By Josh Marinaro, CRO Specialist at Launch
This article dives into the crucial topic of understanding why your customers do what they do, rather than just looking at the what. Experiments based on research have 28% higher win-rate, compared to ones based on ‘gut feel’.
Marketing leaders sometimes assume understanding the ‘why’ involves lengthy, costly projects. But this needn’t be the case – weaving it into your performance marketing mix can be done with a modest budget and also boosts the potential to scale your learnings.
So, let’s crack on with our 7 steps to truly understanding the why of customer behaviour, drawing from our experience here at Launch.
If you prefer to learn via video, the 30 minute webinar below should help. I’ve also made a slide deck summarising some of the ideas in this article for more visual learners.
1. Adopt an Experimental Mindset
Before you even start digging into customer data, the first crucial step is to cultivate an experimental mindset.
The good news is that this is free (other than a bit of research and internal coaching)! Being open to testing things is paramount because if you aren’t, the research and learnings you gather won’t have the impact you’re looking for.
This mindset needs to be adopted not only by yourself but also by key stakeholders in the business. We’re hearing more and more from CMOs that CFOs are now heavily involved, wanting to see how marketing spend can be more efficient and effective. In your meetings with them, advocate for the ways in which experimentation can help you get more from your performance marketing budgets.
Here’s a stat to have in your pocket: businesses which run 15 experiments in a year see 30% higher ad performance, compared to ones that run no experiments.
2. Develop Research-Backed Hypotheses
Once you’ve donned your experimenting cap, you need to structure your experiments in a way which will give the best chance of success. This starts with having a research-backed hypothesis.
The amount of changes made to websites or ad copy based on marketers’ opinions rather than customer insights is a worry. It’s crucial to use the customer voice to inform your hypotheses. So don’t pluck your hypothesis from the air – start by listening to customers. Here’s an example of how a hypothesis can be formed based on customer voice (from page 14 onwards).
3. Conduct Customer Research
This is where you actively seek to understand your customers beyond the numbers in analytics platforms.
Speaking to your customers gives you a why, as opposed to just the what that those analytics platforms give you. This not only illuminates the data you already have but also guides your future actions.
There are various types of customer research you can undertake. Here at Launch, we utilise several methods, including:
Speaking to happy customers to understand their loyalty
Review mining to uncover key themes in their feedback
Pop-up surveys on websites to gather real-time insights
Acquisition journey analysis to see the entire process from search to conversion.
4. Start with Review Mining
For those looking for a straightforward entry point to understanding their customers better, review mining is an excellent place to begin. As long as you have a platform where customers can leave you reviews, there really isn’t any barrier to entry at all.
Review mining involves digging through reviews and looking for key themes within them, not just focusing on star ratings but understanding what people are actually saying.
The goal is to find key recurring phrases and then reflect that language back to your customers in your marketing. By analysing reviews, you can start to understand your customers’ desired outcomes and what they perceive your USPs to be.
Your performance marketing agency should be able to help you put a framework in place for gathering and analysing data from review mining.
5. Uncover Desired Outcomes and Perceived USPs
Initially desired outcomes and customer perceptions of your USPs could be two of the things you focus on – but there are other areas you can look to uncover which can also help influence insight – the graphic below gives a guide.
Through your customer research, particularly review mining and speaking to happy customers, you should actively try to understand what people’s desired outcomes were before they purchased with you.
It’s also crucial to identify what your customers see as your USPs. This might be different from what you, as a business, think your unique selling points are.
Looking for market observations in reviews, where customers might compare you to competitors in terms of price or quality, can reveal valuable insights. This kind of gold is what can really help inform your marketing efforts.
6. Apply Insights to Creative and Messaging
The insights you gain from understanding the ‘why’ of customer behaviour should then directly inform your creative and messaging.
This is perhaps the most obvious application, as it can guide the imagery you use across all your advertising platforms. Always start from what your customer wants to see, not just general best practices.
This also extends to your copy and messaging across all touchpoints, from ads to your website. Consistency in your messaging, based on what resonates with your customers, is key across prospecting ads, social ads, and your website copy. It might even influence your tagline. Moreover, these insights can inform your broader creative briefs, such as guiding photography for upcoming seasons to align with customer preferences.
7. Build a Continuous Learning Program
Finally, understanding customer behaviour is not a one-off task; it requires building a continuous learning program.
As with anything worthwhile, doing this research properly takes time. Your performance marketing agency should be able to offer guidance around how to structure your learning program. For example, here at Launch, we follow a learning program where we house all our tests, recommendations, and understandings in a learning library.
Always allow a long run in before your peak sales period
To truly impact your peak seasons, whether that’s January/February for travel companies or November/December for e-commerce, you need to start building these learnings now.
The aim is to build up a comprehensive picture over time, not just rely on a quick review. Ideally, you want to have these learnings in place before your peak period so that you’re heading in with the best possible creatives and website experience, rather than A/B testing during your busiest time.
So, get started now, even if it’s just by looking at your reviews, and see where it takes you.
Can we help?
Launch’s experienced experimentation team have achieved exceptional results for clients like The Natural Adventure and Corsearch.
We approach every challenge bought to us by a client with curiosity, prioritising open, honest collaboration to get to the heart of what you need and how we can get you there.
Get in touch if we can help you with customer research.
About the author
Josh Marinaro, Senior Paid Media Manager (CRO Specialist)
Josh has 8 years of experience in performance marketing, specialising in PPC and CRO strategies. Before joining Launch, he worked as a PPC Manager at a full-service agency. At Launch, Josh focuses on combining his work across paid search and experimentation to get record breaking results for his eCommerce and travel clients.
