UX is killing Advertising
Advertising is everywhere. We hear it on podcasts, we see it on YouTube videos, it appears at the top of our Google search results and in the middle of our social media feeds. It has become so common that we barely even stop to take notice.
Startups spend almost 50% of their funding on Facebook and Google ads, all in pursuit of one thing - customer acquisition.
In many industries this amount of advertising makes sense. It's the best way to get in front of potential customers. But for many SaaS companies, there's something better. It's better for you and it's better for your customers. Allow me to explain...
👉 Product-Led Growth
Product-Led Growth is a new type of go-to-market strategy that uses your product to get new customers.
Product-led companies have turned customer acquisition on its head. You won't hear them talking about the perfect advertising campaign to convert attention into a one time purchase. Instead, these companies let users take the product for a test drive. They wow users with amazing value on a free version today which naturally leads to a paid upgrade tomorrow.
As the name suggests, product-led companies live and die on the back of their products. They are totally dependent on providing a product experience that brings users back time and time again. They rely on their users to shout from the rooftop about their great experience and beg for their new manager to pay for your product when they join a new company.
Loyal customers - they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.
Chip Bell - Customer Loyalty Consultant & Author
UX > Advertising
And how can your company build a product that's this good? User Experience (UX).
If you are a product-led company, you need to take your advertising budget and invest it in better UX research. It's UX that is going to help you to acquire, activate and retain customers. But product-led growth is only effective if your user experience meets and exceeds customer expectations.
Why double down on research? To give users what they want, you first have to know what they want. Let's explore how you can make this possible...
👉 Three Pillars of UX Research
1. Understanding Your Value
If you are a regular reader of the OpinionX blog post or a subscriber to The Full-Stack Researcher newsletter then you might have heard this one before, but for the newbies at the back...
Big data can tell you what your users are doing but it can't tell you why. To understand why your users do what they do, you need to provide them with an opportunity to share their perspective.
You need to lean on qualitative research and really listen to your customers to understand their unmet needs and motivations. There are three questions that you'll have to answer...
(i) What are the core tasks that my users want to get done?
This is the 'Jobs To Be Done' framework. Use qualitative research to dig deeper than just what customers say they want to find out why they want these things. This kind of investigation will get to the core of user behaviour to reveal new and improved ways of delivering targeted value to users.
You can’t transform something you don’t understand. If you don’t know and understand what the current state of the customer experience is, how can you possibly design the desired future state?
Annette Franz — CEO, CX Journey
(ii) How do users want to feel after using your product?
Do your customers want to feel safe and secure after using your product? Do they want to feel innovative and intelligent? Maybe they want to feel connected? Or even organised? The best product-led teams use UX research to understand how your customers want to feel and then build features that deliver this right back to the user. If this isn't feeling like an input-output cycle driven by user insights, take a second look at what you're feeding into your product development process.
(iii) How do customers want to be perceived by other people when using your product?
This one often gets overlooked but it's equally essential. It is widely known that people make purchase decisions based on social pressure. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Subtly investigate how your users want to be perceived by both their colleagues and customers and it will provide you with a wealth of inspiration.
The customer’s perception is your reality.
Kate Zabriskie — Customer Experience Consultant, Business Training Network
Want to truly understand your users? OpinionX is a free research tool for stack ranking people’s priorities, helping you make better decisions informed by real data.
2. Building Frictionless Experiences
Users today more impatient and less tolerant of friction than ever. They're accustomed to using products built by tech giants who invest heavily in user experience, so they expect everything to be smooth sailing. If you're pursuing product-led growth, your product needs to work like a well-oiled machine. Rule number 1? Nail that onboarding process! You can't build a successful product if users are struggling to even get up and running.
A poor onboarding experience is hard to come back from and is the fastest way to lose a customer.
Paul Philip — CEO, Amity
Low retention rate is a clear sign that something is wrong with your product. If you have poor customer retention, you need to get really serious about understanding why customers are leaving. This alone is enough to kill your business if the cause is not diagnosed and fixed.
Self-service onboarding is a key ingredient in product-led companies, but don't think this means that every product-led team is a room full of shy developers hiding away in some dusty, windowless room. PLG startups will get in touch with their self-service users to see how they're doing, especially in the early days or if they're seeing problems in their metrics.
Ditch that Net Promotor Scores and ask for feedback directly from customers. Talk to users who love what you do as well as the ones that don't. Feedback (especially negative) can help you transform your user experience. You would be surprised how many churned users are just waiting for you to ask them what went wrong. Every new insight is a step closer to a better UX and another referral.
3. Discovery Research
Discovery research is the secret ingredient for growth. This research is focused on exploring a problem space without any bringing any existing judgements or assumptions to the table. Discovery research enables you to learn new things about your users — maybe even things you would never have thought of before. At OpinionX, we call these insights unknown unknowns and they can often be more impactful on your product than running surveys designed to measure or validate insights you already know about (aka evaluative research).
When the Discovery Phase comes to an end, we aim to have a clear, shared understanding of the challenge we are trying to solve as a team, an agreement about where we should focus our efforts, and the outcomes we are aiming for with the next phase.
Myrto Papagiannakou — Head of User Experience, Notallbad
The best way to do discovery research? Mixed Methods. This means blending qualitative research with quantiative data. Mixed methods research is quickly becoming an emerging skillset in the user research world, with researchers combining tools like user interviews and open-ended surveys with data analysis and statistics to prioritise the findings of their discovery research. If the world of mixed methods is new to you, we've put together a super simple guide on the three research designs that you need to master Mixed Methods Research.
It's a culture thing...
As SaaS companies have moved to product-led growth in recent years, user expectations have skyrocketed. Sometimes it can feel like a challenge to do everything right - I understand. We're still learning to put a lot of these learnings into practice ourselves at OpinionX. By allocating more resources towards UX, you're making it clear that creating a user experience worth sharing is a company priority.
The first step is to embed user research in your team's culture and ways of working. It can't be the sole responsibility of the people who have UX in their job title. Instead, everyone must understand that they have an important role to play — from salespeople to designers, customer service and marketing. Lean on your UX researcher to establish this culture and to enable everyone to 'speak and hear the voice of the customer'.
In a cross-functional world, researchers move from being methodology gurus to discovery guides. Researchers don’t deliver the voice of the customer; researchers enable everyone to speak and to hear the voice of the customer. Your job is no longer the executioner of research, but about embedding yourself in the business as partners; to enable everyone to experience the customer and to facilitate that cross-functional conversation about that experience; to best impact product.”
Tricia Wang — Co-Founder of Sudden Compass (at the Mind the Product conference in San Francisco, 2019)
No amount of advertising can fix poor UX. At the end of the day, it's hard to soar like an eagle when you're built like a turkey.