VIDEO 1: WHY IS THE USER EXPERIENCE CRITICAL TO CONTEXTUAL MARKETING?

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VIDEO 1: WHY IS THE USER EXPERIENCE CRITICAL TO CONTEXTUAL MARKETING? Hello again! I m Angela with HubSpot Academy. In this class, you re going to learn about the user experience.

And just how important is your website? 86.6% of small-to-medium sized businesses in the US state that their website is their most important digital marketing tactic.

1 VIDEO 1: WHY IS THE USER EXPERIENCE CRITICAL TO CONTEXTUAL MARKETING? Hello again! I m Angela with HubSpot Academy. In this class, you re going to learn about the user experience. Why is the user experience critical to contextual marketing? Contextual marketing goes to great lengths to focus on the user s needs, habits and goals to create a personalized website experience. And just how important is your website? 86.6% of small-to-medium sized businesses in the US state that their website is their most important digital marketing tactic. Research also shows that personalized website experiences can result in a 19% increase in sales. Marketers, designers, developers and salespeople all want users to have a good website experience. But, what does it take to create a good user experience? Too many companies overlook the user experience. If you take the approach of only telling visitors what you want to tell them in hopes of making your business look good, you miss what your visitors need. Your website should be tailored to your users in order to attract them to your website and guide them down the path to becoming customers. A website with a good user experience helps its visitors accomplish their goals. So, understanding your users needs should first and foremost be in your user experience strategy. The challenge of a good user experience is to align your business goals with your users needs. Contextual marketing is a great way to create a personalized user experience. It s going to allow you to get the right content, in front of the right person, at the right time. You re going to learn more about tailoring content to fit the user s context and how to anticipate their needs. But first, find out how to ensure that your website is promoting a good user experience. See you in the next video! VIDEO 2: HOW DO YOU DELIVER A SUCCESSFUL USER EXPERIENCE? We all want users to have a good experience on our website. But, how do you go about ensuring a good website experience? Fortunately, there are International Usability Standards that will help you evaluate your own website from a marketing perspective. Let s examine five characteristics that your website needs to have for a great user experience. First, your website must be useful. When website users visit your website, they might be looking for an answer to a question, hoping to find a definition, or take an action. By presenting content 1

2 that is relevant to the user, that is, content that aligns with the individual s buying journey, your website will be useful. Let s take a closer look at the buyer s journey. The Buyer s Journey is a research process that an individual takes leading up to a purchase. Your website content will answer your user s questions and you ll help them progress towards making a buying decision and becoming a customer. The Buyer s Journey contains three stages: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. In the awareness stage, a prospect recognizes an issue that needs to be resolved. They begin researching the issue to better understand and frame their problem. In the consideration stage, a prospect has a clearly defined idea of the problem. Additionally, they have researched all of the potential solutions for their issue. In the decision stage, a prospect has evaluated all of the different solutions and must now choose a vendor to help them solve their problem. The Buyer s Journey acknowledges that different content will appeal to different buyers at different stages of the buying process. But, let s not forget your current customers. There may be times when they visit your website as well. Your website can help keep your customers happy by providing the right experience and the right content to them. Useful content for your current customers can result in a sales transaction, depending on what the customer needs. 53% of marketers say continued communication and nurturing of their existing customers results in moderate to significant revenue impact. By using smart content, you ll be able to ensure that your website is useful to each individual user. You can create a personalized experience through smart content that will automatically show your users content that aligns with where they are in the buyer s journey without you needing to direct them to it. Secondly, your website must be intuitive. If a visitor doesn t know where to look or what is relevant to them, then that can result in a confusing and frustrating user experience. Want to perform a quick check on your website? Evaluate the bounce rate. There are some free tools available to evaluate this. Google Analytics is highly recommended. Your bounce rate is the number of single-page visits or users that leave your website without navigating to another page. 2

