Coffee and chocolate. Bread and butter. Coca cola and popcorn. What do all these combinations have in common? They all make sense to us, right? Take a moment and think about this combination: Marketing and User Experience. It has more in common than meets the eye. It’s not an add-on or a separate thing to digital marketing. It is an inevitable part. Let’s just agree on that from the beginning.

There are websites, apps that we could stare at for hours. Not because we deliberately want to, but it’s simply well-crafted and created with a principle “Know your User” in mind. If you ask any user experience expert, they might say it’s one of the most crucial parts of their job. However, there are other types of professionals whose job is to really adapt to their users: marketers. Both types of specialists need to know the market, which is important to the target audience and design well-thought communications or experiences accordingly. That’s why as a marketer, I wanted to explain in more detail why every communication expert should put UX at the heart of the strategy.

Consider the following facts:

1. If the content is not properly optimized 79% of users will leave the respective page and search for another site to complete the task.
2. 48% of users say they become frustrated and annoyed when sites are poorly optimized for mobile devices, while 52% say a bad mobile experience makes them less likely to engage with the company in the future.
3. 95% of customers agree with this statement: “Good user experience just makes sense”.
4. If users cannot find what they want on a website, they will regard the download time as slower than it actually might be. Conversely, if users do find what they want on a website quickly and easily, they perceive the download time as faster than it actually might be.

This data simply shows that one discipline cannot succeed without the other. And here is why I think so:

Marketing and User Experience is about Putting the User First

A good marketing campaign always starts with the cardinal rule of UX: you are not your user. UX is about how someone feels about your product or brand. No matter how much you hope they´ll feel in a certain way, how they actually feel, respond and interact with your message is what matters. Developing the capacity for – and the practice – of emphasizing with the users is what good marketer should always aims for.

Great user experiences keep people engaged

Content is more than just words and images on a page. It’s about telling stories. When content is created with user experience in mind, meaning with the optimal combination of promotional and informational content, it creates a sense of comfort for the user. It is a hardwired cognitive requirement in the brain – speeds task completion and makes people feel good about what they’re using, what they are doing and what they’ll be able to accomplish. That’s why every marketing campaign has to be designed, written, formatted and distributed with the end-user in mind.

Design without Marketing sucks. Marketing without design sucks

All in all, it is about the synergy and collaboration in between both fields. Marketers might always talk about content, inbound, conversions, landing pages and funnels, while designers will describe the same process and objectives in words like hierarchy, purpose, emotion. But at the end, it is all about the same goal – performance and solving a problem/need/pain point.