Three ways that UX designers can gain insight from the Marketing team
Marketing people are a great resource for UX to answer tricky questions
Working as a UX designer means you’re often exposed to several different team members for your projects. These often involve team members like developers, product owners, and various subject matter experts. However, sometimes you’ll find yourself working with team members you don’t often encounter.
This was the case when I ran into a project working with Marketing and Sales team members. I wasn’t sure how to work with them or what we could offer each other: in fact, some suggestions they made seemed like they might make my life harder.
But it was only after working with a great Marketing team that I learned how they could help me. Here are some of the lessons that I learned from working together.
UX and Marketing have a different outlook on users
I was fortunate enough that my team didn’t start with one of the most common misconceptions around Marketing and UX: confusing Marketing Research for User Research.
People are sometimes reluctant to invest in User research because Marketing Research exists, and this is only the start of how teams confuse Marketing and UX. However, there’s a simple way to distinguish between the two fields: Marketing is focused on customers, while UX focuses on users.
Marketing intends to drive traffic to your websites, increase conversion rates, and drive sales. A lot of marketing focuses on understanding large segments of the population to understand what they may have in common.
UX Design aims to provide an experience for the users to connect and find engaging. Users may not always buy a product, but an engaging experience helps them further explore the buyer’s journey map. In addition, the main focus of UX Design is understanding small groups’ user preferences.
These two focuses often clash regarding how they’d design a site. One typical example of this is with login walls: when the user is forced to log in before doing anything or seeing any real content.
From a marketing perspective, it’s great as it pushes users down the conversion funnel by providing their e-mail and other information. Unfortunately, it’s terrible from a UX perspective, and it’s likely to keep users from engaging with your site.
However, these two fields don’t have to be at odds: Marketing, as I found out, can offer a lot to UX Design. Here are three ways how.
How Marketing can help UX Design
The significant ways Marketing can help UX can come in handy is with Design artifacts, Brand Strategy, and writing copy.
Customer/user research and design artifacts
Your marketing team is one of the best places to turn for information when creating certain design artifacts. The primary three design artifacts that they will have insights about are:
Journey maps
Artifacts that define context (like touchpoint blueprints)
Marketing is a research-focused field: they attain marketing insights through research about their customer. In addition, they’re often close to the front lines when it comes to Customer support, Technical questions, and more.
For example, when customers call in to support lines, what are their most common complaints? Or what are the most desired features/suggestions from their customers/surveys?
As a result, they can be a valuable resource to help build design artifacts to create a shared understanding among your team.
However, Marketing can help far beyond just augmenting your user research.
Brand strategy and identity:
Your product’s brand strategy and identity can influence how the product is designed.
As UX Designers, we know about the value of consistency when designing a website: there’s a reason that this is one of Jakob Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics.
But this extends beyond the interaction elements: the visual language of the product should also remain consistent with the brand strategy and identity.
For example, if your product’s main value proposition were something serious like “A testing kit to see if you have a genetic disease,” you wouldn’t use a ‘playful’ color palette full of bright colors on your website.
Things like the value proposition, brand mission, and your brand values may be hard for specific team members to elaborate on, but these are often the cornerstones of how Marketing seeks to present itself. As a result, it’s not uncommon for them to be a source of knowledge about this, which can help you think about how to best design a website.
However, there’s one more thing that marketing can help you with.
Writing copy:
One underrated way that marketing can help you is by writing copy to fill in content blanks. I’ve already discussed how using Lorem Ipsum (and leaving content until last) can lead to issues. However, you may not be sure about what to put there instead.
This is one of the strengths of using Marketing. Marketing is often aware of how to talk about the product (by describing features, the value proposition, and more), and as a result, they can provide you with language that can help fill in things that might otherwise be lorem ipsum.
In addition, this can also be a way to clear things up with the team. So, for example, if marketing believes that we should be advertising a product in a certain way, but that’s not what the rest of the team believes is our most substantial value add, then these are things that the team can clear up ahead of time.
Marketing and UX are two sides of the same coin
Working with a strong Marketing team has taught me that Marketing and UX don’t have to be at odds. While you might have conflicting views on how we may design something, Marketing can offer a lot to UX, especially regarding things we may not be aware of.
So if you end up working with a Marketing person on your team, think about what information they’re likely to have, and you may be surprised to find that they can help your design in ways that you hadn’t anticipated.
Kai Wong is a Senior UX Designer, Design Writer, and Data Visualization advocate. His new book, Data-informed UX Design, explains small changes you can make regarding data to improve your UX Design process.