8 Reasons Why UX Should Be a Priority for Digital Marketers

Every part of marketing is tightly dependent upon how engaged the target audience is. In every marketing avenue, there is no such thing as “user depreciation”. More so in digital marketing. Digital Marketing may seem like a completely different beast when it comes to comparing it to usual market practices since most of the methods of digital marketing can not be respectively applied to other marketing departments and vice versa.

Digital Marketing and Why It Is So Important

The most marked element of digital marketing is engagement and user facilitation. It is more important for marketers that find themselves in digital entourage to consistently and constantly overhaul and revamp their strategy to properly tune it to a never-ending change of pace and setting of a digital image. Therefore, many digital marketers find themselves in a hamster wheel of perpetual need to cater to their whimsical “digital audience”.

Although, all in all, it’s not a bad thing. Since making revisions and amendments, fiddling with different strategies, and honing already established approaches is what defines a healthy marketing strategy from the stale and crusty rind of an unsuccessful marketing breadwinning.

Now, let’s take a deeper dive into what digital marketing is bringing to the table.

• The most noticeable differentiating factor of digital marketing is the sheer scale of its expanse. As internet access has become more of a necessity rather than a rarity, digital marketing began its thriving stride. With that big influx of people getting access to the World Wide Web, clever marketers devised a way to capitalize on this unyieldingly growing trend. This is how the internet medium has become the sole differentiating factor in brand success and awareness.
• Advertising your product through the internet medium is not only expansive and wide in its nature, it also can be subjected to a required tweak or complete overhaul in just a handful of clicks. The beauty of digital marketing is its scalability and flexibility. Remember the old, dusty, and sepia-washed past of making ads in barbaric ways. Setting up negotiations, ponying up for not immediately noticeable things, scraping off old and plastering down new posters, initiating a fist-fight for billboard spots - the list goes on and on. The convenience of doing advertising and marketing business through digital means is one of those irrefutably indispensable factors of sensible business conduct.
• Finally, the availability of digital marketing is hard to underestimate. There are a myriad of options and ways to explore and all of them are in immediate proximity. Digital Marketing almost completely eliminates the need to be physically present to set up a marketing campaign. You are free to choose whatever funnel of action you are ready to bobsleigh into. Social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, and many more. Combining and diversifying various marketing outputs in a digital medium is not something to disregard.

Today we can see with our own eyes how marketing starts to rapidly mold into only digital output. Many companies become increasingly reluctant to do any unnecessary marketing move and, instead, recourse most of their “power” into digital marketing.

UX As A Way To A Successful Business Conduct

We have examined the most apparent reasons why digital marketing is poised in a domineering state today. From this, we can also extract the briefly mentioned earlier fact of digital marketing strategies having a quite different approach than your standard schemes and strategies.

In order to succeed in digital marketing, there is no other way but to ensure the most eye-catching UX design experience. In digital marketing, the value of cleverly put together UX is even more so important than in standard marketing practices. Why so?

First, let’s take a brief overview of what UX is. In simple terms, UX is the experience that users get out of the actual or anticipated use of the product, service, or system. It’s the feeling the user is subjected to when the given product is presented before his or her eyes.

Let’s consider a Starbucks app here. The company has implemented smart personalization based on users’ order history. Users do not have to scroll through the whole menu every time to order a regular cappuccino with skimmed milk. Such a feature is handy, user-oriented, and makes a great addition to a good user experience.

There is a tendency to mix up two similar but different terms: usability and user experience. The usability is strictly focused on the functional capacity of a given item or its practical use. UX encompasses a far broader spectrum of user’s impressions of the product or service.

What Makes UX So Crucial In The Eyes Of Digital Marketers?

So, why should UX be the top priority for digital marketers to consider?

• First and foremost, UX is used to build a basic insight and understanding of what kind of users are interacting with the given digital product, website or application. Factors like user demographics, nationality, and even clicking habits are valid and valuable points to consider when creating marketing plans. With the help of thoroughly conducted UX analysis, marketers can attune a strategy based not on the blind guess but on the empirical pieces of evidence of UX.
• Impartial user feedback is crucial in app testing, website appeal, or product engagement. In marketing, it is a normal practice to muster a certain group of people outside of the circle to gather feedback on the product. Thereafter monitoring their habits, discussing what issues might have occurred, talking about the positive and negative sides of responsiveness and design choices, and so on. Even with a smaller group of people, user-testing is of grand importance in determining the basic patterns of behavior and detecting potential flaws and shortcomings.
• UX helps in creating a comprehensive map of user experience. This map can be used as a tool to better navigate in, sometimes, treacherous bearings of marketing strategies. With it, you can expect to see an overhead view of your current progress and evaluate the next steps in accordance with the past exploits. It is also rather helpful in keeping track of different marketing funnels that you employ simultaneously in your strategy like e-mail, affiliate, and social media marketing. On top of that, task-allocation between team members also becomes a far easier process.

