What do the first Apple mouse, a Colgate toothbrush, and Uber have in common? Each was developed using human-centered design, the process that puts people at the center of problem-solving and figures out solutions to meet their needs. This offshoot of design thinking approaches problems with awareness and collaboration to come up with ideas that are truly desirable to the end audience.
Product development and marketing may be two very different beasts. But the fundamental philosophies of human-centered design – empathy, ideation, and collaboration – can still be applied to your communications program.
In this whitepaper, learn how to employ four simple human-centered marketing strategies to get to the root of your challenges, understand your customers and target audience, and evolve your marketing tactics.
It shouldn’t be news to any marketer that you need to know your target customer before executing a strategy. But knowing your audience and putting them at the center of your marketing strategy are two very different things. When you think you know your audience you say things like, “Let’s do an event targeted at developers.” But when you put your audience at the strategy, you try to understand:
- Is my audience who I think they are?
- What do they care about?
- How can we improve their lives?
Answering these questions helps you to have empathy for your audience and is the basis of human-centered design – the process that puts people at the center of problem-solving and figures out solutions to meet their needs. This offshoot of design thinking approaches problems with awareness and collaboration to come up with ideas that are truly desirable to the audience. This subtle mindset shift from the company and its needs to the customer and their needs helped designers at Airbnb, Apple, and Spotify come up with first-of-their-kind products and services. So when it comes to human-centered design, you’re in good company.
WHY DOES HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN MATTER?
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again – thanks to technology, people have more options and more information than ever before. Purchasing decisions are anything but one dimensional and as marketers, we have to engage buyers from every angle to be successful. The intricacies of the modern marketing mix and the amount of data we can gain from our customers give us a huge opportunity. But it also results in incredible complexity. We have so much information, it’s difficult to make sense of it all or know what to do with it.
Taking a human-centered marketing approach helps us simplify and use the data we have to our fullest advantage – by understanding and connecting to our customer. This means collecting data that gives us insight into our audience rather than collecting data for data’s sake. From there, we can build marketing campaigns that will serve their interests.
HOW TO USE HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN IN MARKETING
While human-centered design, a design-thinking subset, was originally popularized by IDEO as a more innovative approach to product development, at its essence, it’s a way to solve problems with creativity. No two marketing campaigns are the same, but the following four techniques can help you get to the root of your challenges, understand your customers, and evolve your programs.
1. Ask a Big Question
Whatever your objective – thought leadership, event attendance, media traction, social media presence, content development, all of the above – your first step is to boil down your challenge to its essence. This challenge framework encompasses three important parts:
- How might we – Describes what we hope to accomplish together.
- In a way that – Describes the approach or values that we should apply.
- So that – Describes the impact we hope to have.
This hypothesis gives you a blank slate as well as a clear direction. It helps you look at the challenge before jumping forward to the undetermined solutions and ensures nothing is off the table. By starting with this framework, you can adopt a beginner’s mindset that helps you remain open, remove your assumptions, and get comfortable with ambiguity. Because in modern marketing, there’s a lot of that.
2. Employ Empathy
As marketers, we think we know a lot about our customers. We believe they are candidates for our products or services. We know some general demographic information about them. Maybe their purchase history or their browsing habits. But this information alone doesn’t give us a complete picture of who they are. The easiest way to visualize the customers you’re trying to reach is to treat them as real people. Buyer personas can help you transform data on your customer segments into characters that represent your target audience. The basic construct of buyer persona development includes the following:
Between focus groups and ethnography studies, customer surveys and feedback forms, Google Analytics, sales and social media data, it’s never been easier to access data that can inform your personas. But customer data alone doesn’t give a complete picture of potential or ideal customers. Secondary research, like reputable articles, and industry and analyst reports, can help to round out your customer data. It also helps to understand untapped audiences or where the market is going. While data can give you the insights you need, empathy helps you illustrate who your personas are on a human level.
Empathy means answering questions like:
- What do they think and feel?
- What does their daily routine or work-life look like?
- What do they like to do? What do they not like to do?
- What happens in their environment?
- What makes them tense?
- What makes them happy?
How can they improve their lives? Once you’ve developed your personas, you can put them to work immediately. Personas should have their own acquisition and marketing strategies. You can speak to them through targeted blogs, white papers, infographics, social media marketing, and digitals ads. You’ll know you’ve implemented your personas successfully when you start asking questions like, “Would Chris respond to an ad like that?” or “I think Nina cares more about X than Y.” Thinking like this shows you’re marketing to your personas from their perspective and helps to enhance their experience.
3. Ideate Together
Collaboration is a key principle of human-centered marketing. By co-creating marketing strategies with interactive brainstorms – that put all parties on an even playing field to contribute and share insights and understanding – you can unearth a wealth of ideas. To avoid a question-to-answer mentality, which can result in business-as-usual solutions, your aim is to use rapid ideation to get everything on the table. Whether you’re examining the customer journey or coming up with a new content marketing strategy, you can design brainstorming sessions to help you stretch past what you know and what you can do, to discuss the broader possibilities of what could be done. The idea is this: By thinking through all the possibilities, you can land on solutions you may not have otherwise considered. These brainstorms also help to align your team so you can move quickly into execution.
Human-Centered Brainstorm Rules:
4. Focus on Feedback
Feedback is probably the most important part of a human-centered marketing strategy. In human-centered design, this means testing a prototype before it hits the market. It’s always smart to test a big campaign before you launch, but not every concept warrants extensive testing before it sees the light of day. And sometimes the best way to see if something will work is to put it out there to see how it resonates, then iterate and expand from there. This is where gathering feedback comes into play. Gathering feedback can mean checking your Google Analytics to see what content is resonating and where people are spending their time. It can mean reviewing engagement on your social channels to see what’s working. It can be a survey to see what attendees liked or disliked about an event you had. It can be a town hall meeting where employees are asked to give their thoughts on the company’s new positioning. It’s crucial to ensure the process you have in place gathers honest feedback – from real people and with accurate data. From there, you can evaluate if your strategy is working, and how you can pivot and iterate to improve your marketing effort.
MAKING HUMAN-CENTERED MARKETING WORK FOR YOU
Taking a more human-centered approach to marketing communications doesn’t mean uprooting your process or reinventing the wheel. More so, human-centered strategies provide you with useful tools you can infuse into existing practices so you can expand your ideas, understand and listen to your audience, and collaborate more freely. You may never know everything about your customers, and that’s okay. Developing empathy and removing your assumptions helps you put your customers front and center. And that’s always a good place to start.
