Using human insight to engage buyers throughout their journey

Today's buyers are more empowered than ever with many digital tools at their fingertips. They can conduct research, get recommendations from friends and family, and buy products and services all from their smartphones.

This means that most buyers already know about your product or solution long before they talk to a salesperson or go onto your website to engage in an offer. In fact, 68% of B2B customers prefer to research independently online before contacting sales or making a purchase, according to Forrester. This is also true in retail, as nearly 90% of shoppers begin searching for new products online, according to Salesforce.

So how does a marketing team reach and influence today’s digitally-savvy buyers, strategically guiding them as they travel down their path to purchase?

It’s not enough to optimize your website and cross your fingers. You need a strategic and carefully-executed buyer experience designed to speak to your prospects’ needs, intent, attitudes, and behavior. You want to make sure you’re meeting their needs each step of the way.

While market research and industry reports can help you understand the buyer’s mindset and trends in the customer journey, you can get more specific and actionable insights by listening directly to real people in your target market.

UserTesting helps marketers drive awareness, increase consideration, and influence purchasing decisions by enabling them to discover customer attitudes, understand the buyer journey, and quickly validate messages and material. 

In this guide, we’ll share how leading-edge marketers use insights from real people to optimize the buyer experience at each stage of the funnel.

We’ll cover:

• How to gain a better understanding of your ideal buyer
• How to uncover the why behind buyers’ actions
• How to execute campaigns that engage your buyers

Gain a better understanding of your ideal buyer

Buyers of consumer goods and business solutions start their purchase journey by researching options online. But buyers are often uncertain about what they’re looking for during this early stage. They have a problem or a need but generally haven’t decided on an exact solution.

For example, a business leader at an enterprise company might be considering a shift to an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy but might not know which tools and solutions are needed to implement it. 

Understanding customers’ pain points and how they search for solutions can help companies design an experience that cuts through the clutter—delivering the right message to the right person at the right time and place.

In the example of that business leader looking for ABM tools, organizations offering possible solutions need to understand exactly what questions that leader is asking—and how they answer them. Are they turning to Google, B2B tech review sites, or calling on trusted colleagues or peers?

Understand your ideal buyer with UserTesting

Customer experience starts with the very first interaction with your brand, so it’s critical to understand your customers’ pain points (and how a product solves them) to craft a relevant message.

UserTesting helps you accomplish this goal in several ways. Your team can interview people who align with your ideal buyer personas on demand. Whether through live interviews or recorded feedback, you can identify users with problems, such as needing a solution to manage their ABM strategy, and watch as they search for a solution.

Speaking to your exact target audience will help you understand how they do their research. What terms are they searching for? Which are they not searching for? What watering holes do they visit and trust the most? And—more importantly—what insights can be gained on optimizing the company’s organic (SEO) and paid (SEM) search strategy? Testing behavior on desktops and mobile devices is important to see if and how it shifts.

For example, through UserTesting, Autotrader discovered that the car-buying journey starts with online searches rather than visiting its website first. The company revamped its entire site to make it friendly to search users landing on any page.

Some other examples of journeys UserTesting customers have studied:

• How do people research Medicare plans?
• What’s the customer journey for choosing a hotel?
• How do parents start the process of finding a toy for their child?

Uncovering the why behind buyers’ actions

The average time spent on a given page on a website is a mere 54 seconds, according to Contentsquare. This doesn’t give a business much time to make a first impression, much less gather leads. 

Analytics can tell you what people are doing in that short 54-second period, but they can’t explain why each click, tap, or conversion happens—or doesn’t. The missing piece of the puzzle is what the customer thinks and feels when they take action or exit a page. Knowing how to better reach and relate to your target audience is impossible without understanding the why.

Quickly understand customer attitudes with UserTesting

Testing the customer experience on websites is more important than ever. What is the user’s first impression when they arrive on the site? Are there intriguing calls to action, like whitepapers, offers, or free trials on the homepage, that deliver enough value to propel a prospect to fill out a form or accept a trial offer? Do the forms prevent drop-off while still capturing the right information?

UserTesting increases your productivity by making it easy to get insights on customer thinking within hours. You can move faster with greater confidence.

For example, a clothing company used recorded tests to discover that its product photos drove away customers because the models were too skinny, leading customers to assume the clothing would not look good.

Other samples of customer thinking explored through UserTesting:

• What are perceptions of calories shown on a fast food menu?
• Which of these brands would you trust for making a large purchase?

Executing campaigns that engage your buyers

This is where the rubber hits the road. There isn’t time or money to research every deliverable, so marketing teams often guess whether messages and materials like emails, videos, and images will resonate with customers. Marketers also spend a large chunk of their budget on lengthy and expensive experiments like A/B tests and multivariate ad sets to test their assumptions and gain more data after the experiment concludes. 

Instead of guessing, and before running costly experiments, authentic feedback from your target audience can give you confidence that your marketing initiatives will resonate. You can empower your teams to make more informed decisions in real time. And you can get compelling videos of customer reactions, which you can share within your organization to explain decisions, educate people, and settle disputes within hours.

How to execute engaging campaigns with UserTesting

An online education leader planned its rebranding through UserTesting. It learned that its previous brand identity felt too unprofessional and ‘cartoonish’ to customers. In a few days, it checked the resonance of all new brand elements, including colors, logos, tagline, images, copy, and overall emotional tone.

Other examples of insights you can easily get on-demand:

• How well do customers understand the vocabulary we use?
• What message did the ad convey?
• Sort and prioritize product images for a new product
• How effectively are we communicating who we are and why we’re special?
• Which email content resonates best with participants?
• Compare the pitches for two products. Which pieces of information resonated the most?

Invest in customer empathy for a competitive advantage

Best-in-class marketers invest in quantitative and qualitative ways to measure customer sentiment at every buyer journey stage to ensure they deliver the right message and solution. The customer experience spans from the moment a customer discovers your brand or company until their very last interaction with it—and they expect it not just to deliver value but to be seamless.

With UserTesting, you can quickly understand the interactions that make up your customer experience with various features designed to surface and share insights. You can spotlight meaningful reactions and responses using video clips and highlight reels. Lastly, you can search transcripts to find key moments in a single place—and then share the insights easily throughout your organization to put them into action.

UserTesting can give you the insights you need to develop a powerful customer experience that helps you earn and retain customers, profits, and a competitive edge.