Marketing without design is lifeless, and design without marketing is mute. – Von R. Glitschka

Rightly said!!

Both complete each other. As much as you need marketing for design, a design is needed to make, maintain, and promote a product.

But unfortunately, marketers often underestimate and underplay their role in creating a robust product with a prototyping tool. Besides, only 58% of marketers feel that they are successful in meeting their goals. What about the rest?

The days are over when customer experience was a designer’s job. In 2021, it is vital to create a product app design that delivers as per the expectations. And for that to happen, the marketing team has to come forward and support the UX team.

In the coming sections, we will discuss the role of marketers and how UX should be an important element in their marketing process.  

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What’s the connection between UX and marketing?

UX and marketing are essential for the success of a product. Both target users at the helm. However, deep down, they are knotted closely together.

Every time a product doesn’t appeal to the user, it is essential to provide the metrics to the design team. And who does that – the marketing team.

Similarly, if the user experience lacks in its efforts, the design team must take over. However, if it is a new product, then the marketing team has to take the lead.

Let’s understand this further.

Role of usability

Steve Jobs once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

This is what we are trying to say about UX and usability. In an attempt to be unique, do not forget to be clear, concise, and accessible to your audience.

While it is true that usability is an essential component. And it helps in shaping the UX, but it is not responsible for the entire user experience. Usability forms only the surface, while UX goes much deeper. It includes UI elements, user behavior, and user activity.  

Usability is essential in UX, but if other elements fail to attract, usability is a failure too. In other words, the role of usability is vital but limited.

Let’s illustrate this with an example. You must have witnessed Apple’s user experience makeover over the years. After their growth reduction in 2016, the company improved its portable desktop. It even started a digital assistant, Siri. The iOS 14 too revitalized the smartphone’s user experience.

Think of it! Had Apple stuck to the previous strategy, was this momentous growth possible? With some marketing, they found out the growth hurdles and removed them successfully.

Product metrics

Businesses often monitor their products to measure their success or failure. This tracking is performed using some metrics known as product metrics. Some significant examples include churn rate, conversion rate, and monthly recurring revenue.

Take an example. You have a product running in the market. Now collect some data for it. It can include metrics like: “how are the users interacting with your product?”, “what is their reaction to product promotion?’ and more. Analyze it. Eventually, see if these metrics tie back to your objectives or not.

Now, If you are not achieving the desired results, it may indicate two things.

First, some aspect of your product isn’t clicking well with your users, and second, your user experience is lagging behind while lacking something significant.

Remember, such metrics are essential as they tell you whether your UX strategy is working or not.

SEO

Both SEO and UX have almost similar goal, which is to provide users with the best experience. While SEO targets the search engines, UX focuses primarily on the website’s visitors.

Let us help you understand this with examples of a few website elements and how they affect SEO and UX.

Headings	Headings tell search engines and users what the page is about and display the logical hierarchy of content. Headings also help users if they find themselves lost on a page.
Navigation and site structure	Site structure is essential for both users and search engines. Most visitors do not visit your website through the home page. Clear navigation can help them in the process. If the site links are clean, they may also appear in Google search results. Thus, helping in SEO.
User Signals	Every interaction you and your user have with each other tells Google that you both are engaging well. Some studies also indicate that these user signals affect your rankings.
Mobile experience	The mobile-friendly update of 2015 and the mobile-first index of 2018 have put SEOs and webmasters under immense pressure. A good mobile experience is everything. Take the example of navigation. A user should be able to find what they are looking for easily. Or else he will move away. The same applies to Google.
Site speed	Site speed is a ranking factor. Websites that load slowly are a turn-off for the visitors. News sites and content-heavy sites are an example. They often load slowly. No wonder these are opened on mobile devices more.   Founders should pay attention to the experience. They may use Google’s Pagespeed Insights; it helps detect issues and recommends suggestions to fix them.

Remember, every element on your website impacts the user experience and the SEO either directly or indirectly.  

Marketer + UX designer = <3

Now here is another dynamic. Have you ever considered the role of a marketer and UX designer in creating the UX?

Let’s dive in to find out more.

Impact on user acquisition

The role of user experience or UX is to increase and maintain user satisfaction. Whenever a visitor lands on a website, he or she has an experience. This experience must have the quality to leave a positive impact on his mindset about your brand.

For this reason and more, UX has been acknowledged for its role in user acquisition and retention in recent times. So, if you build a product that is easy to use and a sizeable number of people use it and continue using it. It is a success!

