The Difference Between Marketing and Product Design
Your objectives define your company’s outcomes. And that is especially the case with defining the differences between product and marketing design. So in laying the groundwork for this post I want to be very clear about what these two important design objectives mean.
Marketing Design
The primary goal of your marketing design for the web is to match your company’s products and services to the people who need and want them. The objectives of marketing design are to educate and convert visitors of a website or viewers of an advertisement.
Product Design
The primary goal of any product is to provide the most value possible to the end user. This typically involves providing a better user experience for your customer which can increase revenue and reduce a myriad of costs for your business.
If you are trying to fill a funnel, sell, or educate people about your product you need to apply a marketing design approach to optimize your website for conversion. If you have a software product that currently solves a problem for customers and you want to increase the amount of value it creates, you’re going need product design specialists.
To illustrate this further lets take a look at a few examples of marketing websites and their adjacent products.
GSuite Marketing Design
The GSuite marketing website demonstrates many basic tenets of good marketing design on the web. There is a descriptive central text and playful image that invites a visitor to learn more. You can see call to action buttons in the top right corner that are providing people an opportunity to take a next step.
Various tabs take you to pricing tiers, solution options, and feature descriptions. This organized layout of information and persuasive language is intended to take visitors through the buyers journey to payment and becoming a customer. Once the chasm from being a prospect to customer is crossed the customer’s needs and what Google must deliver completely changes.
All this leads to the user paying for a suite of products which creates a new priority for designers.
In the case of your business, once your visitor has been converted to a customer, your sales switch has to turn off as you flip into value delivery mode. A philosophy that is fundamental to product design.
GSuite Product Design
This workflow gif shows how to download Images from email to a user’s computer or cloud-based drive. Everything within the suite from the UX for composing an email to the workflow for a Google Hangout is product design. Accomplishing tasks in the Google Suite is easy, convenient, and allows users to collaborate easily with anyone.
By creating intuitive products that don’t take long to figure out, designers are adding value by reducing task completion time and the overall amount of user errors.
When a GSuite designer adds a feature like collaborative document editing users are able to make better strategic decisions on things like content and proposals, which in turn leads to revenue gains.
If your product consistently adds value your users will become more and more reliant upon it. Through positive experiences and consistent value delivery, your product will retain customers and create an army of evangelists that will spread the word about your product in their communities.
Common Themes
This delineation between marketing and product design can been seen with nearly every tech company’s marketing website and value adding product.
Slack’s Marketing Design
Slack’s Product Design
Buffer’s Marketing Design
Buffer’s Product Design
HubSpot Marketing Design
HubSpot Product Design
Why Does This Matter?
As a decision-maker you need to truly understand your objectives when designing anything digital.
It’s important to note that marketing design is essential no matter what you’re selling online because it is your value-communication vehicle. There are many digital products that are built without the marketing side designed. Which can create a situation where one has a great product but no way of educating and creating new customers.
But if you did do that right and you acquired some customers, your product design will now have to match or exceed the value promised in order to retain the customers your marketing design captured.
Marketing design and product design are pieces of the puzzle but depending on the needs of your business you will probably need to prioritize one more that the other. Typically businesses that provide physical services need to focus more on marketing design and businesses that have a technical product need to emphasize the design of a great product. But in today’s day and age with so much customer engagement happening through digital channels, even companies the don’t sell anything online need to design great experiences for people interacting with them through laptops, phones, and tablets.
That is why it is so important that if you are relying on the value that your technology product creates for your users you cannot expect a marketing agency to do this job.
Do not be fooled into thinking that SEO optimization or landing pages are improving usability and the product for your existing customers. Users are the key to great product design, not an agency that thinks they know everything. A true product specialist will have a level of humility in regards to how she can improve your product through educating herself about your user’s mindset and needs.
Conclusion
Remember Marketing Design involves informing users of the value your product or service provides and making a pathway to purchase. While Product Design is the way in which the value of the product is delivered, with usability and user experience being major drivers. Applying these two design pillars in the right places will put your company in a great position to attract new customers as well as delight your existing ones.
Helm Experience & Design is a digital product and UX studio proudly located in Buffalo, NY.
You can check out our work here and if you’d like to talk more about design, technology, or business just send us an email at team@helmux.com.
