Why marketing and UX are best friends
A positive user experience can be key to having marketing success.
So how can UX actually help marketers achieve their sales and conversion goals?
There are three key benefits for incorporating UX into a marketing strategy to drive better outcomes.
User experience refers to what user’s think and feel when they’re using a product. When I made my career transition from digital marketing to UX design, I found UX to be a crucial element to successful marketing. I initially was drawn to marketing because I was able to be both strategic and creative in driving business growth with success clearly measured through conversion rates. However, as someone who enjoys connecting with people, I felt I wasn’t able to focus on the user as much as the conversation rates.
In saying this, both disciplines are in fact similar with UX design and marketing having the same goal of making a product or service as desirable as possible. However, in UX design we see that the intention is to design an all round positive experience for the user. While, marketing is very much focused on how to persuade or convince customers to take a specific action that is most commonly being making a purchase.
Identifying the sweet spot business needs vs the user needs
The emphasis on conversion metrics versus the user experience is essentially the business needs vs the user needs. It’s what distinguishes the two disciplines from each other. But to identify the most sustainable, impactful and valuable solution to a challenge that a client is facing, we need to consider both the needs of the business and user.
A simple way to visualise this is through a venn diagram as pictured below. This “sweet spot” where both needs overlap with one another is the opportunity area that marketers need to leverage. Clients are more likely to also understand the value of UX when showing them how it relates to their main business goals or key performance indicators.
For my redesign case study on Goodreads, I examined the converging value between the needs of Goodreads and their users to identify the features necessary for the prototype. Goodreads’ business needs was a strong user cross-interaction on the platform while users’ needs were discovering new books through their friends and family. Through this, I discovered the features necessary for users would be a seamless experience in the social feed connecting them with each other through a shared interest of books.
Designing the user journey to create a positive customer experience
From the landing page to the actual product, UX design can be used to help shape how customers should feel and think at every stage of the user journey. In the case of marketing, it’s especially important to consider the user experience throughout the whole customer journey that includes everything from the landing page and social platforms as well as advancing digital tools such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). These days, many brands are taking advantage of AR in their marketing campaigns such as Netflix, Sephora and Pepsi especially creating gamified AR which we can already see on Snapchat and Instagram.
With consumer behaviour rapidly changing in pace with the advancement of technology, UX will play a critical role in shaping how to guide users in the writing of the content to the visual design throughout the awareness, consideration, conversion stage and so on. It’s important to understand that through the UX lens, we’re not looking at what tactics or strategy will drive conversion rates but what are ways we can design a meaningful positive experience for the customer.
Driving customer loyalty with UX
UX design helps to create a memorable and positive emotional experience for users that is vital for businesses to establish a strong customer relationship. It makes sense that customers will only return if they are experiencing positive feelings and thoughts while interacting with the brand. The reason customer loyalty is important is because it is commonly considered more expensive to drive customer acquisition than it is to maintain customer loyalty.
For instance, if users arrive on a landing page feeling lost or confused while navigating the page, it is highly likely they will be less inclined to return back to the site considering their initial goals and needs were not met. Research from Toptal has shown that 88% of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience.
The Slack landing page is an example of good UX design where they’ve provided an interactive demo feature of the product to allow ease of access for visitors to test the key product features.
With UX, marketers can connect with customers through an understanding of user behaviour or in other words how they use a product (i.e. social media or landing page etc) and in doing so design a more personalised human-centered user experience in the customer journey.
Conclusion
By using a combination of marketing and UX, marketers are able to:
- Leverage the key benefits of finding value between users and business needs
- Design a positive customer experience
- Drive customer loyalty
Moving forward, the overlap in marketing and UX design is one that both designers and marketers should recognise if they are to improve the customer experience and drive better business outcomes.
Credits to my mentor from IxDA Jessica Smith for her guidance and feedback in the writing of this blog article.
