UTILIZING HEURISTIC ANALYSIS TO MAKE OPTIMIZATION DECISIONS.
Gaining depth in growth marketing requires expertise in it’s 3 building blocks;
Channel expertise: Your ability to know operational marketing technologies like search engine optimization, search engine marketing,email marketing, product design, basic programing,etc.
These are the technical skills required to thrive as a digital marketing expert.
However, you still need to be grounded in analytics(as well as the requisite tools for testing) and excellent project management to be called a growth marketer.
I wrote an introduction of growth marketing here. Do well to check it out here.
Subsequently, I’ll be writing on core channel tools and the other brothers of growth.
For this article, what will be broken down is a mixture of psychology (heuristic analysis) and data gathering for excellent optimization decisions.
MAKING OPTIMIZATION DECISIONS
Generally, when making optimization decisions, there are 6 types of data that can help you;
- Technical Analysis
- Heuristic analysis
- Digital analytics
- Qualitative surveys
- Quantitative surveys.
- User testing.
Before starting with any of them in the list, we ought to list out the problems we want to solve, the questions, pain points,needs,etc.
It’s important to list them so as to make the data answer them after your process.
Heuristics analytics
For an introduction to heuristics analytics, please read up here.
We need to criticize every of the pages on the website with our team.
Although the results are not scientific but suboptimal and quick. The criteria used to measure pages are
Clarity: What the site is about should be well communicated and clear. It is a bad practice to make people try to understand what your site is about. Everything should be clear. Copy or media can be used to drive home your message.
Every page also need to have it’s clear goals.
Homepage : segmentation goal,ie to move the audience use the audience.
Category page: click on a product.
Product page: Add to cart.
The objectives should be enshrined into the
Relevancy: Is the page specific to my need?
Motivation: Does the page have enough motivation to push me towards subscription?
Friction: What is the level of difficulty I encounter from your site.
To understand the heuristic analysis framework better, the fog model is used to drive the message of what leads to web success.
In this model, it clearly shows how success/desired action is determined by the combination of behavior, ability and triggers.
Motivation : Don’t lead them to CALL TO ACTION until the motivation is very high. Try to motivate users in order to push actions.
There are 6 factors that can motivate man; pleasure, Pain, Hope , Fear, Acceptance and Rejection. Every of a Brand’s copy and general content should be positioned on line with a particular motivation they tend to fill.
1. Trigger : Triggers tell us what to do at a given time. It can be external and internal.
External includes, word of mouth, notifications, good advertising, good packaging,CTA buttons, notifications,email newsletters,etc. Internal triggers tell the user’s what to do due to association ( i remember writing a post about the popular conditioning of dogs with association). Naturally we would try to use our product to modulate the negative valence state of people. It’s is forming an association with it and our brand. Like popular brands like ;Facebook(when you’re lonely), Google( when you’re unsure), Sports,news,gist blogs,(when you’re bored), the aim is to position our products as the solution to those itch.
What are your customers itch?(trigger)
Instagram solves the problem of losing the moment ie, if you’re in an exciting place, your desire to snap a picture with your cell phone increases because of Instagram.
Action : This is the simplest behavior done in anticipation of an instant reward. According to B.J Fog, for any behaviour to happen, we need the active 3 variables.
Ability- your capacity to do something. Factors that increases ability are; money,time, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance,non routine.
After everything on the site have been well optimized with a quick heuristics analysis by you and your team, make a pictorial call out of all the problems on the former pages.
To be continued..
This is my 4th entry for the CXL Growth Marketing mini degree program I’m currently enrolled in.
