The Client:
Our client (who wishes to remain anonymous) is a global dental education brand that provides training and support to help businesses deliver healthcare services across the USA.
Overview:
Our client was missing growth opportunities by being unable to service clients outside of the major population areas of the USA.
Having never employed a process to map and understand the behaviours and journeys of their prospects, they had no insight into how to make improvements to their marketing funnel or website to help engage them.
Through user research, behavioural data mapping, and insights from offline activity, we were able to visualise the online journey and anticipated customer behaviour for these hard-to-reach prospects.
This then allowed us to identify opportunities for optimisation improvements within the client’s marketing funnels, and where user experience design and development were best employed for maximum ROI.
Results of this project included:
- Our insight helped to form a core part of our client’s 5-year business plan
- Improved CRM utilisation
- Operational efficiencies, helping the client to make resource and budget adjustments based on our insight
The Challenges:
Our client knew that professionals in the remote locations were very reliant on using their two websites, but they were completely in the dark as to how these clients and prospects were using them.
The lack of understanding meant that it was difficult for our client to understand the potential upside of investing in user experience design and development strategies that would help to achieve increased website engagement and secure more customers.
As such, we were required to help them create a digital services strategy that would help them to justify a project designed to improve the servicing and profitability of the remote location businesses.
Our Work:
Step 1
Our first step in creating a digital marketing services strategy was to conduct a series of interviews with our client’s ‘training and support’ team in the US who have experience in working with the businesses to progress them through the journey from prospects, to clients, to advocates. Our aim was to understand the types of questions their prospects were asking them, the information they required, their pain points, and the solutions our client was offering.
The answers that we gathered from this interview process formed a qualitative dataset about our prospects, including key insights such as:
- The products they used
- Their comments and questions to the ‘training and support’ team
- Key differentiators between each step, and what makes a prospect move from one step to another
Gaining an understanding of the existing journey was vital in ensuring that we could then map these findings to our new digital journey.
Step 2
With our understanding and analysis of the primary research, we were then able to map the correlating data from our client’s website and digital channels in context of a prospect’s online journey. This was achieved by assessing online data that mirrored the offline behaviours that we had identified. If that data was not available, we had to assess whether we could implement data collection methods so we could make this data available in the future.
Step 3
Following the alignment of online and offline data, we could start to better understand the online behaviours that our client needed to encourage.
By encouraging the right behaviour through website design and functionality, our client could encourage customers who fit their target audience profile to complete the actions that are most persuasive in convincing them to engage with the websites, resulting in an increased likelihood of them moving from prospect to customer.
Examples of recommendations included:
- Advising the ‘training and support’ team on when they should call prospects to maximise engagement and help to move them along the user journey
- How paid advertising could be used to effectively target prospects in remote locations and at engage them in the marketing funnel
- How to use prospect data collection to inform organic search strategy
- Why the client needed to invest in ‘comparison’ themed content to engage early-stage prospects
- How to use urgency in paid advertising to maximise leads from on-the-fence prospects
- When information-orientated content was best used to nurture prospects
- Why the client should invest in email marketing to engage professionals in remote locations
… and much more!
The Results:
For the first time, our client had a swathe of new digital information about large numbers of potential customers that it had previously been unable to reach. They were able to make use of the information on both the needs of their customers (remote locations and large cities), and how they were behaving on their websites and across digital channels.
Crucially, our client was able to understand how and why prospect needs may differ based on their profile, and tailor the information presented to them accordingly.
The insight from this project also resulted in:
- Recommendations from our analysis helping to shape our client’s 5-year business plan
- A change in our client’s marketing strategy to encompass further data collection and improved measurement of the digital journey
- Data collection and content recommendations being incorporated into the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy
- Resource and budget adjustments were made to allow a new focus on digital channel attribution, data quality, data collection, analysis, and copywriting
- An understanding of which channels are best utilised for acquiring customers
- A thorough understanding of the types of content that are most/least effective in engaging prospects
- The prioritisation of user experience design and development work within the business
- The shift in understanding that meaningful data should be tracked as a priority because it will give richer insight into behaviour and further ways of measuring the impact of website changes
If you’d like to find out how we could help you with any part of your digital marketing strategy, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can call us on 01273733433 or leave us a message via the contact form below: