Which information do customers need during their buying process

Alpha version

Organization

B2C retail, brick-and-mortar store selling custom-made, high-end bicycles, 4 FTE (± 12 employees)

The challenge

A boutique, high-end bicycle store attracted customers by publishing a broad range of tips and tricks for people planning to go on self-planned bicycle holiday. What information was missing on the website that would help the audience speed up their holiday preparation research process?

Roles

  • Me: UX researcher, content marketer
  • Research project collaborators: shop owner, web content editor

Constraints

  • Budget: The store owner only allowed ad-hoc research with limited budget when the project leads to actionable and practical recommendations that increase the efficiency of the company.
  • Resources: No ability to involve other personnel other than the web content editor. The store owner had limited time for the project.

My approach

My hypothesis was that the website was missing information that could help the audience speed up their holiday preparation research process. I needed to research the discrepancy between what information people needed, and what information the website was offering.

Phase 1: Selecting the research method

I already learned from interviews that the buyers’ journey of the retailer’s customers spanned many weeks or months, and that customers had multiple interactions with the retailer during their buyer’s journey.

To find out what people need, useful research methods would be a diary study, a contextual inquiry, or an intercept survey on the website. However, the store owner did not support the use of unfamiliar methods, paying participants, or extensive involvement of his customers.

Therefore, I decided to use web analytics data to find answers.

Phase 2: Preparation

As a content marketer, I had already set up Google Analytics for their website years ago, to collect additional data that it didn’t collect by default. In my configuration, it collected the search terms from two sources: search phases that search engine users used to visit our website, and search phases from the website’s search form, entered by people that were already on the website.

Phase 3: Content analysis of search phrases

I put all the search phases in a single list, and grouped them per topic. Although there were many variations, almost all searches appeared to be variations on a limited set of topics.

Phase 4: Gap analysis

To know which topics are covered by the website, I exported the list of the website’s webpages. Then, I compared the topics from the search phases with the content on the website.

Result

I found a list of commonly searched topics that the website was not (adequately) covering: Saddles, breaks, and handle bars, and a limited set of questions related to these terms.

Impact

  • To help the store owner delegate the writing of the pages to his employees, the web editor and I did some desk research and prepared a set of questions about each topic. The questions would help the employees to get ideas what to write about. And indeed, with the list of missing topics and these questions, the employees were able to write helpful pages about the missing content, with minimal help from the store owner.
  • With my SEO efforts, we were able to grow the number of website visitors 9% YoY for 5 years in a row, of which 80% comes from search engines. Note that online content marketing is the only form of digital marketing the business is doing. This resulted in an average revenue growth of 14%, 5 years in a row.

Reflection

  • Using search terms to understand people’s needs and intentions, has many limitations, such as:
    • The search phrases site visitors used were quite limited: They were mostly limited to 1-3 words, and often did not provide sufficient information about their search intent.
    • The data indicated that only 2% of our site visitors use the website’s search form.
    • People that are new to certain field or topic often don’t have the vocabulary yet to put into words what they are looking for. People that are new to bicycle holidays might use different search methods to find what they need.
  • To better understand what information people need during the preparation of their bicycle holidays, a diary study or a contextual inquiry might be more suitable. A quick and low budget option might be to invite website visitors and store visitors to a survey with open questions about the phase they’re in.