How Marketers And Creatives Must Collaborate To Achieve Online Success
Marketers claim that only 16% of designers have the potential to meet the client’s demands. Meanwhile, 24% feel that the creative teams they work with are adequately staffed, according to Visually. The most successful digital marketing campaign is simple, clean, and beautifully executed to supercharge your customer experience design.
Before creating beautiful web designs and engaging content, designers and marketers often engage in countless backroom battles. The friction between these two professionals is understandable because they speak a different language based on their line of work.
While marketers focus on timelines, conversions, and ROI; designers prioritize the creation process, feel, and purpose of the final product. Keep in mind that without the design and marketing team, a successful digital company is incomplete.
So, regardless of their differences, both teams must work together to achieve online success. Here is how design and marketing must collaborate to achieve online success.
Brainstorm Ideas
Marketers and designers must work together, starting from conceptualization to the execution of a campaign. Although Visually Infographics show that less than 40% of marketers admit that creatives do well when following the brief, brainstorming sessions are essential. During meetings, both professionals create harmony by discussing the expected marketing strategy’s impact and performance.
With a solid plan, designers and marketers can collaborate towards meeting client expectations. Visualizing target consumers, web design, content, and the overall tone of the site, designers and marketing teams can eliminate any potential doubts they have among themselves.
Understand the Market
In today’s business world, marketing involves more than selling products or services. This means it is essential to identify the target consumer, understanding what consumers want, and what competitors are doing to gain attention.
After researching the market, marketing experts create a memorable experience for the consumer with the product. However, marketers cannot achieve this goal on their own, and that’s where designers come in.
Like marketers, modern designers don’t sketch lines or images and add color to advertise a service or product. The role of a design expert is to create a bridge between the product and the target consumer. However, creatives collaborate with the marketing department to get a clear vision of the market and achieve the best results.
By working together, designers and marketers will be able to focus on excellent customer experience and understand their client’s needs.
Deliver Great Consumer Experience
Rather than viewing the differences between marketing and design, creative and marketing experts focus on providing a great customer experience. Both parties bring a considerable amount of value to the marketing campaign by learning from each other.
For instance, marketers strive to learn the basic concepts of design. This step helps them to understand the designer’s language and communicate better when brainstorming or sharing marketing ideas.
But most importantly, marketers must learn how consumers interact with websites when researching or shopping online. That way, they can create marketing strategies that align with the behaviors and needs of their target consumer.
At the same time, designers must also improve their marketing knowledge to create an interesting design by familiarizing themselves with market research. Key areas designers pay attention to include customer journey, from research to buying habits, pain points, and desires. Understanding the principles of customer experience design is vital for designing customer-friendly websites.
The best e-commerce site guarantees reachability, purchase and customer service convenience, and channel flexibility. Today’s consumers also want personalized interactions, touchpoints, and easy to navigate sites. For these reasons, marketers and designers must identify consumer behavior and agree on marketing content and design.
Establish Solid Communication
Effective communication is critical for preventing tension between marketing and design experts. Since marketers are good at numbers and words, they must show examples of what they expect from designers.
They also need to base outcomes on studies that work towards measurable goals because they labor within time and financial constraints. After all, design professionals work better with visuals in a flexible environment.
So, communicating with each other through every step is vital to avoid misunderstandings. Having a clear vision of the marketing’s expectation in tangible form and the design team’s goals in aesthetics and user experience can work hand-in-hand and meet the needs of their project.
Find the Balance Between Marketing and Website Design
The role of creatives when working on e-commerce websites is to ensure an appealing design. But they also have to consider conversions, ROI, and sales funnels. At this stage, they have to come up with effective strategies and use the right tools.
It is also crucial for designers to communicate effectively with marketers and convince them to make wise decisions. In most cases, sharing design ideas with marketing experts isn’t always easy, and it’s even more difficult to oppose them when they want to try out their ideas.
They have to collaborate to avoid internal competition in website design. A designer should focus on creating attractive website designs to increase conversion rates. Therefore, they must commit to asking the right questions to design a site that loads faster and has a call to action button placed appropriately to enhance the consumer experience.
Marketers should understand that squeezing in many ideas on one page may affect consumer experience and conversions. They need to share their ideas with designers and find a viable way to find a balance while maintaining a simple website design.
Provide Great Storytelling
Storytelling in online marketing is essential if you want to remain relevant in your industry. In this digital era, consumers seek the best user experience and want to feel connected to the brand. While marketers have the skills to tell an engaging story and turn prospects into customers, they can’t do it alone. Stories must have a natural flow and be narrated to a specific target audience using the right language.
A marketer needs to collaborate with a designer to give life to the story by using shapes, characters, and colors. Collaboration helps the two teams build an account that gives them both a voice to create a campaign that resonates with the target consumer.
Compromise on Timelines & Revisions
As much as designers and marketers may disagree when handling a project, they have to agree on deadlines and amendments. The two teams must set timelines based on the estimated number of revisions on each deliverable. So, the marketer and design expert must go through deliverables and decide how many amendments are appropriate. By doing so, they can settle on deadlines that aren’t too close to the launch of the campaign.
This strategy helps reduce cross-departmental tension and rivalry when marketers receive deliverables that need revisions a few days before the campaign date. Designers also feel frustrated when they have multiple changes they must handle ahead of strict deadlines.
Creating a brand requires effort and patience on all teams, and the process is not dependent on one department. A marketer might be good at storytelling, which is an essential part of digital marketing. But for a brand to succeed, excellent customer experience is a must, and that’s why every campaign creation needs the input of a designer. Despite the different ideologies both parties may have, they must work in harmony to achieve success.
The bottom line
Imagine you could go back in time and give your 20-year-old self a bit of advice on investing in the creative process, coming up with new ideas, and producing good, fun work.