On the internet, people are far more likely to click on the ad that has checked all of the boxes of clever and appropriate UX design. Thanks to Peter Morville, we know exactly what factors influence UX design.

• Usefulness and applicability. A product or service you are advertising should fill the void that needs filling. Although there is a popular trope on the internet that goes like “every product has its crowd”, this is only partially true. Since, yes, you may attract a small circle of individuals who, let’s say, share your vision of the new, bleeding-edge, WiFi-connected juicer that spews juice with a finger tap on your smartphone. But, is it really useful and practically applicable to the majority of sane people? The answer is - probably not.

  Let us take a look at a crowd-sourced platform of reviews-Yelp. They are expanding their range of services by adding extra options such as delivery orders, making an appointment at a chosen business, etc., as a useful addition to tips and reviews they provide, thus making the resource more useful and applicable for already existing customers as well as attracting potential ones.

• Finding. UX design should not be a strain for users’ mental prowess. If your navigation menu or navigation bar is too clunky, lacking visually detectable elements, or is, objectively, off-putting, it definitely will have a detrimental outcome on the users’ perception of your service. On the same wavelength is also the user’s ability to actually be able to find your product or website on the internet. Since, if there is no one to experience it - it doesn’t exist.

  A great example here is the user experience design implemented by ZOOM. Nowadays, it is hard to find a person who hasn't heard about this platform, mostly due to the pandemic and the forced need to move meetings and lectures online. Zoom has made the experience as easy as possible by thoroughly filtering everything that is on its home screen. There are no redundant options - all the required features are easy to find and kept to a minimum.

• Desire to use. When it comes to UX design, there shouldn't be a shortage of two things: ease-of-use and visual appeal. Okay, when it comes to visuals and appearance there can’t be a universal manifesto that you can follow and guarantee yourself the world acclaim. However, the crucial part in actually designing the visual aspect of a product is to, first, keep it simple and, second, don’t make a copycat. The design of your product shouldn’t be representative of both overdoing and overcomplicating. Take a small, albeit, user-friendly touch provided by FreeFileSync, for instance. While you install the app, you will see pictures of animals instead of ads as per usual. The design of this application is somewhat simple, but the absence of ads right from the start adds to the desire to use this platform.

• Accessibility. How accessible your product or service is will dictate its ultimate success. For this reason, it is imperative to: ensure the widest possible range of available locations and/or languages; make sure that your service can be accessed through different devices, means to provide maximum coverage; and provide full access to your service/product for people with disabilities. Accessibility is essential in finalizing and expanding the volume of your audience and creating new ways to reach a wider range of users.

  Even though it took some time for Netflix to realize the importance of providing equal access to content for all its users, now all the content comes with closed captions. Such an approach will widen the audience and improve their experience.

These 4 points of proper UX have been widely adhered to because they represent the essentials of how users perceive and interact with the service or product. It shows what UX designers should be aiming at creating an easily digestible and free-flowing experience for their user base. The crux of UX is to facilitate the most understandable, intuitive, and simple navigation and interaction. This of course applies to the product itself, but also to any administration areas like user management and signup flows or settings where the importance of UX can sometimes be overlooked.

UX Is Very Unlikely To Falter Any Time Soon

More and more companies have been keeping UX at a much closer distance than ever before. They realized the importance of user experience and the overall impact qualitative UX design has on the end success of the product or service. It does mean, however, that users are becoming increasingly fastidious and picky when it comes to practicality and ease of use. Which, in turn, puts a considerable strain on everyone involved in UX designing.

With digital marketing seeing such an upsurge in the last decade, it doesn’t seem plausible that UX is disappearing any time soon from the radar. “It is reasonable to assume UX to be an alternative to physical and tad bit obsolete CX (customer experience). Unlike CX, UX requires immediate attention and reaction from the user. In UX it is mostly about the first impression that strikes home. And it is certainly harder to adapt to the caprices of incessantly changing trends and demands,” mentioned Ben Grant, Head of Data Research and Content Marketing at LinksManagement.

The UX is, no matter what, a great professional career to pursue as a digital marketer. It can be an invariably important complementary tool that deepens a marketer’s understanding of his/her user base. Especially today, picking up the basics of UX and UX design should not pose much of a problem as the abundance of resources is exuberant. So, don’t hesitate to dive into UX and expand your marketing horizons because UX is bathing in the spotlight right now!