It goes without saying, but if your prospects/customers don’t have a positive interaction with your company, they won’t be interacting with you for long! And, that’s true even if you have outstanding product and service offerings. In today’s competitive business climate, there are likely many companies that do what you do. If a person isn’t happy with you, they can easily move on to the next option. Consequently, providing an excellent user experience (UX) on your website, mobile app, or any other audience/company interface is critical to your success in content marketing.
Great UX Doesn’t Happen by Chance
If you have ever had an especially positive interaction with a company through its website or app, you can be sure that didn’t happen by chance. They devoted significant resources to creating, refining, and optimizing that interface to ensure it operated smoothly and intuitively. What’s the return on that investment? Among other things, it is priceless word-of-mouth advertising that spreads like wildfire and elevates your company’s reputation.
How can you produce that kind of business-boosting UX? Here are some tips?
- Know your audience. Develop detailed profiles of your personas. Gain a thorough understanding of who your most important types of customers are and what questions they have when they come to your website. If you don't know who they are and what they want to know, and tailor your content to their needs, nothing else you do will create a positive user experience.
- Get input upfront. Too often, companies create user interfaces based on what they think are the most important features and functions. Rather than guessing at what your existing customers want your website to do, spend time upfront determining your customers' expectations by asking them what they want and need your website or app to do before you write the first line of code.
- Provide options. Yes, the form you created for contacting your support team is easy to find and simple to use. But, some of your customers still may not want to get in touch that way, preferring to reach out through social media instead, or chat, for example. People appreciate having multiple options for how they connect with your company.
- Keep keystrokes to a minimum. You should design any process that a user will execute on your website or app so that it requires the minimum amount of typing and clicking. The simpler and more streamlined a process is, the happier the customer will be.
- Personalize your content. With a marketing automation platform (like HubSpot) you should be able to personalize the content for returning visitors. Don't treat every customer the same. They are not. Give them a unique and personalized experience and they will keep coming back.
- Test, test, and test again. Don’t settle for simply testing for the most common use cases. Do that and then ask, “What’s the craziest series of actions a user could take?” and test for that, too. And everything in between. Nothing will destroy a positive user experience faster than encountering an error message.
- Educate your users. You want all of the user experiences you craft to be highly intuitive. But, no matter how well you’ve done in that area, you should provide enough explanatory information that someone who just doesn’t seem to “get it” can read a few sentences to get back on track.
- Revisit/revise the interface frequently. Both technology and customer expectations are evolving faster than ever before. The interface you designed last year, and which by all measures was providing an exceptional UX at the time, may not be today. A process like Growth-Driven Design (GDD) can help ensure that you are creating the best possible user experience over time.
Be Sure Users Experience Satisfaction!
I recently blogged about turning customers into advocates. Engineering processes that efficiently and effectively satisfy their needs is a great way to do that. We’ve got UX experts in Colorado Springs, CO, and Springfield, MO, that have a long track record of creating positive user experiences and leveraging them as a key element in successful content marketing initiatives. If you’ve never given much thought to UX, now is the time—and we can help! Contact us today to learn more.
