Content creation is an anchor of digital marketing that has the power to generate new leads and improve a company’s overall sales potential. However, content marketing cannot function on its own. You need to provide customers with quality user experience (UX) and optimize conversion rate to maximize the potential of the content marketing strategy.
Some marketers consider these two tactics to be the same, but they actually overlap while fulfilling different purposes. In this article, we will show you why UX design and conversion rate optimization (CRO) should work together to enhance your content marketing strategy.
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CRO Defined
By definition, CRO represents the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take the desired action — be that filling out a form, becoming customers, or otherwise. In other words, marketers use CRO to turn leads into full-time customers.
It’s easy to calculate CRO because it equals the number of unique purchase orders divided by the total number of user sessions. Unique purchase orders occur when users take concrete action on your website, while total sessions count the overall number of site interactions.
UX Design Defined
UX design is the process of creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the creation of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function.
Here’s how Craig McManaman, a UX specialist at Resumes Planet, explains it: “To put it simply, UX design has the purpose of ensuring seamless and intuitive website experience. If visitors can navigate through the site easily, that means you did a great job with UX design.”
On the other hand, potential customers will leave your website if you can’t handle UX design. A report proves that almost 40% of users will stop engaging if they find the content or layout of a website shabby and tatty.
Five Ways CRO and UX Design Complement Each Other
Successful UX design ensures quality website experience. That way, you can convince visitors to stick around longer and consume more content, which eventually leads to new conversions. But how exactly CRO and UX design influence and augment each other? Let’s take a look here:
1. Analyze UX to improve CRO
Content creation and conversion rates mostly depend on the needs and preferences of the target audience. This highlights the importance of UX design since it deals with the “experience” element and learns how to arrange the CRO funnel accordingly.
The logic is simple – you have to understand what users want before choosing the right conversion optimization strategy. UX design essentially becomes your way of acquiring and implementing behavioral insights, thus making CRO more effective and profitable in the long run.
2. Use UX to provide CRO-related data
CRO is mostly done through sets of test methods that reveal random values and sales indicators. However, random procedures become more precise and accurate when you add UX design to the formula. In such circumstances, UX turns into the key component of CRO planning.
In the meantime, the CRO strategy is getting stronger so you can detect pain points in the sales funnel and make necessary adjustments. But if you don’t take UX data into account, you can hardly ever reach the same level of accuracy and productivity.
3. UX design enables CRO across multiple devices
About two-thirds of eCommerce time is being consumed on smartphones, so it’s literally impossible to overestimate the significance of mobile optimization. Today, users consume marketing content on various devices, including mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and desktop computers.
In such circumstances, your entire CRO strategy revolves around UX design. You need to optimize a website to fit all sorts of devices, displaying marketing content clearly regardless of the screen shapes and dimensions. But as smartphones are winning over more users every day, your primary goal is to ensure a smooth and seamless mobile experience.
4. Detect pain points through CRO
We already mentioned that UX supports CRO and vice versa. If you are not satisfied with the CRO efforts, there is probably something strange going on with the UX design. This means that CRO can help designers to detect pain points and make necessary corrections.
Even the smallest details can make a huge difference in this case. For instance, there might be a problem with the color of your CTA buttons – it’s not bright enough, there is no contrast to the background color, or it’s simply not appealing. Working together, CRO and UX can find and solve the issue, creating a win-win situation for both parties.
5. Use CRO tools to help designers
CRO teams run a lot of tests that can reveal conversion difficulties. But as we already mentioned, CRO issues are often a consequence of poorly-designed UX so you can change the latter using insights from the conversion optimization unit.
For example, A/B testing can discover the need for more video content or product-related images. UX designers only need to acknowledge the results of CRO testing and rearrange content accordingly.
Conclusion
UX design and CRO serve the same purpose, but they do it differently. However, each feature is essential if you want to improve sales results and turn more leads into loyal customers.
This post showed you five ways UX and CRO should work together to improve the content marketing strategy. Did you already use any of these tactics? Do you have other interesting suggestions to share with our readers? Feel free to let us know in comments – we will be glad to see your opinion about this topic!
Warren is a marketing enthusiast and a blogger at ResumesPlanet, who loves music. If he doesn’t have a guitar in his hands, he’s probably embracing new technologies and marketing techniques online! You can meet him on Twitter and Facebook.
