In UX Bites Webinar #8, we discuss why UX and marketing are better together. Although different in goals and focus, the two disciplines must co–exist.
UX and marketing, better together
Video: UX Bites by Fathom webinar 8 ‘UX and marketing, better together‘. Find this webinar and more on Fathom’s YouTube channel.
Q+A
Q1. I work at a company as a product designer, where marketing and product have traditionally been somewhat separate. Marketing has a market research team that conduct research for them through surveys, whereas the product team has a UX research team that conduct research by speaking to our users. As a product team, we’re working with marketing more regularly now, and finding that there is a lot of crossover. How can market research and UX research co–exist in a way that supplements each teams’ findings, whilst avoiding finding out duplicated or contradictory information? How can we share and collaborate on research findings?
A1. Great question and great to hear you’re making good strides on bringing the two traditionally separate disciplines together. There’s a few things that we would encourage to avoid duplication and contradictory research and insight. My first thought moves to QA for research, have the other team review learning plans, test scripts, surveys to ensure there’s no unintentional bias baked in there and get together to review the insight and co–create artefacts. Have some folks in each team really own artefacts and keep them alive.
Q2. What most affects marketing strategy? CX or UX?
A2. The main goal of marketing is to communicate with, influence and persuade customers to continually invest in a product or service. From this viewpoint, we would argue that CX has a greater impact on marketing strategy as customer touchpoints, behaviours and attitudes matter more than the user, when they are using a digital product. The wider scope of CX, with also the clue in the title (customer) aligns it more closely overall with marketing strategy. As we discussed UX has a key role and relationship to play, and as part of CX, but of course with UX customers are not necessarily the user so that holistic view cannot always be attained.
Q3. What’s the best way to check if your UX is working or not yourself? Is it just checking conversion rate through Google Analytics?
A3. Google Analytics to check your conversion rate is it good start, it will certainly identify what’s happening on your website. Comparing your conversion rate to your competition or within your industry will very quickly let you see if you’re losing money and opportunity, but it won’t tell you why. A nice blend is to run some usability tests and to ask users to step through the journey that isn’t converting well, you could even go a step further and run a user test on your competitions website to see where those pain points or moments of truth lie.
Q4. Tips for how I carve a space within my company for UX design, I’m currently working as a design intern in the marketing department. I feel that the value of design in general is underappreciated within the company.
A4. In our experience the best way to carve space for UX design is to try and deploy two main tactics. The first is to educate the decision makers in the business as to the return on investment that can be gained through investment in UX. This might of course mean either a trade–off with existing activities and / or extra investment in UX resource and activities, but there are lots of great stats and info on the business case for UX. The second tactic to try is to undertake some UX research (the more qualitative the better) and play back data and insight that represents pain points, unmet needs, confusion etc. back to the decision makers in the business. These two tactics, individually or collectively if presented well often result in a change in mindset to carve out space, time and investment in user centred design.
Q5. What is the source of the ‘Experience growth metric’?
A5: The source for this graphic is from a Walker Study in 2016. We would also recommend a great report by PWC that goes deeper into the value of experiences in today’s world, to today’s consumers.
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