Initially it may seem that pairing marketers with a user experience (UX) research and development team might make for an odd couple. The end goal of marketers is to convince individuals to purchase your goods or services. UX teams, on the other hand, put themselves in the shoes of potential clients and provide the greatest possible experience—increasing sales is merely an added benefit.
This dialectic might seem to create a natural conflict of interest, but in truth, having both parties work together can help businesses develop a more effective marketing strategy and empower your customers at the same time.
Here are three ways that pairing these two groups together can drive profitability in your business:
Break Down Departmental Silos
One of the greatest challenges facing marketing departments today is the silos that can be built up as various team members work on different campaigns. According to a Forbes survey, 65 percent of marketers say silos within their organization obscure a holistic view of campaigns and initiatives. This can result in miscommunication, a lack of direction, and ultimately, poor productivity.
UX teams can increase communications and collaboration between the many arms of your marketing department by designing an inclusive and intuitive intranet or application designed specifically to address the challenges being faced by your marketing department.
Educate Marketers About Their Buyers
At the heart of any successful marketing campaign is a firm understanding of who, and what, an organization’s potential customers want. User experience teams can help marketers achieve that goal in a number of ways. By conducting user testing, UX teams can regularly provide marketers with actionable user feedback so that campaigns can be tweaked for optimal effect.
One way that marketers today learn about their buyers is through large-scale data collection. But sorting that data can be time consuming and costly. By developing customized automation software, marketers can utilize a greater percentage of that data to generate truer results.
Unify Multi-Channel Campaigns
In order to reach a broader audience, enterprises use an average of eight different marketing channels simultaneously for their marketing campaigns. And while marketers might know how to craft their message to optimize the results yielded by each channel, they may not necessarily be adept at unifying those channels so that a potential customer can jump from email to a mobile application, social media and into the hands of your sales force.
The UX team can help apply the best practices of design in order to allow users to seamlessly navigate across channels to achieve the highest level of convenience and inclusivity for the widest appeal.
Even if your marketing department seems to be firing on all cylinders, there may be room for growth. Check out some of the ways that UX design has helped drive profitability.
