Do you love what you’re doing? Just take a minute to think about it. If anyone asks me that question, you’ll see me smiling ear to ear because I absolutely do.

Have you ever felt this way? That every day and every moment revolves around a single idea? In my case, it’s marketing UX. People who know me, know that pretty much everything I do revolves around it.

People often ask me, “Shirley, how do you do it? Don’t you feel like doing something else? You’re obsessed!” And my answer is always the same, “I love marketing UX and I’ve never seen it as a job.”

Now, you must be wondering why I love marketing UX so much.

What is Marketing UX?

Modern marketers are changing their understanding of consumer behavior. Instead of looking at prospects as numbers, they see them as people who have problems. Marketers are focused on who is buying their product and what they are buying. They build campaigns, branding, and marketing strategies based on this understanding. UX, on the other hand, is focused on why someone is buying it in the first place. What are your prospect’s needs, desires, and behaviour while interacting with your landing pages and ads?

Merging marketing and UX can greatly impact marketing initiatives as well as the business as a whole.

You’ll love Marketing UX if

You love science.

Learning Marketing UX requires drive. Understanding human behaviour is at the core of the subject. Without learning basic human principles, it’s like shooting in the dark. Marketing UX is often concerned about the why of things — why have the sign ups gone down? Why did one CTA work while the other didn’t? To answer these questions you need to understand human behaviour and think as a customer.

You love design.

If you’re a designer and you want to make your designs meaningful, then Marketing UX will help you meet your goals. Design isn’t about being decorative, it’s about solving problems for people. For instance, when a person lands on a page, they are looking for something. If they find the information they need sans friction, it means the page is designed meaningfully.

You love marketing.

Are you a marketer who wants to increase your conversion rates or customer engagement? Then you need to start focusing on what your customers value and the goals they have. Marketing UX shifts the focus from the marketer’s goals to the customer’s goals. And this, in turn, helps in achieving conversion goals and engagement.

You love data and research.

Are you a person who loves crunching numbers and research? I love research, but data wasn’t my cup of tea. As a Marketing UX practitioner, I can tell you firsthand that tracking quantitative and qualitative metrics are absolute necessities to unearthing insights and problems. You can’t just rely on one or the other. And once I got the hang of it, there was no turning back.

Bringing Marketing and UX together

UX is almost never a single person’s effort or responsibility, but rather a team effort. Rather than focusing on how to make Marketing UX successful, the focus should be on how to help people achieve their goals with UX.

UX broadens my view not just with work but with helping my team adapt to this new understanding. And while change takes time, it is important to put yourself in the shoes of your team members.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Imagine it like this; Marketing UX is your product, your target audience is your team. If you need to sell your product to your audience, what would you do? AIDA is a popular framework any marketer is familiar with. Apply the same strategies within your team. Something like this:

• Awareness: To grab people’s attention instead of telling people, follow the model of “show and tell”. Take a landing page that your team has built, and conduct a presentation. Identify areas they are struggling with and come up with a UX solution that helps. And always remember to speak in the language your team understands.
• Interest: Run weekly or monthly UX talks where you talk about UX concepts. Remember to try and connect it to the marketing functions such as SEO, content, and design. Make it a continuous learning process for the team.
• Desire and Action: Run experiments. Now that you’ve done the groundwork, it’s important to share these insights with your team. Be sure to answer questions like:
  • What were the hypotheses?
  • What problems did you find? How did you find them?
  • What are the proposed solutions? (can be a great idea for a brainstorming session)
  • What are some behavioural insights?

If you work with a data-driven marketing team, this approach helps build a connection since it’s a language they are familiar with.

It’s also important that they understand the core UX concepts that they can use to meet their goals and this is why, every experiment, whether a success or not, MUST bring about learning.

What once felt like a solitary and impossible journey has now transformed into one incredible team of UX superheroes.

Finally Thoughts

Marketing UX is a multidisciplinary study that combines behavioural science, neuro marketing, user psychology, visual design etc. By applying UX, marketers can achieve tremendous outcomes such as:

• Better conversion rates in landing pages and blog
• Memorable impressions in the minds of prospects
• More persuasive ad copies that impact high CTR
• Enhanced site engagement
• Stronger design guidelines that help in conversions
• More informed decision-making through behavioural insights

To know more about marketing UX, check this out.