User Experience Marketing: What Every Online Marketer Should Know

At first glance, the term ‘user experience’ seems and feels like the domain of web designers and interface architects.

However, user experience (UX) is much about the relationships and interactions between a brand and its customers as it is about the design of a product. In a world where social media has disrupted the traditional principles of marketing, it has become more important than ever for the online marketer to make the interactions between them and their customers transparent and seamless.

Against this background, user experience is more than interface design or usability – although these are important aspects of user experience. In essence, it is all about the quality of experience consumers have when they interact with your brand at different points in the entire layout of the purchase cycle. Whether it is your website or blog, the emails and newsletters that you send to your list, the products that you promote or the checkout process, UX is really about the experience your customers have with these processes.

Here are the fundamental aspects of user experience and what they mean to your marketing goals:

Usefulness:

As a marketer, the objective of your business is to provide content and products/services that solve your customers’ needs or problems.

Evidentially, poor quality content or even tangible products that are unhelpful do not perform well in a highly competitive web space.

As you create and design a product (whether that’s an ebook, podcast, blog post, app etc) it is important to think about its value to your target audience and how it will help solve a particular problem.

Usability:

Usability is all about ease of use. Usability should be at the heart of all your marketing processes. Think about it: Is your website structured in a way that makes navigation for your site visitors easy? Is your email newsletter easy to read from different devices?

Are your promotional emails easy to understand? How about your check out process, are customers spending the shortest time finding products and paying for them? You need to make things as easy as possible for your target audience in every interaction they have with you.

Desirability:

Unique branding and visual presentation is essential to creating an excellent image for your business. You could have the best content or an intriguing product but how you brand and present it plays an important role in how your target audience perceives your brand. Branding can be the difference between success and failure.

Consistency is key when it comes to the visual presentation of your brand—from newsletter design, website, and landing pages to social media platforms.

Consistency with your branding allows users to instantly identify your brand and your brand messaging regardless of the point they are in the customer cycle.

Visibility:

There is an intricate connection between user experience and SEO. How you organize your website and content online is not only important for your human readers; it is equally important to search engines. When search engines bots are able to easily find and index your content, it becomes much easier for your target audience to effortlessly find you organically.

At the same time, visibility is about designing your website in a way that allows users to see or find what they require.

Credibility:

A lot of factors impact on your credibility and your relationship with your customers. For starters, the look of your website can raise a red flag or it can communicate trust. The language that you use in your newsletters and emails can impact on your customers’ trust in you; the customer reviews, social media posts, other social proof, the information on your landing pages, down to the checkout process will determine whether customers will believe what you tell them.

User Experience

These are just the basic elements of what user design entails and their implications for the online marketer. In the larger scope of things, user design ultimately affects the customer’s purchase decisions.

Think about it: Say an online user visits your website. They are able to easily find the information they are looking for thanks to a clean, navigable and simple interface. They head over to your social platforms and there too, they find branding and messaging that is consistent with your website. When they sign up to receive your newsletters, the information therein is not only pertinent but it is also easy to understand and is professionally presented.

All these elements add up to the customer’s user experience throughout the buying cycle and eventually to the point of purchase. Make it as easy as possible for your visitors to become life-long customers.

For help with website design and development, online marketing, branding and user experience don’t hesitate to get in touch.