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Why UX is critical to digital marketing

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In the world of digital marketing, there are many “Jacks-of-all-trades.” Part of the reason for this is that this industry is only approximately 25 years old — and in the beginning people in the industry had to cover all bases by themselves.

Over the last 10 years, as the industry evolved alongside the evolution of the internet, the web, and digital apps, there has been a growing and positive trend to do a way with the “Jacks-of-all-trades”(and masters of none) and engage specialists instead. One of the key skills that the digital marketing industry is sadly ignoring, howver, is that of the User Experience (UX) expert.

The absence of UX experts on digital marketing teams shows that those in charge of these teams still believe that everyone can be all things. Just as digital marketing teams tend to rely on the digital analytics team to help evaluate the success or failure of their marketing campaigns, or to help optimize the campaigns after they are launched, they should be engaging with a UX expert before the launch to ensure there is nothing in the experiential aspects of the campaign that will hold it back from its potential.

To delve into the signs that you need to engage an UX expert as part of the digital marketing process, we asked one of the world’s leading UX experts, Jared Spool from UX design school Center Centre – UIE to answer a few questions on UX and digital marketing.

What percentage of digital campaigns do you feel involve any level of UX thought and or testing?

I would have no idea. I would hope all of them do, but I’m sure they don’t. So, it’s definitely a number below 100%. Since I know some do, it’s above 0%. So, I’d say the likely range is between 1% and 99%. Beyond that, it would be hard to narrow it down.

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What would be a sure sign in analytics reports that a digital campaign has failed from a UX perspective?

Unfortunately, you can’t tell from analytics whether a campaign has succeeded or failed from a UX perspective. To understand the UX, you need to really understand the experience of the users. (That sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t really know what their users’ experiences are.)

Let’s say you have a simple campaign that drives people to a landing page, with the intent of getting them to sign up for whatever the landing page is intended to sell. Now, a lot of folks will tell you that you could look at the conversions to see if there was a failure. Unfortunately, conversions only tell you half of a story.

Conversions tell you whether someone converts (signs up) or doesn’t. The analytics could tell you how many people visited the landing page and how many converted. Dividing the latter into the former would be your “conversion rate.”

However, this assumes that every visitor should convert. What about the people who legitimately shouldn’t? Maybe they didn’t understand what was offered by the campaign, yet when they landed on the page, they suddenly realize this isn’t the offer for them. Should they convert?

If they do, you might have a disgruntled customer on your hands. Or you’ve overinflated your number of people who signed up. This means there’s four possible combinations of people who come to your landing page through your campaign:

1) Those that should sign up and do. (Yay!)

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2) Those that shouldn’t sign up and don’t. (Also, this should be a ‘yay!’)

3) Those that should sign up, but don’t (Hmmm.)

4) Those that shouldn’t sign up, yet do. (Uh-oh.)

If your efforts try to optimize for #1 (this is standard “conversion rate optimization”), you’ll end up ignoring the intentions of #2 and #3. When you optimize for conversion rate, success isn’t measured in terms of what makes your customers happy, but what’s good for your wallet. 

Unfortunately, there’s no analytics in the universe that can tell you about #3 or #4. The only way to learn about these is to do hard-core user research (which is a fancy technical term for “talking to your customers”).

What is the most common aspect of UX that digital marketers forget?

Simple: talking directly to their customers and prospects. Having conversations. Learning what they need and what they don’t.

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People try to use digital marketing campaigns to replace having salespeople. And there’s lots of good reasons to do that. Yet the one advantage a salesperson has is they usually have to talk directly to customers and prospects. Those conversations are research into what the customer and prospect really need. And the salespeople are always learning.

Once you eliminate the salespeople from the equation, digital marketers often don’t replace that research with anything. The absence of research has a technical term for it: guessing. If you’re guessing what your customers and prospects want, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Have you seen any digital campaigns recently where you felt the designers did a good job from a UX perspective?

Sure. But you can’t isolate things to a campaign. When we’re talking about user experience, we’re talking about their total experience. 

Let me give you an example: Insurance companies try to get people to switch to their product from someone else’s. (This is because, in many places, people must have insurance. The market isn’t growing. The only way to grow your business is to steal someone else’s customer.)

If the marketers see their business as a commodity business, they see the biggest differentiator is price. Yet the biggest reason people switch insurers isn’t price. It’s the quality of the service they get during a claim. Someone has a bad claim experience (the company makes it really hard to get the claim settled satisfactorily), then they’ll switch instead of renewing. Where do they go? Someplace they believe offers better service.

Therefore, the UX of the insurance purchase has virtually nothing to do with the campaign that gets them to switch. It has to do with the quality of service. By the way, do you know what the No. 1 way people learn about better quality service? Not from ads, because every ad claims their company’s service is great.

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It’s from their friends. Word-of-mouth advertising is the No. 1 influence on who people choose for their next insurer. What drives word-of-mouth? Not clever campaigns. No. It’s great service. So, the best thing UX people can do to help digital campaigns is to make sure the overall service is the best quality service.

If you could make digital marketers and designers implement a single aspect of UX into their campaigns, what would it be? How could they measure it to be sure they did it correctly?

It would be to deliver high quality service at every touchpoint. How would you measure that? By talking to customers and prospects to make sure you’ve delivered high-quality service everywhere.

Any other thoughts you’d like to share on UX and digital marketing?

My thought is that UX is digital marketing. A great user experience is the number one driver of every marketing metric. Investing in better UX is the best way to improve digital marketing. Not just of the marketing campaign experience, but of every aspect of the product or service.

When you invest in better UX, you improve the experiences people have. You improve the way they talk about you and your services. You make everything in your marketing efforts easier. 

It’s far easier to market a product or service everyone thinks is great than a product or service that nobody thinks is great. So much of the heavy lifting in marketing is because the company hasn’t made the investment in UX that they need to.

The main takeaways

To sum up the points and perspective Jarred Spool shared, UX should be and needs to be part of every digital marketing strategy. Failure to incorporate UX efforts into digital campaigns, typically results in poorer performing campaigns which could have been much better performers.

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Unfortunately, there are no KPIs or simple analytics measurements to inform you that your campaigns would be helped from UX nor that integrating UX into your campaign development process will help your campaign performance. At best you could compare a current campaign with UX versus an earlier campaign without it.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About The Author

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Alan K’necht an independent SEO, social and analytics consultant, a public speaker, award-winning author and a corporate trainer (SEO, social media marketing and digital analytics).

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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