Marketers have less time than ever to hook a potential customer. It takes less than 50 milliseconds (or 0.05 seconds) for a visitor to decide if they like a website and will stay or leave.
Given that, making content too text-heavy can significantly bog down the user experience, leading to higher bounce rates, lower time on page and fewer conversions. So how can marketers better capture – and keep – a customer’s attention? By incorporating visual, interactive design. Interactive content — like infographics, quizzes, product demos and games — ranks high in the buyer’s journey, especially when it:
- Tells a story that resonates.
- Uses data and research to support claims.
- Features shareable statistics and quick-hitting insights.
- Meets a customer’s needs through personalization.
To accomplish this, marketers must enlist designers to help with campaign strategy. Designers bring a different perspective because they’re trained to use visual design to communicate stories effectively. Their expertise can help elevate projects, as well as fill some of the gaps in how marketers may approach content creation by default.
Marketers should include designers in these three areas of campaign development to create engaging storytelling:
Developing a creative brief
Creative and marketing need to align their goals as early in the process as possible. The creative brief outlines a project’s strategy, including its primary objective, messaging, stakeholders, target audience and how the campaign helps elevate the brand.
An effective brief also references existing content for inspiration, giving the designer an opportunity to guide the strategy. Designers invite deeper conversations about the project, challenge the process and ask key questions that marketers might overlook.
Audience research
Rather than learning about audience pain points second-hand from the marketing team, designers should be more directly involved in the research process. Why? Because they have a much different perspective than their marketing counterparts. Not only can designers uncover a more holistic view of the problems customers face — like confusing navigation or vague language and directions – but the insights they glean help drive more effective solutions.
Designers’ involvement in audience research may also spark new ideas for visually conveying a solution to a problem. Studies show that 40% of people respond better to visuals than text, so ensuring designers are involved in all aspects of the strategy helps better support the main ideas an organization wants to deliver with an experience to match.
Journey mapping
A healthy, strategic partnership with marketing teams enables both parties to map out a customer’s journey through a piece of content and find more effective solutions for addressing each potential pain point spatially as well as narratively.
Designers help ensure a smooth journey by clarifying:
- Whether the presentation makes sense
- The content leads naturally to the call to action
- The feelings or thoughts the content is meant to elicit
- Whether the content expects too much from the audience
Planning for the customer journey through each piece of content guides teams to better outcomes. Marketers and designers can’t create exceptional, nuanced digital experiences without approaching them from an empathetic mindset and anticipating customer expectations. If a customer feels an organization (or content experience) doesn’t meet their needs along the way, their patience gets tested and their overall perception of a brand can change for the worse.
The window to hook a customer may be short, but that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. You can capture (and keep) them on your site through collaboration. Marketers and designers form the perfect partnership to forge compelling, interactive experiences adaptable to address customers’ ever-evolving needs.
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