You’ve just spent a lot of time, effort, and money on a detailed UX research report. After user tests, A/B testing, and discussions with your UX designer, you’re brimming with data and insights, and have an extensive plan for the website.
But are you missing out on another major opportunity to put your UX findings to use?
Chances are, you might be.
Think about it: All that information you’ve gathered about your audience, competitors, and website performance – what other field of digital marketing is it relevant to? If you guessed biddable media, you’re right. As far as customer-led, competitor-responsive avenues of digital marketing go, it doesn’t get much better than biddable.
But that’s only one part of the equation. The more important part is how you actually take insights from a UX research report and translate them into a successful social ad, particularly if two completely different teams are working on each component.
Ready to learn how to apply UX research to your biddable media strategy?
Let’s dive right in.
1. Audiences
One of the best parts about a UX report is the sheer amount and detail of the information it presents about your audience. From their demographics and behaviours to their needs, motivations, and pain points, a good UX report lays it all out on the table for you.
But don’t let that information sit there collecting dust. Use it across multiple areas of your business, especially biddable media. This can be one of the best places to start when it comes to defining your audience for search and social activity.
Targeting
Have you ever looked at a user persona developed by a research team and thought, “Wow, that’s a whole lot of information that I’ll probably never use. Who cares that Tyler is a 22-year old student who has a low income and passion for graphic design, snowboarding, and YouTube?”
The short answer: You do!
The long answer: One of the key roles of UX research is developing personas to understand user needs. UX-based user personas form a solid base on which you can then build out the core elements of your social audience. For example, if you’re a clothing company that has identified that a big portion of your customers are also interested in makeup, part of your targeting strategy can incorporate relevant makeup brands and products.
The same goes for keyword categories. If you know common terms and phrases that customers use to describe or search for products and services related to you, consider these when doing your competitor keyword research.
Optimisation
UX research can also provide direction for parts of your overall optimisation strategy. A good example of this is using UX findings to guide the time of day your ads should be showing.
If you know most users convert on your site between 7pm – 10pm, you really want to make sure your ads are appearing during that time. It’d be a shame to hit your daily budget by 6pm, right before your target audience is jumping online and looking to make a purchase.
Competitors
Whether this means conducting competitor keyword research and using the findings in your search campaigns, or targeting users who’ve expressed interest in your competitors through social channels, leverage off your competitors to reach audiences that are highly relevant to you.
Any digital marketer worth their salt knows the importance of keeping a close eye on the competition. Always have a solid idea of who your competitors are, and use this knowledge to your advantage.
2. Messaging
Picture this: You’re in the midst of writing search ad copy and spend hours reviewing existing website content and pulling messaging from there based on what you think will resonate with your audience. Little did you know, the UX team has already done a good chunk of the work for you.
As part of their research, they’ve tested various messaging with a heap of users, learned what works best, and written recommendations (thanks, team!). While it may seem like the primary purpose of this research is for website content, why wouldn’t you use this for your search and social ad copy too?
Emotional Branding
Knowing how to tailor your message to your audience starts with knowing your audience. To be more specific, it starts with knowing the way your audience sees themselves. If, for example, you’re a fashion brand who knows how customers prefer to describe their own personal style, use this information to drive the messaging and content across digital channels.
Recently, a client was 100% sure that their main audience would consider their personal style “trendy and edgy”. After extensive research, however, we learned that the client’s customers actually perceived their style as “comfy and casual”, and preferred tried-and-tested options to of-the-minute trends. Can you guess what the next EDM focused on? You guessed it: Basics.
Unique Selling Propositions
Once you know how your audience sees themselves, it’s time to think about how they see you.
UX research will give you a good sense of what’s important to your customers, beyond just the product or service itself. In today’s highly competitive e-commerce landscape, this often boils down to customer service and payment options.
Look closely at the numbers and findings and the results may surprise you. Perhaps you thought customers valued AfterPay the most, but the reality is that your free returns policy is the main reason they shop with you (in which case, they wouldn’t be alone: 68% of US customers report that free returns and exchanges are an incentive to shop online). Whatever the case, work out what the customer considers to be your key USPs and incorporate these into your ad copy.
3. Website
Top Pages
Insights can also help identify where you send traffic from your paid campaigns and determine other aspects of paid search campaign management. There might be pages that seem like the right choice, but the UX team may have identified user issues that aren’t as obvious when you’re looking at it from a paid campaign perspective.
Or, your UX researchers may have found that the homepage converts at a significantly higher rate than the product page. Be sure to reference the research report when choosing pages to drive your paid traffic to.
Devices
Research may have identified that mobile converts significantly higher than desktop among the majority of your products, and that hardly anybody buys on their tablet. Bring these learnings over to your search campaigns and apply bid adjustments so that Google can optimise towards the higher-performing devices.
What about the other way round?
Now that you know how insights from UX research can be used to shape your biddable media strategy, it’s time to turn the tables. With a bit of forward planning and communication between your teams, a number of paid search basics can be used to help the UX process.
Messaging
Testing different messaging across your search campaigns can often be quicker (and more measurable) than testing it with users, who might keep their reactions internal.
Search campaigns have the ability to reach high volumes of people quickly, and give you important metrics like Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CVR).
You can then take learnings from campaign testing and apply them to your site.
Identifying Key Pages to Analyse
During their website analysis, the UX team can focus on the landing pages used in your biddable campaigns that receive lots of traffic and activity. As these are the pages that new audiences are being driven to, they should also be trialled during user testing.
Search Queries
Imagine you’ve run a campaign for ‘sandals’ over the past few months, during which time 60% of the clicks have come from queries specifically referencing ‘waterproof summer sandals’. How easy is it for new customers coming to your site to find these? Do you have a search function, or a related products section in the main navigation?
Incorporate this into your user testing and ask users how they’d find waterproof summer sandals on your site to ensure the products with higher intent are easily accessible. Let’s face it: Nobody should ever have to live without waterproof summer sandals.
The best paid search marketing is driven by insights from the UX team and beyond
Like all aspects of digital marketing, developing a biddable media strategy shouldn’t be done in a silo. Working with other disciplines (like the UX team) can help you build a well-rounded, data-driven strategy that gives you a competitive edge.
At Yoghurt Digital, our multidisciplinary teams are all about working collaboratively. Ready to sink your teeth into some UX research insights and put them into practice in your biddable media strategy? Get in touch with our digital strategists today!