One of the significant barriers to user research is the perception that it’s expensive,but really, that doesn’t need to be the case,especially when you’re starting out.For a start, you’ll find that you’ve got a lot of knowledge about your audience already within your company. I want to explore how to dig out that knowledge without spending a cent. You will know just how much hidden knowledge your colleagues already have about your audience,and how to extract insights from freely available data sources.Finally we’re going to look at how to leverage the huge amounts of data users share themselves quite freely every day online.How do you start to better understand your audience?Well, the one thing you don’t do is immediately go out and hire a user research company.That would be an enormous waste of money,and that’s because you’ll already have a large amount of information within your company,and you might be sitting there thinking, “Well, no I don’t”,but you do, trust me, there is more there than you think.So what we’re going to do, is we’re going to start by finding any existing research that already exists within your organization.
Now, when you do find it,you’ll discover that maybe not all of it is up to date,and that’s okay, and we’ll deal with that.And, it might be that not all of that research you’ve got actually is that relevant, and that’s okay too,but we need to know what we’ve got before we start getting anything new.So we’re going to collate everything we possibly can,so where should we look for this information?Well, first of all, we should go to our sales team,that’s normally where I start, right?Our sales team have contact with the customer every single day,they’re always out there talking to customers.So they will know in their heads a huge amount about their customers.They’ll know about where they work,they’ll know about questions that they’ve got,and most significantly, what objections they have,what reasons do they give for not buying?Because those are the kinds of things that we can be addressing in our marketing and sales strategies.So our sales people will give you amazing insights,they’ll also have things like testimonials from customers,and all kinds of insights into who they are,and what they’re trying to achieve.
What are their goals?What are their pain points?The sales team is a great place to start.So, have a chat with them, see what you can find out.After that, talk to customer support people, right?These are the people that answer the phone every day.They can have amazing insights into existing customers as well.What are their frustrations?What are their struggles?What do they wish the product does that it doesn’t do at the moment?They’ll have all kinds of insights that you can glean.They probably have even got a database of commonly asked questions as well that they’re constantly having to answer.And again, if you can address some of these questions up front in the sales process,often you can close a sale faster, and you can reduce the load on the customer support team later.Then, you want to talk to who ever’s running social media on a daily basis, that might even be somebody from within your own team.Those people will have incredible insights into what customers are asking online,about your products and services,but also into who those customers are, okay?Because those social media feeds will tell you all kinds of things about your customers we will come onto later.Another group of people you can talk to is however is in charge of your analytics.All kinds of insights can come from looking through your Google analytics, and if you’re running something like Hotjar you can discover lots of stuff.Again, we’ll touch on that more in just a minute.And then finally, there’s any customer,any other customer-facing staff you’ve got.All of these people are dealing with customers on a daily basis and really understand them.So, those are your starting points.
You can collate what you know about people,from other people within your company.What about collecting date on your audience?Absolutely, we should be looking at the data that we have on our audience.Now we can’t rely solely on data,as a lot of what we need to understand is about people’s motivations,while data tends to focus on their behaviors,what they do.But, that said, there are things that we can learn from looking at our analytics.First of all, we can look at what search terms people have used, right?Both search terms that have brought them to the website in the first place,but also the search terms they’re entering into your website.These will give insights about the questions that people have,the pain points they want help dealing with,what their ultimate goals are, that kind of stuff.Also, if you’ve got something like Serpstator some other search engine optimization tool,then you can look at that to see what kinds of questions people are searching on relating to your product or service.So you can find often that people are using slightly different terminology than maybe the terminology used on your website,and so you won’t be able to see from your search terms that those are relevant questions,but using a good search engine optimization tool,that will reveal to you other questions,other related terms to the ones that you’re already using.The other thing you can learn from analytics is where people are giving their most of their attention when they visit your website.What are the most popular pages?But also, what pages get the most dwell time, all right?Because that combination of dwell time and visits will give you an indication of what areas people are most concerned with.Because not everything that you communicate will be equally important,some information will be more important to users than others, and you need to know what that is.We also need to be considering the analytics associated with our social media campaigns as well.We push out social media updates in the world,and only give superficial attention to things like shares and likes.But the kind of things that people share and like are also good indication of what they care about.The final analytic source that you need to be looking at is things like session recorders and heatmap tools.So, for example, you might already be running something like Hotjar, that lets you look at heat maps and, you know, video playback of users sessions.
By watching what people are doing on your website,you can get an indication, not just of their behavior,but the underlying motivations,what it is they really care about.Are there any other good sources that we should be looking at?Absolutely, one of the most overlooked sources is social, all right?Social media is incredibly useful,and I’m not just talking about the social media we push out into the world,but what our followers push out in the world, all right?There was a time when you would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get market research done.These days, all you need to do is look at your audience online and you can find out everything they care about.Everything that’s important to them is all just posted online.Who are they talking to?Who do they follow?What do they post about?What do they share about?What kind of things do they say about topics relating to your product and service?All of these are absolutely invaluable sources that we really should be paying more attention to.Look at their profiles,who else are they following, all right?What do they share?What do they moan about, all right?What questions do they ask?But we can’t just be monitoring mentionsof our own products,we also need to be monitoring mentions of your competitors,do people follow them, all right?What kind of people follow them?And what do those people post?We also need to be monitoringany questions relating to our products, okay?So let’s say, I don’t know,you sell web design services, okay?What questions are people asking about web design services?Those will give us indicationsof what our campaigns need to be addressing.
As you can see, adopting a user centric approach to marketing doesn’t mean spending a lot of money on user research.None of the suggestions that I’ve made involve hiring a user research company.You can start by simply collating what you know and what is easily available.Your colleagues, data sources and social media are all valuable sources that you can use to start patching together insights about your customer.Not to mention previous research that you’ve probably already done and has ended up in a drawer somewhere and never gets looked at.However, don’t do this, don’t think that by doing this you’re going to get a complete picture,there will be gaps and some insights that you need to check are still relevant and up to date.
