How building a customer use case improved ad CTR's by 38% 📈
What's a customer use case and how can DTC brands leverage them
I recently took the Reforge Growth course and I was surprised to learn that I knew very little about what a customer use case actually was.
In this post, I will walk through what a customer use case is and how DTC brands can leverage them to boost their paid marketing efforts.
Alright, let’s get into it!
What is a customer use case?
According to Reforge, a use case sums up the customer problem that your product solves for.
Once a use case is defined, brands can then leverage it as guide for updated positioning and messaging. This is where the magic happens for improving your copy in ads and landing pages.To build a successful use case you need to:
Define the customer problem and the persona for your product
Aanalyze the alternatives in the market
Determine the “why” behind the reasons customers choose your product
Determine the frequency at which that problem occurs
Define the problem and the persona
The first step to defining the customer problem is to identify the specific issue that your product aims to solve.
Ideally, you can explain your customers problem in their own words and Reforge recommends leveraging product reviews and past customer surveys to mine for these insights.
They also suggest conducting customer interviews and leading with open ended questions.
This means that instead of asking:
“What does this product solve for you?”
Ask:
“Why did you sign up for the product?
What did you expect this product to do for you?"
A fairly quick win is to export your product reviews and throw them into ChatGPT and ask it to summarize the key reasons for why customers purchased your product. Here's an example prompt I've used in the past:
Act like an ecommerce marketing manager at [insert brand] and find the common themes for why customers purchased from the following list of post purchase survey responses.The second step is to define the persona for the target users of your product.
A good persona includes both demographic data (age, gender, income, etc.) and firmographic data (company size, industry, location, etc.).
For most DTC brands, demographic data is all you need to begin building a successful use case. Firmogrpahic data tends to be more important for addressing B2B segments.Here’s how the problem and persona could be identified using Northbeam’s product suite as an example:
Once you have the problem and the personas defined, then the next step is to analyze all of the alternative options in the market.
Analyze the alternatives
Reforge recommends looking at both direct and indirect competitors that your target customers are using to solve their problem today.
The direct competitors are fairly straightforward. These are the competitors in your space who offer similar products to yours.
The indirect competitors are less obvious and they include broader solutions like using Google Sheets, free solutions or simply doing nothing.
IE: “I know I need more visibility into my ad metrics, but I don’t know where to look. For now, I am going to use the in-platform metrics that Meta provides me and GA4.”
Using Northbeam as an example again, the alternatives could be direct competitors like TripleWhale or existing solutions like the ad platforms themselves:
The next step is to determine the “why” behind why customers choose your product.
Determine the why
The why step is about identifying the unique value that your product provides to customers that motivates them to select it over alternatives.
Identifying the “why” in this step will be one of the more important findings in this process because it will highlight whether or not your current messaging is addressing the key reasons people are choosing your product or not. Determining the “why” is made up of two components:
The core motivation or reason they use your product over the alternatives
The differentiatior for how your product is different than the alternatives
Identifying the core motivation usually includes finding the personal, financial, or social reasons someone uses your product.
For Northbeam, this could include saving money on wasted marketing spend (financial) or gaining recognition from your boss for presenting more thoughtful growth strategies (social):
The last step is to determine the frequency of your products use case.
Determine the frequency
Determining the frequency includes identifying how often people encounter the problem that your product solves for.
Reforge mentions that frequency occurs on a spectrum from daily, weekly, monthly and goes all the way up to yearly use.
An example of a daily use frequency product would be taking daily vitamin (IE: Athletic Greens). A yearly use example could be booking an AirBNB or buying a house.
Reforge claims that it is better to have a product that is closer to the daily end of the spectrum because that helps create a habit cycle for more frequent use. And, that habit creation is what ultimately improves retention.
Northbeam likely falls between the daily to weekly end of the frequency spectrum as marketers typically check ad performance frequently to make their account optimizations:
Alright! That is the 5 steps to building a customer use case. Now, lets go through an example for how this can be applied to DTC brands.
DTC example
Let’s go through the 5 steps using Eight Sleep as an example.
I put together a template that you can use to run through this exercise on your own. Just click this link and make a copy of the shared sheet or enter this URL in your browser:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ahK4E0N4AQZWEHupnV_f2O7x_fVJ92ng1tmZDICbkBc/edit?usp=sharingDefine the problem and the persona
At Eight Sleep, the core problem that we solve for is that we offer a solution for those who have trouble sleeping.
This problem is most acute in hot sleepers and our ad targeting usually targets messaging around “cooling down your sleep”.
The “in your customers own words” version of this would be:
“I sleep hot and often wake up in the middle of the night sweaty.”
The persona that we are targeting includes people who have disposable income, they live in warmer climates, and they care deeply about their health.
Analyze the alternatives
There are a few direct competitors for us like Chilisleep, but there are also indirect competitors like prescription sleep medication and air conditioning units.
I would also include the broader lack of knowledge that temperature regulation could improve your sleep as an indirect competitor that we oftent go up against.
A few potential marketing copy angles that we could test to counter these includes:
Reduce your A/C bill with the Pod
Cool down your sleep to improve deep sleep
Restore your sleep without medications
Determine the why
The why for us is mostly personal (improving your sleep), but there is a broader trend happening right now where it is “cool” (pun intended) to focus more on your health, which could also be a social motivation.
Determine the frequency
Fortuntately for us, the need to sleep well occurs every night.
This means that we fall on the daily, habit-forming end of the frequency spectrum.
This all comes together in a simplified customer use case that looks something like this:
How to apply this framework to improve your ads
Candidly, we recently backed into a customer use case that improved our ad click-through-rates without this exact framework in place, but I think we would have got there a lot faster if we applied these principles earlier in the ad creation process.
Without giving up our secret sauce, I will say that our top performing ads right now are doing a much better job at addressing the core problem our customers face (sleeping hot) and the frequency (daily) for which the problem occurs.
The key thing to reiterate is that the use case framework can be used as guide to inform your positioning and messaging. A simple switch in copy to highlight the core problem and the solution that you offer may be all that is needed for unlocking that next level of growth.We have seen a 38% lift in click-through-rate (CTR) month over month since launching ads that are more problem-solution centric.
Here is the actual CTR data from our Meta account with the axis removed to showcase the lift.
I hope this helps get you and your team thinking about how you can apply the customer use case framework to create higher resonating ads and landing pages for your audience.
Until next time,
Trent