Why Should Marketing and UX Design Work Together

If the goal of marketing is to generate value for business by creating future customers, the objective of user experience designers is to create value for the customers. The UX design practitioners work with user personas, customer journey maps and continuously test user preferences to uncover their needs and want to help customers accomplish those most conveniently. This ability to serve the customers with a compelling design for accomplishing the required tasks surely requires a deeper understanding of their behavior, needs, wants, and aims. Of course, these insights are obtained from research and analytics.

While the basic function of marketing is to persuade the customer to buy, the primary purpose of user experience is to serve the underlying needs of the customers and prospects. In the digital marketing eco-space, one precedes the other. Both marketing and the UX designers elucidate their objectives through an understanding of consumer behavior, and so their work methodologies are interspersed with occasional convergence as well. However, in designing marketing applications, history supports the fact that majority have failed miserably in performing the marketing functions.

This is evident in the failure rates of the apps produced by myriad companies and brands. The branded apps that fail is utterly due to one main reason, and that is they cannot both serve the customers’ needs and sell at the same time. The branded apps that are a successful answer the needs and wants of customers and serve them in the best possible manner. In them, we see a conjoint success of the marketing and the user experience designers.

These apps help the customers to fulfill their needs, and the user experience they provide compels users to use them continually. Along with the satisfaction of the human need, the design should also solve the problems of the users and be easy to use and understand. Thus there is a thin line of differentiation between UX and marketing in designing applications and in its use in digital marketing, and the two wings should work jointly in order to come up with winning applications and designs. Here, we discuss the ways to do it in detail.

Involve UX teams for internal application development

As there are applications that facilitate customers to interact with technology for various business objectives, there are systems and applications that enable a business to function effectively as well. These could be an accounting software, HR application, or a customer service software. User experience can be enhanced throughout the whole spectrum of business and could be applied to the internal customers as it is applied to the external customers. This would not only deliver improvement and innovation throughout the organization but would promote an organization-wide design thinking.

Involve marketing and design thinking in entire business eco-system

When marketing and the UX team join hands to come out with fruitful solutions, some of the biggest successes start happening. The marketing thinking along with design strategies should be applied in the entire brand eco-system. A culture of improved and innovative design should be inculcated in all the brand touchpoints be it online or offline. This not only helps in more collaboration of the design teams with marketing and other teams but implants a culture of innovation and creativity throughout the organization.

A design is termed great when it is not just aesthetically pleasing, but it solves the intended problems as well. A marketer is successful when the campaigns do not only pull the prospects but are successful in persuading the prospects to do the desired action. One more important aspect that the designers have to keep in mind is their job is not done just by creating incredible designs, but they have to get the support and the buy-in of everyone in the team.

Involvement of marketing and design teams in the internal tasks makes that happen and facilitates the coordination between the internal staff. Such interactions help in the conglomeration of the marketing and design teams in all the chores of business making a winning team which confronts, collaborates, and experiments to bring about the best in all their efforts.

Key Takeaways

• While the basic function of marketing is to persuade the customer to buy, the primary purpose of user experience is to serve the underlying needs of the customers and prospects.
• When marketing and the UX team join hands to come out with fruitful solutions, some of the biggest successes start happening.
• A design is termed great when it is not just aesthetically pleasing, but it solves the intended problems as well.