3 A high bounce rate means that your website is not intuitive. Users are not finding the right information and leaving confused. While there s not an industry standard for what s deemed as a reasonable bounce rate, 40% or lower is a good website goal. There are three ways to make sure that your website is intuitive. Let s review them now. First, make sure that each page only tries to answer one question at a time. When you try to provide multiple answers and solutions on a page, it can quickly become cluttered and confusing for the visitor. And that s the opposite of a good user experience. On each page, consider what top questions a visitor might have and provide content that addresses the right questions, one at a time. Here s an example from the company River Pools. The homepage asks Considering an inground pool? referring to the beginning of the buyer s journey. Most visitors on your homepage will be at an earlier stage of the Buyer s Journey and perhaps even a first time visitor, when compared to visitors on your Products or Services pages. No matter which page you are creating on your website, be sure that the page is for one visitor problem at a time. Second, only ask your visitor to take one action at a time on each page. If they re on the About Us page, suggest for them to read a testimonial. If they re on a Products or Services page, ask them to watch your case study video. This will ensure that the visitor knows exactly what to do. On the River Pools homepage, they re only trying to give a first time visitor more educational information Pool 101. This example doesn t provide every last option to the first time visitor. Instead, this example works to provide more information to the visitor and is aligned with the first time visitor s stage in the Buyer s Journey the awareness stage. Which leads to the last way to ensure website intuitiveness. Position your content so that it guides the user to their individual next stage of the buyer s journey. Don t try to lead people to a pricing guide on their first website visit. You re trying to guide users down the path to becoming a customer. Meet your users where they are, not where you want them to be. 3

4 River Pools still has options for visitors that are further along in their buyer s journey. In the navigation menu, there is an item called Why River?, which is a question a visitor may ask when considering their options to make a purchase, in the decision stage. The menu item links to an entire page, which answers one question: What makes River Pools different? The page also offers a buying guide to help lead visitors down the path to becoming a customer, so River Pools isn t missing out on any conversion opportunities. In order to create a positive user experience, your website must be consistent. Familiarity is something that humans inherently like. This phenomenon is referred to as the mereexposure effect. Psychologist Robert Zajonc defined this term as: The more familiar we are with something, the more we like it. Take advantage of the mere-exposure effect by creating a consistency across your website. Aim for both consistency in the design, elements like the page layouts, colors and fonts, as well as consistency in the content. Don t make your users spend effort trying to figuring out if your free trial trial kit and demo kit are the same thing across different pages. Forrester Research shows that 40% of users do not return to a site when their first visit is a negative experience. Confusing content and navigation can certainly create a negative experience, so aim to create a consistent website for your visitors. The next best practice is that your website must be accessible. Your website designer should manage web accessibility standards for things like readability for screen readers, color contrast, font size and more. Let your designer know that there are free accessibility tools out there for your designer to evaluate your website, if he or she hasn t already. Another access point to consider is from a mobile device. We ll talk more about mobile devices, so stay tuned. Contextual marketers that aren t maintaining the design aspect of the website will want to focus on how users access your content. Contextual marketing can help ensure that information the users are looking for is in front of them on each page. However, you ll also want to help users navigate your website. 4

5 In a HubSpot study, more than three-quarters of respondents said that the most important element in website design is how easy it is to find information. Of course! If you can t find helpful information on a website, then you probably won t spend much time browsing the content. The rule to creating a proper navigational structure is to make it easy for your user to find information. If a visitor is looking for your pricing page, help them get to it quickly by creating a navigation that is logical and consistent with what a user needs. Include a navigation menu in your header and footer. This will help simplify navigation and help users stay engaged when they have finished reading a page. Choose a navigation style: flat or deep. The example on the top is a flat navigation. It has one level of navigation. All of the menu choices are in one row. The bottom example shows a deep navigation. The first level of navigation has fewer items, but each menu item contains a subnavigation menu. The choice is yours, but simplicity is key. To keep navigation simple for your users, aim to have no more than seven menu items in your main navigation, and in most cases, have no more than three levels of sub-navigation. Don t give your users too many choices if you confuse them, you might lose them. And last but not least, your website needs to be appealing. Your website represents who you are and what you offer. It s your chance to make a great first impression. While you might not be overseeing all design aspects on your website, you should be able to recognize and evaluate the most important design elements to make sure that your website is optimally appealing. Simple can be appealing. When users can understand the page s purpose and content at a quick glance, this can create a positive user experience for them. Use the whitespace on each page to visually frame important information and shape the focus of the user. Also, a relevant image is also a great way to convey a lot of information and give the page some appealing visual interest. When ensuring that your website is appealing, keep the intuitive principle in mind as well. You re solving one goal per page, so choose your layout and the elements on the page wisely. And those are all of the best practices for a positive user experience. Your website must be useful, intuitive, consistent, accessible and appealing. In the next video, you ll learn how to go about redesigning the user experience to ensure that your website has all of these best practices. 5

