It’s no secret that a fantastic user experience is important for the success of digital marketing campaigns.
Great UX is crucial for maximizing conversions. It’s also a requirement for high search engine rankings, which is one of the end goals of digital marketing.
But that’s not all.
Certain UX design concepts can also amplify the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies.
UX design and digital marketing share fundamental similarities, particularly the user-orientedness aspect.
Here are seven UX design principles that can be applied in digital marketing:
1. Have a User-First Approach
UX design is all about creating compelling experiences that align with the user’s expectations, goals, and preferences.
Building an effective content strategy revolves around the same components.
It starts with topics and headlines that steer the user’s expectations in the right direction.
The content should then provide users with information critical to their goals. And to ensure all details are received, the content must be tailored to the target audience’s preferences.
This “user-first approach” can also be enacted through strategies like:
- Conducting audience research: Use surveys, statistics, and web traffic analytics to be in tune with users.
- Building personas: Create fictional profiles that reflect your ideal audience with tools like HubSpot’s Make My Persona.
- Encouraging feedback: Invite users to write reviews, comments, and emails to communicate with you.
2. Build for Mobile First
Speaking of implementing a user-first approach, it’s important for both UX designers and digital marketers to optimize for their audience’s device preferences.
Now that mobile devices account for nearly 60% of all internet traffic, it makes perfect sense for UX designers and marketers to prioritize the experience of mobile users.
Mobile-first has several implications for UX designers:
- Making clickable elements easily distinguishable and with ample spacing.
- Using large, readable fonts.
- Utilizing simple interactions like swiping up and down.
- Building interfaces that automatically adapt to portrait and landscape screen layouts.
- Implementing multi-page forms rather than cramming everything into one page.
These principles are also important in digital marketing, especially in page design and content creation.
For example, CTA buttons and links must be spaced out to prevent accidental clicks on smaller displays. Responsive page layouts also enable content to be viewed properly regardless of screen size.
Remember, mobile-friendliness is a must-have ingredient in SEO content. That’s why Google offers a free, official “Mobile-Friendly Test” app that you can access via their search engine.
3. Simplicity is Key
Simplicity enhances the learning experience, improves loading speeds, and maximizes the readability factor.
In UX design, simplicity can be attached to interface design elements and operations (creating an account, making a purchase, etc.).
For digital marketing, it has more to do with the way written content is structured.
Below are some tips to incorporate simplicity into your digital marketing:
- Avoid long, obscure words that are hard to spell and pronounce.
- Use short sentences that are ideally less than 20 words each.
- Only use up to 3-4 sentences per paragraph.
- Break down the content’s main body using several headings and subheadings.
- Use formatting tools to improve readability (bullet points, numbered lists, boldface, etc.).
4. Visualize Your Strategy
One of the most important features of UX design tools is the visual planner, which can be used for creating wireframes.
Wireframing or prototyping lets UX designers look ahead and ensure projects achieve goals before they pay attention to the fine details.
In digital marketing, wireframing is useful in developing and optimizing pages, including landing pages, product pages, and category pages.
Visualizing strategies also help ensure each piece of content is created and promoted in a way that benefits marketing goals. Doing so also encourages collaboration by tracking what needs to be done, who’s in charge of tasks, and the timeline of activities.
Project management tools like Trello, Notion, and Asana make visual planning easy and accessible to marketing teams of all sizes.
5. Balance Text with Visuals
UX designers need to strike the perfect balance between text and visual elements to provide a smooth experience for users.
Visuals keep the experience engaging and help users focus on the right elements. The right amount of text, on the other hand, smoothens the learning curve and supercharges the productivity of users.
Just like UX designers, digital marketers need to know the right blend of text and visuals to captivate their target audience.
Certain content distribution channels, like emails and social media platforms, feature tools that help marketers deliver memorable experiences. You can combine popular TikTok quotes with life hack or tutorial videos, promote surveys on Instagram Stories, share shocking statistics on Facebook “My Day” videos, and so on.
For website content, long-form articles must contain sufficient visuals—from data visualizations to screenshots—to keep readers hooked. As a rule of thumb, insert at least one relevant image after every 300 words.
6. Highlight Key Elements
Important elements in digital marketing copy must have contrast from the background, just like in user interfaces.
This applies to “sign up” buttons, navigation menus, links, and other elements tied to conversions.
Tools like color wheels and color contrast checkers can be used to ensure you’re using the right shades to highlight these elements. It’s also important to use effective typography combinations to help readers identify where to focus when consuming content.
7. Test, Test, and Test
Just like in UX design, rigorous testing will help in the ongoing optimization of marketing content.
Start by identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like clicks, pageviews, conversion rate, and session duration. Doing so lets you find testing tools that reveal the right metrics.
For example, Google Analytics is the quintessential content analysis tool designed to analyze website traffic.
It is capable of showing the real-time values of metrics like:
- Pageviews
- Pages per session
- Session duration
- Bounce rate
Google Analytics can also reveal your top-performing pages in an instant. This will give you an idea of what content formats and topics generate the most traffic on your website.
Final Words
UX design and digital marketing go hand in hand.
Both share similar goals like ramping up user engagement and maximizing conversions. There are also a lot of UX design principles that can elevate the success of digital marketing campaigns.
The seven principles above should help any digital marketer craft winning digital marketing strategies. Not only will they help brands hit their marketing objectives, but they also ensure users get the quality experience they deserve.
Author bio
Travis Dillard is a business consultant and an organizational psychologist based in Arlington, Texas. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing.
