Understanding the customer journey is essential for your business success but you don’t have to be a wizard. Marketing is all about understanding your customer needs and wants and positioning your products or services to meet those wants. But how can you get back to Oz if you don’t know the route or who is going to be walking the path?
That is where user-center design helps. User-centered design (UCD) focuses on your customer’s needs, wants, and limitations. From a marketing perspective, this focus continues through all stages of the customer journey (i.e. yellow brick road). If you aren’t sure who your customer is, take a peek at 5 ways to get to know your customer, it’s a great place to start.
Utilizing a user-centered design process in your marketing strategy will provide structure and order to help your customers as they journey to Oz. UCD helps to shed light on your consumer's decision-making process, a helpful tool to move your customers along their journey. However, before you start, knowing your customer demographics and psychographics is needed to provide the best foundation for UCD.
UCP is all about creating an easy, user-friendly experience; keeping the flying bats at bay. There are four considerations in the design process that are needed in order to solve problems from users and address their needs. These include research, concept, design, and evaluation. Evaluating these four things will help you to connect (courage), engage with your customers (heart), build proper messaging (brain), and position your brand for success (Oz). Embracing a UCD process in your organization will help your customers to more easily navigate the twists and turns of their journey, resulting in increased brand awareness, loyalty & equity, i.e. Oz.
Sometimes along the journey, visual cues are misunderstood. Next week we’ll dive into the importance of visual messaging in your communications. If you have any comments, feedback or requests, let me know. Providing relevant, timely, and meaningful information to help you with your business is our focus. Until next week, remember, the longer you listen and serve your customers, the more experience you have. “Experience is the only thing that brings knowledge, and the longer you are on earth the more experience you are sure to get.” ~ L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz