In an industry that rewards clear and deliberate strategic thinking, doing less can help you accomplish a lot more. If those of you in marketing want to approach your work in a more minimal, focused way, then taking some cues from your user experience (UX) design counterparts is a great place to start.
Here’s some tricks marketing teams can take from UX designers when it comes to unlocking customer conversions and lead generation.
Find the weakest link
Marketing teams can often over-complicate their jobs. Marketing’s role, ultimately, is simply to bring in new business in a sustainable and scalable way. What is complicated is the variety of methods that can be used to accomplish this. UX designers face a similar issue, but we specialise in defining the single most important factors that hinder conversions and engagement, and then prioritising those in our design work. It's an efficient, fast, and data-driven approach that most of us can learn from.
Say, for instance, that we face the issue of a high-traffic website with a low conversion rate. A marketing team might try to address this in a variety of ways, most obviously by trying to improve the quantity and quality of visitors so as to compensate for their low conversion rate. This may work, but only at the cost of constant time and money being pumped into content and advertising. A UX designer would instead hone in on the details hindering conversions, allowing for an increased volume of leads, and also saving the effort and money of generating extra traffic.
This isn’t just about websites. In fact, you’ll find this tradeoff between conversion and volume everywhere you look. Your social media strategy can boost leads and engagement through more frequent posts, but you may be better off improving your messaging and content templates first. The former solution makes you look busy and productive (more posts are made), but the “lazier” and seemingly more passive option will deliver the same results, and at a fraction of the cost. Even better, you can always increase your volume after improving your conversion rate, providing even more dramatic returns.
A good analogy here is a chain. Your marketing efforts compose different connected links, with the weakest link causing you the majority of your lost conversions. By simply finding and improving this single point of failure you can produce outsized effects on your lead generation metrics. It seems obvious, but marketing teams often try to fix the entire chain rather than taking the time to identify the actual roadblock to conversions. UX designers don’t make the same mistake.
An illustrative (and exaggerated) example of your marketing chain
By fixing the weakest link we can gain outsized results.
Measure actual success
Just as we can learn to identify a small issue causing a majority of our problems, we can also find a handful of metrics to accurately measure our success. Again, the key here is doing less, more focused analysis rather than trying to track and understand every possible metric available.
Let’s return to the example of social media marketing. If you make a series of posts on Linkedin, you can track a lot of statistics. Views, reactions, clicks, comments, the list goes on. Frankly, however, only a minority of these numbers actually matter. Most users who view and engage with your content will never buy your product, and never even indirectly cause somebody else to buy it. That’s simply a fact. What matters is how your target audience is engaging with your work, not anybody else. Content that is relevant to this minority may “perform” worse when it comes to top level measurements, but it drives a smaller number of far more valuable engagements.
UX designers understand the importance of targeting the right metrics, not every metric. This means understanding the story behind every figure, and resisting the urge to celebrate misleading or irrelevant statistical successes. As before, it is by doing less that we can accomplish more. By choosing fewer (but more relevant) metrics, we can invest more time into understanding their contexts and consequences, leading to meaningful strategic insights and adjustments, and not just analysis for its own sake.
Don’t force it
It is easy to fixate on the hardest part of marketing and sales, even at the expense of much easier wins elsewhere. By focusing on the minority of leads who need to be convinced or persuaded to convert, you can overlook the much larger amount who already want to buy, and just need to be connected with your product. Again, UX designers don’t make the same mistake. A good UX facilitates, rather than forces, user conversions. The assumption is that the product will sell itself, and that the user simply needs to be exposed to the right information at the right time. Broadly speaking, this is true for marketing, and especially so in a B2B context where buyers are making well-informed and rational decisions.
UX design is a data-driven discipline, and it shouldn’t surprise us that it focuses its efforts on the users who are most likely to convert. Of course, this isn’t to say we need to obsess only on these customers, but it does mean you should consider if the audience you target has a real reason (and real ability) to convert at some point. If the crowd isn’t interested, and won’t ever be interested, then we can happily ignore them.
Form and function
One crucial element of UX is the user interface (UI). This is what ensures that users enjoy a visually appropriate and attractive experience with your product or platform, and helps build a positive association for your brand and organisation. There’s something that we can learn from this too: Marketing is not just about converting buyers who are in-market, but also providing a positive brand experience to potential buyers who are not in a position to purchase. Just as in the world of design, function and form are interdependent, and an attractive presentation of your brand is crucial to your long-term marketing success.
Your UX cheat sheet
So what can you learn from UX? Not to brag, but an awful lot. To summarise what I’ve covered here:
- Focus on finding and addressing pain points, rather than blindly “improving” your entire conversion pathway.
- Carefully select the metrics that you use to measure your success, and try to understand the context they are produced within.
- Think of your work as facilitating rather than forcing conversions. Remember, your best customers are the ones who already want to buy!
- Be considerate of the experience of users and leads who may not immediately buy. A positive impression of your brand will pay dividends in the future.
Of course, I’m not an expert in marketing, but these should be generally applicable principles for those interested in applying some design thinking to their work. If anything, I hope this at least provides a fresh perspective on the process of lead generation and conversion, something that all of us can gain from.
