effort and budget all seem worthwhile.
In general, adhere to these principles:
– Focus early on users and tasks
– Measure users empirically
– Develop and work with an iterative design, testing, modification process.
Put them all together, and you will develop reliable qualitative and quantitative data that spans the ground between what people say, and what they actually do.
UCD is a great digital marketing strategy, but one that’s currently sparsely used in the B2B world – an irony as it’s well suited to B2B. So embrace it and reap the results.
