Behind the Curtain: 5 Human Behavior Books to Hack Your Customer Expectations
It all starts with an idea.
When that idea is ready to go out into the world, however, it doesn’t translate well to customers. Most of the time, there is no data around the customer or what you offer, so it is hard to get started.
You may be all too familiar with this. You eventually got it going, but could it have been easier? How do you manage going forward?
With the right software, mindset, and foundation, your startup can get off the ground and reach more customers more easily than you think.
Customer expectations are at an all time high, and we want to show you how to meet and manage them in order to build a future for your company.
Your customers’ minds work incredibly differently than yours do. As a business owner, you have a sort of “creator blindness.” The products you create are like gold to you, but you need to make them look like gold to others, too. You have great ideas, but they don’t always meet customer expectations.
That being said, you need to learn how to find customer expectations. Get feedback on your website and conduct a few searches to:
- Find paint points and noteworthy conversations on forums
- Interact with users and see what’s trending on social media
- Analyze how long users are in your website funnel with Google Analytics
Be realistic about what you’re putting out there. Have at least a small understanding of what your customers expect before launching something.
Learning customer behavior is part of learning how to grow your business. Be relevant. Understand what they want. Success will follow.
Starting a business requires you to figure out the right way to align your messaging to what customers want.
Most people hit a wall after they’ve already started their website. When it’s time to sell, they can’t figure out how to get going.
The problem, however, isn’t necessarily that users don’t want your product. It’s that users don’t want your messaging. You have to think like a customer.
It isn’t selling because of that creator blindness mentioned above. What you want and what your customers want is different. The lines can be blurry, but the bottom line remains: it’s all about the customer.
Understanding customer behavior is the first step to giving your website a future. To get started:
Auditing traffic helps you understand the behavior of your current users, and that traffic is a significant part of your acquisition effort. You can find out:
- What customers are doing
- Why they are doing it
- When they are doing
Measuring acquisition effort assigns real value to your marketing efforts and allows you to measure your ROI. To calculate it, you can divide all the costs spent on acquiring more customers (marketing expenses) by the number of customers acquired in the period the money was spent.
A few ways you can audit traffic:
- Optional SEO Assessment
- PPC Assessment
- Conversion Rate Assessment
- Website Performance Assessment
With an SEO Assessment, you can audit the content you’re publishing to ensure it’s actually solving your visitors’ problems. Consult your analytics: look at keywords and landing pages to find places you can optimize to improve your rankings.
When doing a PPC Assessment, you want to look for a good Click Through Rate, or CTR, on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or Google Ads. If you have a good CTR, that means your target audience has found your ads helpful.
A Conversion Rate Assessment will tell you what happens when your users are actually on the page. If you find that they’re on the page and leaving, try optimizing your call-to-actions (CTAs). They will offer opportunities to collect customer information and keep customers engaged with your content.
With a Website Performance Assessment, you should focus on how users navigate your website. Take speed and usability into consideration. The goal is to make sure it’s easy for users to get the information they’re looking for.
Not only do these assessments help you understand your customers better, but they also build the foundation to make sure that your users find what they need and come back for more.
In order to set yourself up for success, you want to tell an end-to-end story about what you’re trying to sell. From ad to landing page to product to checkout to thank you page, the journey should tell the reader more about your company.
Building this story gives a couple benefits to the success of your business as well. You can:
- Bridge the gap between your efforts
- Build an emotional connection
It’s not just a sales funnel, it’s a story, a journey to solve a customer problem. When there’s not a good followup from an ad (or any lead generation), then customers will bounce.
This should get picked up in either the PPC or Conversion assessments, and it should force you to understand what the customer wants, allowing you to bridge the gap and create that connection.
Creating a customer journey map is one way to go, but it’s a lot of work. Try putting yourself in the customers’ shoes instead.
Look at your website (and products) as if you are a user who knows nothing about it. Try to understand the journey and build a story from there.
Another psychological component that impacts human behavior is trust. You want your users to trust your brand so they stick around for the long run.
Some trust factors to make sure you add:
- Design and experience
- Reviews to add authenticity
- Information to empower users
- Deliver on promises
Think about building trust like you think about creating a story for customers to follow. You want to build that emotional connection with your customers so that they know they can trust you and continue to follow the story.
Trust may seem like an abstract concept but committing to adding the above components will make that abstract into a reality.
There are many resources online with different trust factors to consider, but the video, “How Can We Study Website Credibility” will help you get that extra edge you need to gain customers’ trust.
No one will feel confident in your product if you don’t have support. When a customer is interested in a product, they want to learn more about it and, therefore, they want access to support so they can ask questions and read more.
Even if they aren’t customers yet, prospects will comb through support to look at problems and potential pain points they might encounter.
Different variations of customer support can provide different things, and technology can be leveraged to create an alternative to the best forms of support out there.
Some things to consider:
- Self-service support – helps customers help themselves (knowledge bases)
- Help desk – brings all support platforms to one place
- Live Chat – gives users instant access to customer support
- Social media – allows you to support and engage customers
The point here being not that you need to put as much effort as possible in order to create the best customer service, but that you can create the best customer service with minimal effort by using one of the above.
You can’t work on a good design unless you have a good foundation of content and strategy. Once you have all the pieces lined up and the foundation is set, your design can amplify and optimize the customer experience.
Having a design without a good foundation is like putting lipstick on a pig.
To build a foundation and content strategy:
- Do a content audit
- Choose a content management system
- Publish and manage your content
When auditing content, there are a few steps you can take. You want to first think of your goals—what do you want to accomplish with this content? You then want to gather and categorize your content, which brings us into the content management process.
A content management system will allow you to categorize and store your content without creating endless spreadsheets. It will manage the creation and modification of all your content. When you then publish content, the system will manage it for you.
All that taken care of, you can begin to focus on the design.
Your design should have these six features built on your content foundation. The visual appeal will support the content but can’t stand on its own.
Your website is a proponent of marketing, and marketing never stops. Continuing to optimize your site and finding holes that you can plug will help you continue to find and meet the expectations of customers.
You can audit and change something on your website, but that doesn’t mean it is automatically fixed. If you try something new, it may not work right away.
You need data for this process. Depending on your specific needs, ideal solutions could be:
- Data quality
- Data management
- Data integration software
Data quality assesses whether information is serving its purpose. Look for accuracy, completeness, reliability, relevance, and timeliness.
In the same vein, data management is a process that includes acquiring, validating, storing, protecting and processing data to ensure the quality is up to par.
Data integration software allows businesses to manage, cleanse, and integrate data from a web-based application.
If you’re still in the early versions of your website, you have a lot of work ahead. Continue to measure, but look out for what’s working and double down.
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