6 VIDEO 3: HOW DO YOU REDESIGN THE USER EXPERIENCE? Now that you ve learned about the parameters for a good user experience, let s walk through how to evaluate and redesign your website. This redesign methodology was developed by HubSpot s User Experience team. You ll find this process is applicable no matter how drastic of a change you want to make - whether it s a complete site redesign or just tweaking a few elements on a single page. Let s start at the beginning. First, conduct a content audit. You ll map your existing content to each stage of the buyer s journey. You can create this on the Content Audit Worksheet that s in the Tools Resources on this page. In your worksheet, you ll be able to analyze your overall content mix and identify holes and opportunities for your content. Secondly, conduct interviews with your internal stakeholders. Ask your CEO, your boss and your peers what they think. Other people in your organization may reveal issues that they have encountered with the website or provide valuable direction for changes. Next, complete card sorting sessions to evaluate your navigation. This will help you understand if your content is easily accessible by your users. Card sorting is a simple technique that you can perform, even without a lot of user testing experience. Here s how to work through a card sort to evaluate your navigation structure and wording. Write out your website pages names on index cards and lay them out in no particular order. Invite individuals outside of your organization to organize the cards. You ll repeat the card sort with each individual. Have them group the cards according to similarity, which is called open sorting and look at the trends. How did your card sorting participants choose group the pages on your site? Design your navigation to reflect these findings. If you already have categories that you ve decided on, you can perform a closed sort instead. 6

7 Give your participants the categories that you ve come up with, and ask them to organize the index cards into those categories. Whether you perform a closed or open sort, the easiest way to document the results from each person is by taking a photo on your smartphone or quickly sketching the organization. After completing a card sort, conduct usability testing. You may want to use user-testing software like Hotjar that will show you how visitors use your site. You can also conduct your usability testing in person or remotely watch a person use your website in real-time with a program like WebEx or GoToMeeting. Watching how a person uses your website will help you identify content areas that are lacking or missing entirely, navigation issues and you ll also find out what questions people have. It s a good practice to recruit both your current customers and noncustomers. The stronger the user mix, the more objective your results will be. If you re having trouble recruiting users for testing, provide an incentive like an exclusive content offer, if you can. Different audiences will have different experiences on your website. So think about your buyer personas and select audiences composed of similar people. To determine if someone is a good candidate or not, send the interested participants to a form called a screener. To make your testing as clear as possible, give your users one task. Pick a common problem, question or need that your users have when they arrive on your website, and ask your testers to walk you through how they would accomplish that goal. Don t forget the key best practices for a positive user experience. Keep the website s usefulness, appeal, intuitiveness, consistency and accessibility in mind as you design your usability test and evaluate the results. Be sure to ask each question the exact same way to each tester and try not to suggest answers or hint towards one. The easiest way to ensure good testing process is to write out a script and follow it every time. In addition, you ll want to record the results (for internal use only, of course). Take thorough notes or record the session to make sure that you retain what you learn. Lastly, you ll want to keep conducting usability tests until you aren t surprised by the results. That will be your indicator of having a large enough sample size and testing the right things. 7

8 After you complete usability tests, the next step in the user experience redesign methodology is to create a style guide. The style guides help ensure consistency. Your style guide can include instructions for font choices such as family, size and color. You can include logo treatments like the example shown here, and page layout guidelines. By establishing design parameters, you ll be able to provide a consistent experience. You can also include guidelines for written content, like tone of voice or specific language that s used when addressing particular buyer personas. This list of items is just to get you started with your style guide. Don t feel limited to this select few. Your style guide will be updated regularly by designers and marketers in your organization. Take some time to make sure that your style guide is up-to-date or take the time to create one now. The last step to redesigning a user experience is to make a list of things to change. In order to create these lists, you ll refer to your website evaluation that you completed previously. Based on your current website s needs, you ll create a wish list of things to improve and a to-do list of things to fix. Another way to approach these lists are must-haves and nice-to-haves in a certain timeframe. For example, an item on my must-have list is to add Products into the navigation menu. This needs to be completed as soon as possible. And a nice-to-have would be to revisit the landing page that has three columns across. User testing and analytics show that all pages using that template aren t performing well. However, that is not a commonly used template. So it s nice to have, but it doesn t have to happen in the near future. There you have it -- the user experience redesign methodology. First you ll conduct a content audit, hold internal interviews, complete card sorting sessions, conduct usability testing, create a style guide and make lists of things to change. The process should take a good amount of time as each step involves planning, research and testing. Furthermore, some steps are never fully completed. You ll update your lists of things to change and the style guide regularly. As you conduct research using the methodology, you ll realize ways to improve and how to optimize for a positive user experience. 8

Professor: Angela Hicks

CLASS 02 Designing the User Experience Professor: Angela Hicks Contextual Marketing Certification Brought to you by HubSpot Academy 1 WHY IS THE USER EXPERIENCE CRITICAL TO CONTEXTUAL MARKETING? 86.6%