UX design and digital marketing are similar disciplines with many overlapping techniques and skill sets. However, even though both professions are focused around interacting with customers, the two are often viewed as in competition with one another.
This is because the goal of UX design and marketing are different. UX design’s core tenet is to deliver the possible experience to the user while marketing’s focus is to produce the most conversions possible.
However, both the UX department and the marketing department work for the same company and share the goal of bringing the greatest benefit to that company. Keeping that shared goal in mind can only enhance the efforts of both your marketing and UX design departments. Here are some of the best marketing principles your team can bring to your UX design.
Embrace Testing
An important concept in digital marketing is that if you aren’t testing, then you are guessing. Marketers run constant A/B testing to see which campaigns perform better with different groups. Subtle alterations to a call to action, the content included in email campaigns, and even imagery can produce significant deviations in response rates.
Adopting a testing mentality can help you perfect your UX design. You can direct users to new versions of your website based on their buying history or location to see what sort of reaction your new build receives. If you are planning on launching a new version of your website, you can direct a small percentage of your traffic to it before it goes live to make sure it will be effective. Experimenting with things such as the placement of an “add to cart” button can have an impact that you wouldn’t have imagined possible, and your team should embrace the opportunity to test these changes.
Build Profiles
Effective digital marketing is empathetic to a customer’s needs. Marketers need to understand not only who their customers are but what motivates them to use your products. Beyond that, an effective marketing campaign considers the decision-making process a customer undergoes before s/he would seek out your services.
How do marketers find a way to understand their customer’s journey? By constructing profiles. These profiles help marketers meet their customers before they send them the first email. Profiles help guide the A/B testing marketers use to perfect their campaigns and strategize the drip marketing utilized for cold leads.
Likewise, you should plan your UX design around a dynamic understanding of your users constructed through profiles. Take time to consider the challenges your users face and how both your product and your UX design can help alleviate them. Take a critical eye towards your design and try to find where any pain points might exist and how your UX can be streamlined to avoid them.
Focus Your Message
When your UX team is trying to design a pleasing design for your website, the main message trying to be communicated can be lost. A website that is meandering, no matter how innovative, can ultimately be to the detriment of your users. After all, a great looking website that fails to solve your users’ problems is not a useful resource for the customers who need your services.
Marketers know that they need to keep the product front and center in their material. No matter what content they use to entice new customers or retain existing customers, the service they can deliver are never hidden, and a good marketer always keeps a pathway to that service present. Your UX design should as well.
Find a Voice
Digital marketing communicates on behalf of a brand, and to stay true to that brand, digital marketers use a consistent voice in all their communication. Take, for example, the cool confidence of Apple’s marketing or the fun, quirky marketing of Slack.
Likewise, the UX design for your website should reflect the voice of your company. Every element of your website, from the color choices to the font, should reflect your company’s image. Your users should gain an understanding of the experience they will have not only with your website but with your services from the voice that is expressed through your UX design.
Make a Good First Impression
One of the realities of digital marketing is that there is a very limited window in which marketing material can reach a customer. Digital marketing must make an impact starting from the subject line in order to be opened, and once an email is opened, if the content isn’t presented in an appealing way, then the customer won’t interact with it.
The same holds true for UX design. If your website doesn’t grab a user’s attention, you can be sure that the user will find another one to visit instead. Make sure your UX appeals to the users you are trying to reach and includes elements that your customers are interested in interacting with. Your users shouldn’t have to click through multiple pages to find the products or service they are interested in, and the graphic elements should be clean, appealing, and attention grabbing.
Users Remember How They Feel
Marketers use a variety of tools to connect with customers on an emotional level. Digital marketing material might include a story that appeals to customers, a blog post that makes them laugh, or an instructional video that helps customers learn how to perform a task more efficiently. Marketers include these elements because they know that if they connect with customers on an emotional level, those customers are more likely to remember marketing material they sent.
Your UX design should strive to do the same thing. The use of imagery, colors, content, and even gamification can create an experience that will elicit an emotional response from a user. That emotional response will create a bond between your user and your website, and that bond will translate into a stronger experience for your user.
By taking cues from the essential principles of marketing, your UX design will see many benefits. By integrating the principles of both schools of thought into the tools you use to reach your customers, you will make your product an essential part of how your customers solve their problems. Learn more ways to enhance your UX design at The Creative Momentum.
