The Hidden Synergy Between UX Design & Content Marketing

There’s a tendency for organizations to silo teams into their designated roles. The UX designers handle the user research, wireframing, prototyping, and usability testing of a website’s design. The content creators create blog posts, videos, and audio content that will be displayed through the website’s design. 

Simple enough right? 

But if you’ve got an awesome UX, and a steady stream of quality content, and still aren’t quite seeing the level of engagement and conversions that you’re looking for, it could be that you’ve yet to tap into the hidden synergy between UX design and content marketing. 

To illustrate this point, let’s return to the basic definitions of UX design and content marketing. 

What is UX design? 

UX design is the process of designing products that provide value to the end-user. It’s about having empathy for the people using your products and designing something that they will love to use.

What is content marketing? 

Content marketing is about creating and sharing content (e.g., videos, articles, infographics) designed to inform and entertain. The goal is not to explicitly promote your brand, but to stimulate interest organically by providing value to the end-user through quality content. 

Content marketing and UX design share the same goals

Notice something about these two seemingly disparate disciplines? Both processes share the same goal of providing value to the end-user. UX designers and content creators share common ground. 

And therein lies the golden opportunity: integrate your content strategy with the UX of your website. The challenge is, of course, getting your UX designers and content marketers on the same page. Fortunately, UX design philosophy already has a helpful methodology for finding human-centered solutions to complex problems: design thinking. 

What is design thinking? 

Design thinking is about finding solutions that strike that sweet spot between usability, viability, and desirability. It involves balancing the needs of consumers with the goals of stakeholders. With empathy as a guiding principle, design thinking encourages an iterative design process that incorporates feedback from stakeholders, developers, user research, and testing at every stage.

This human-centered approach to problem-solving has applications that can be applied outside of the traditional role of UX design. 

Applying design thinking to content marketing

So what does design thinking look like in the context of content marketing? A good place to start is to take a step back and ask yourself why users would want to visit your site in the first place. 

It involves tracking the right UX metrics, gathering user feedback, and leveraging your data to create content with a purpose. The good news is that many of these tasks are already being performed by most content marketing teams. The trick is to use design thinking to bring a fresh perspective to your content strategy. 

Here are some quick examples of how UX designers can work together with content marketers to better serve content to the end user. 

- Provide design insight into content templates and layouts with routine user testing, feedback, and analysis.

- Create content that guides visitors through the customer journey from brand discovery to checkout.

- Create content that supports existing customers who are already using your products and services.

- Redesign blog categories to make it easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for.

The idea is to get your UX design team working together with your content marketing team to create content that serves as an extension of your website.