Why UX Design can be your best Marketing

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Why UX Design can be your best Marketing

Have you ever tried a perfume before buying it?

Have you ever test driven a car before signing the purchase papers?

If you answered yes, you have experienced what we are about to analyse.

What is it about?

The most successful digital products (Apps, SaaS, Software) leverage UX Design as the main vehicle to acquire, activate and retain customers.

Slack, Atlassian, Shopify, (and many others) are able to scale faster thanks to this change in approach.

But how do you do it? How can you now apply it to your product?

Let’s see it together.

Where it all begins

It all starts with User Research, a key element of UX Design but also of any marketing team.

This relationship allows the best design decisions to be made based on the research results.

UX Design, Marketing and Sales

What is the most common goal of your current marketing and advertising activities?

Most likely lead acquisition, right?

But if the success of a marketing campaign is measured by the number of leads it generates, it is clear that a great User Experience plays a vital role in conversion.

This is why it is essential to know your users:

• What they love
• What they hate
• What problems they have

With a good UX Design process your product will then be able to maximise the stimulation of incoming users and increase the number of conversions.

In a moment you will see where to start to improve the user experience of your product, but first…

Let’s look at 4 basic premises:

UX Design is not only Usability

Usability is a very important part of the user experience (UX): ease of use, performance and speed, visual accessibility of the interface.

UX Design, however, plays a much broader role.

It deals with the whole process of interaction between a user and the product.

So your product may have great usability, but that doesn’t mean it will also have a great User Experience.

If you want to know more about UX Design, read this article on our blog or visit our service page.

Marketing needs UX Design

A good design process for your product allows you to satisfy and delight your target users.

This way your product stands out from the competition and allows you to innovate and get noticed.

Great UX Design builds customer loyalty

Most users leave your software when it is too complicated and when it does not satisfy their main problem.

The main reasons why users stop using an app or software are:

• Low usefulness (you didn’t attract the right person)
• Low usability (difficult to use, looking for another solution)

Balance between UX and marketing

An obsessive focus on conversion and purchase can have a negative impact on the User Experience of your product.

The right balance must allow the user to experience the software or app at its best, guiding them naturally to conversion or upgrade.

How to improve the User Experience of your product

It all starts with finding the answer to this question:

What result do people expect to get when they buy my product?

The answer can fall into 3 macro groups.

Your users are usually looking for a result:

1. Technical: i.e. “what activities do users want to accomplish using my product?”. For a Web Analytics platform it may be monitoring key KPIs of their website, or for a graphic editing software it may be creating creatives for social media.
2. Emotional: answers “how do my customers want to feel (or avoid feeling) when using my product?”. This can be a feeling of accomplishment when getting new ideas (in the Web Analytics software example above).
3. Social: i.e. “how are my customers perceived by others when they use my product?”

Keeping promises

Do not disappoint the user.

This is the most delicate point when it is the product that drives your strategy.

To be successful, the value users perceive from your product must match the value they get from using it.

The greater the gap, the more users will leave.

Wes Bush calls this difference the Value Gap.

A good User Experience of your product that covers all the touchpoints of the customer journey allows you to build a relationship of trust with your users.

If not? What happens?

According to the Product Led Institute, you need to measure time-to-value.

Analyse the sign-up flow of your product.

When a user registers for the first time, how long does it take before they perceive its true value?

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Do the first interactions a user has with my product immediately lead to “success” in use?
• Is the onboarding process of a new user intuitive and does it guide people through the journey?
• Are there any slowdowns or distractions from the main task during use?

The result

The product becomes the main marketing lever.

The marketing of ‘traditional’ companies is driven by the sales department, which relies on customer-supplier relationships to sell contracts.

In contrast, product-driven companies drive their marketing with the product itself.

So if you offer a mediocre experience, you will feel an immediate impact on conversions and retention of your users.

Extra advice

With this kind of approach, the pricing page becomes one of the most important.

You need to communicate the right mix of free and paid features with the aim of activating as many users as possible.

The best way to convert them into buyers is to get them in touch with your product as soon as possible.

Clear and comprehensive prices are the strengths.

We have made a short video on our YouTube channel about UX Design tips for ecommerce.

Some of these can be very useful for the pricing page.