The Intersection of Design and Marketing 

Design is a complex task that excels when there’s marketing collaboration.

Designing something like a website takes time, energy, and focused effort. We designers often get stuck in the trenches of moving pixels left and right for what feels like hours. We collaborate with our teammates and establish sitemaps, locate/gather assets and come up with a game plan.

We then get into some design and start the “pretty” stuff or the “fun” stuff as it’s often referred to. Design can be fun, though it’s generally more about complex problem solving with a creative eye.

Designers iterate, iterate, iterate, and then we iterate some more until we’ve reached a final piece. So often though, this is done without consulting marketing professionals or anyone else really. 

These professionals have a keen sense of what customers want, how they want it, the emotions they’re experiencing, and the language that will resonate with them. 

Collaborative design is always the best approach.

It’s no longer effective to design inside a bubble on your own island. More opinions bring bigger, better, and more exciting ideas. Combining ideas from your fellow team members improves collaboration, the output, and the end result.

This is especially true when you’re integrating marketing tactics like conversion rate optimization. Using color, size and shape can really change the performance of your site for the better (or worse at times). Conversion is the number one goal of any site. This is paramount to traffic and other engagement metrics. Why? Because a site with 1,000 visitors and no conversions is much less effective than a site that receives 100 visits and 1 conversion a month. 

In marketing, you have to balance traffic with conversion. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a tremendously big topic. For our purposes, we’ll talk about how CRO works with design.

Taking ideas and putting them to the test.

Designing and developing a site is only the first step in the process. Most agencies and businesses “end” their effort with building a new site. For us, it’s not that simple. A site, in our eyes, grows and expands over time. Monthly or weekly even! 

…and that means we’re always testing.

Using conversion optimization tools like Google Optimize can help you hone in your site so it performs its best. We test things like: 

• Button colors
• Button text
• Messaging
• Images
• Placement of calls-to-action 
• Video vs image backgrounds 

Through our tests, we’ve improved conversions by half of one percent (WHICH IS HUGE). Often times we see even more growth by as much as 2-3% increases in conversion in some cases. Depending on the service or product a single conversion can mean all the difference to a business. We don’t stop here though, because we’re never done.

You can optimize any portion of your website, not just the home page. Collaboratively we work with design, marketing, and our clients to create the best experience possible for users.

The results speak for themselves.

We have dozens of cases where CRO tests generated 1,000’s of conversions for a client’s business. Yes, thousands. Names below have been omitted for privacy.

• Recording studio – increased conversions by 2% or 1,000 sign-ups per year.
• Family service company –  increased conversions by 1% on a highly competitive term and market. Resulting in 200-300 additional conversions per year.
• Sign design company – increased conversions by 1% (or slightly under) resulting in an estimated 30 more conversions per year.

These are just some examples and you can get more insight from our case studies.

Conversion rate optimization can change the course of a marketing campaign’s outcome and drive incredible business results. We know because it’s what we do. 

As always thank you so much for reading and I’ll see you again next time.