UX Tips and Tricks for Marketing Managers
User experience designers and marketers both communicate the company in different ways. Whether that be through adverts, websites or emails. Both roles need to build empathy with the people they’re talking to.
“The first thing I’ve learned from UX is empathy, helped me understand my audiences need, pains, etc and use this to create more effective strategies” — OJ Quevedo, WhatUsersDo
Here we share some of our UX tips, tricks and techniques for you, as a marketer. From how to talk with your users, to how ensuring your message translates globally.
1. Talk Branding With Your Users
As a marketer, you are the conductor of a company’s overall experience. You ensure all companies content follows the same tone of voice, colours and context. All this to ensure the brand is consistently delivering the company’s promise to users.
“UX also made me realise that in a way I’m designing people’s experiences of my company through marketing campaigns and activities” — OJ from WhatUsersDo
A good brand is clear, concise and above all, your promise to your customers. Not only does branding affects your user experience, but it also affects your customer experience. So, how do you know how to speak to your users if you never speak with your users?
As marketers, why not conduct your own research with users at earlier stages? Ensure your branding is giving off the right message. Use First Impressions tests to discover if your colours make sense in the context of your business. You can also squeeze in questions to ask how the branding appeals to different demographics.
2. Sketch Your Ideas
Stationery are core to any UX designer’s toolkit and it’s all for a good reason. Wireframing and sketching ideas allow us to collaborate across teams and gather feedback earlier. The earlier we discover issues, the cheaper the changes are to make.
From a UX designer to you as marketers; invest in pens, pencils and sticky notes. Then next email campaign you have, map out of a journey of devices, screens, pages etc. onto sticky notes. Get out those pencils to quickly sketch ideas. Cut up your pages into single elements that you’ve drawn so you can move them around. Each time you move your pieces of paper around, you have another variation which you may decide to use as a variation for an A/B test.
3. Empathy Map Your Campaigns
Users find themselves in different situations, even throughout the day. UX researchers study users’ circumstances so that we can provide the right information at the right time. Why not use our UX techniques like empathy maps and analytics to understand when users are most susceptible to your marketing material?
Let’s look at email campaigning. If your business is aimed at young professionals, you can roughly work out their lunch hours. That is a whole hour people have free to relax and catch up on their personal lives. Emails sent later in the evenings is the time when these people are cooking dinner and avoiding technology before bed. Yet if you’re targeting parents, the later hours in the day are when they have the time to check things like emails.
Understand your user’s day to explore their touch points with your brand. You can then introduce new touch points in their day to understand what works best for your users.
4. Localise Your Message
Your marketing strategy should change, just how user experiences change across cultures. Elements in your branding may have a cultural meaning. And if these don’t translate well, may have a negative impact on your company.
Marketers need to be aware of how slogans translate and how cultural traditions can affect the way your business comes across. Deliveroo for example, it’s a British food delivery company which has a kangaroo as their logo.
Deliveroo discovered users have very different interpretations of the logo in different countries. Countries like France thought that the kangaroo looked like a rat, while The UAE considered kangaroos to be dirty. Neither of the countries wanted to associate a rat nor a kangaroo with their food. Yet in cities like Dubai, services like Deliveroo are a must-have where the weather is too hot to go outside.
Even if your company is not global right now, it’s easier and cheaper to do international research as early as possible. This will avoid issues and miscommunications later down the line.
5. Debug Your Strategy With Analytics
Analytics are a great tool for many roles within a business. They allow UX designers to understand the impact of designs across the board. Marketers can also use analytics to gather insights on who is coming to their website and when. You can also use analytics to see where people are dropping off and abandoning their tasks. Analytic tools provide indications of how users are using the site. They also show where users are leaving, on which pages and which forms. This can shed light onto which pages don’t provide the right information and the information users appear reluctant to share with you.
Analytics however will only provide quantitative data. Meaning very rarely will they explain why your users are doing what they’re doing. So, just like marketers, UX researchers rely on survey tools like HotJar to ask a small set of questions. HotJar provides the ability to ask your user questions in the moment. Such as when they are about to abandon the website or on ask their thoughts after completing a task.
Effective marketing comes from understanding users, which only comes from speaking to them.
Why not ask to join your UX researcher’s user interviews, or ask for access to analytics? You’ll be amazed to see how your brand is actually being interpreted. If you don’t have UX designers where you work, there are more than enough books which explain how to do this research yourself, on small budgets.
And don’t worry, users don’t bite. Often.
Elizabeth Chesters was invited by Hi INTERACTIVE to write this article.
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