5 Reasons Why UX Design Training is a Marketer's Secret Weapon
For today’s marketing professionals, career success may involve deepening your understanding of user experience practices. The definition of UX design is to create digital products, such as apps or customer journeys through websites, that are “easy to use and delightful to interact with.” When UX practices are woven into marketing, it can yield higher customer conversions, improved loyalty and satisfaction and more revenue.
UX may be the most in-demand skill for today’s marketing pros. Research reveals that 39 percent of organizations believe there is a minor shortage of UX knowledge among marketing candidates, while 22 percent believe they’re majorly affected. Marketing professionals who deepen their knowledge of UX will be positioned to utilize customer-focused design thinking to create effective campaigns, digital experiences and research their ideal customers. Discover five ways UX design training benefits marketers:
- UNDERSTAND CONVERSION PATHWAYS
User flow is an important concept in UX and is defined as the pathway a user will take through a website, app or other product to complete an action.
UX professionals employ a wide variety of UI concepts, such as wireframing, visual hierarchy, functionality and more, to optimize user flow. When designing digital conversion pathways for lead generation, the use of these UX concepts can help marketers significantly increase conversions and meet their marketing metrics.
- PERFORM BETTER MARKETING EXPERIMENTS
Experimental design is an important concept in UX. User-focused organizations like Netflix constantly deploy A/B testing to optimize their customer experiences and increase their two key metrics: retention and revenue.
Today’s marketing experiments are shifting towards data-driven initiatives, with 64 percent of organizations planning to spend more on experiments and other data-based practices. Knowledge of iterative UX-based experiments can prepare marketers to integrate data into winning strategies and test almost everything.
- REDUCE FRICTION IN DIGITAL CUSTOMER JOURNEYS
Friction in UX is “interactions that inhibit people from intuitively and painlessly achieving their goals.” A complex array of aspects of UI like color, contrast and visual hierarchy can dictate the user’s “cognitive load,” or their sense of ease and satisfaction as they navigate through a website or app.
Friction is the enemy of conversions. Users who find a website hard to navigate are less likely to convert, complete a purchase or research your product. By understanding how to identify, test for and reduce friction, marketers can create happier customers and more leads.
- ADOPT AN ANALYTICAL MINDSET
Analytics and related data skills are among the most in-demand competencies for modern marketers, with 30 percent of organizations planning to hire at least one data-capable marketing professional in the next 12 months. While the field of UX brings together a variety of disciplines, data and experimentation are at the core of optimizing user interfaces. Marketers stand to gain new tools and tactics for data-driven customer journey design through bootcamps and programs that offer UX training.
- UNDERSTAND YOUR BUYER PERSONAS
UX personas, like marketing personas, are focused on creating profiles of the ideal customer. However, UX customer profiling uses data, research or other information to develop an understanding of “user goals, current behavior and pain points” as they interact with a digital product.
Marketers who are able to deploy UX concepts in the design of personas and customer journey mapping can better understand how their ideal customers engage with digital products. There’s potential to use UX-informed knowledge of their customers’ needs, goals, motivations and digital behaviors throughout a marketing strategy. Deeper buyer personas can yield better marketing results and lend a sense that you understand and care about your customer experience.
UX-DRIVEN MARKETING IS THE FUTURE
As the competition for customer attention increases, organizations are placing more value than ever on satisfying, quality customer experiences. UX principles can drive better marketing results and boost metrics for SEO, lead conversions, lead quality and countless other areas. Enrolling in training like Startup Institute’s web design program could be the smartest career move possible for today’s motivated marketing professionals.