Introducing User Research into content marketing, Brandwatch
Role and Responsibilities: User Experience Designer
The Brandwatch marketing team wanted to understand better what their customers were looking for and identify where to improve their user journeys for higher conversions.
Brandwatch is an industry leading social media monitoring platform that enables brands to measure sentiment both positive and negative for their products, and the opinion of their brand activities through social media listening and other monitoring activities.
Mapping as-is experiences
To understand where opportunities are to improve your content you need to first assess where you are. I ran a discoery phase where I:
- Hosted 1:1 interviews with the marketing and sales team members to outline their understanding of their customers and their behaviours
- Met with a number of users & procurement officers for existing customers to understand there experience with purchase, and needs
- Reviewed search log data on the site to see what visitors were really looking For
- Audit of Google Analytics to see what was being tracked and why
At the end of this information gathering I was able to benchmark the website against the data points collected. By doing this I could find the misalignment between lead generation strategy, effort into key marketing activities and their impact, i.e. were they getting the right information to the right people? And of course, how this all affected the customer experience.
Through user researcher it was possible to extend the guidance for which content-types were designed to speak to which audience, with people in clear groups:
- Users with influence, or assignment to find a solution for social media monitoring
- Procurement officers, that need commercial details and reassurance of performance
User Journey mapping through prototypes
Through a series of workshops with the design team, and senior content marketers, we developed a series of value proposition statements to better explain the purpose of each product in the suite, and how we wanted to speak to the industry verticals they were targeting.
Content strategist Heather Atchison was working in tandem to produce content governance and strategy for marketing. My work with page templates, supported by Heather’s guidance made creating page-type templates for the site much clearer. I produced content guide templates and wireframes for each content-type that was intended to be a lead generator, whether promoting webinars, case studies, blog posts or reports, all with clear drivers to which product they were leading traffic to through long-tail strategy.
Results
After developing the new page templates, and the content marketers producing the updated landing pages, there was a marked lift in well qualified lead traffic that made the sales teams follow up smoother as there was a better indication of which audience they were reaching out to, and how long the procurement could potentially take.