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This is where designers and marketers can add value. To design a good experience, they must have the following knowledge.

Understand the commonalities	How do people view their website? What attracts people to click? How to improve website readability? How to grab people’s attention? How to build website credibility?
Know the unique thing about your users	What is different about your target audience? What are they trying to achieve? What are their thoughts? If the designers are not aware of the answers to the above, they must identify the audience first. If you work with a UI UX design agency they usually conduct research so they can create a user-friendly design.
Be considerate	Look at the app from a user’s perspective. Understand what they are looking for. If you understand this, you can swap positions with them and take the right direction. App development becomes easy once you empathize with your users.

The first two points in the table are a marketer’s job. By understanding the likes and dislikes, they can help designers build UX desired by the target audience.

Fortunately, organizations realize the importance of UX in leveraging a personalized, engaging, and meaningful interaction. Therefore, both marketers and designers are given equal opportunity and responsibility.

Impact on user onboarding (even if you run a blog)

User onboarding is a method of guiding users to look for a new value in your product. With onboarding, the organizations ensure that the customers are successful when using a product for the first time, especially the SaaS products.

As the definition suggests, user onboarding is more than telling people how to use it. In order to have successful user onboarding, the user must feel welcomed, receive value and handle the learning curve well.

This affects the retention rate and lowers the cost of customer acquisition. And to achieve this, you need to nail the content, channel, and time wherein focusing only on UX is insufficient. Again, marketers can help with picking the right channel and timing for successful user onboarding.

Take the example of Tumblr. The signup page displays user content, describes the platform, and also lays down user expectations smartly. Further, when a user is creating his login credentials, they are used to choose five interests. This way, Tumblr personalizes feed while also offering various options to the users for content marketing.

Boost on user engagement

User engagement tells us whether a user finds any value in your product or not. One can measure engagement by tracking different activities such as shares, clicks, downloads, and more. Moreover, if users engage more, they prove more beneficial as it leads to desired outcomes such as a purchase.

Marketers and UX designers analyze user engagement using product analytics. They try to gauge the factors that can boost user engagement. They often perform the following actions to enhance engagement.  

Discover what users find valuable	The design team has a more significant role to play in this. They can perform cohort analysis to know what actions are repeated the most.
Improving usability	The marketers have to find out the events that lead to drop-off. Design teams can then fix it.
Educating the new users.	Human interests keep changing over time. While new users look for value, old users look for advanced reports. Both designers and marketers can analyze the customer journey and customize it for new and old users. For example, the designers can hide advanced features not to overwhelm the new users while making them available for the old users.
Communication with the users	The UX and marketing teams can work in cohesion to reach out to the users. For example, they may use surveys, in-app notifications, and more. It may increase the cost of the app design, but is all worth the effort. Push notifications are an excellent method to reach out to users hard to reach. But the message should be clear and concise due to push notification character limits. Needless to say, you need a marketing team for this.

In addition, marketers can offer new tools such as machine learning, AI, VR AR  to engage users. UX designers can realize this user expectation. Include developers in your team with such expertise.

Enhance smooth conversions

Marketers, with their consistent efforts, bring the customers to the app or the website. They perform several promotional activities and offer incentives in their endeavor.

Now the users must feel attracted to the app or a website. This is the job of the designers to create an appealing user interface with features that facilitate making the purchase.

The onus is on the UX designers to deliver the expectations with the elements, page layout, and smooth navigation to persuade users to take positive action. Thus enhancing sales and conversions.

As a result – boost up customer experience to high skies

When marketers and designers join hands, expect nothing but success. The design strategies with marketing thinktank can build an ecosystem of improved and innovative designs for an enhanced customer experience and customer loyalty.

Remember, a pleasing design is not the only metric that defines a designer’s work; the product should resolve the intended issue. At the same time, it should attract prospects and persuade them to take the desired action. And they cannot accomplish it on their own. Team support is vital.

Incorporating the services of the marketing team in the internal tasks ensures collaboration for better results in customer experience.

Summing up

The golden rule of customer experience focuses on what your brand delivers and its behavior once it reaches the customers, implying the designer’s role to be significant.

We must not forget that modern-day buyers like to wait and do some research before they consider a product or service. Implies that marketing has a long and crucial role to play along.

So choose your software development company wisely. He should incorporate the service of both to deliver a world-class product.