7 Effective Ways to Coordinate Content Marketing with UX Design

By Ljupka SimonovskaOctober 21, 2022Content Marketing

Person standing at a desk with papers showing website design mock-ups. Photo credit: UX Indonesia

Brands have more opportunities than ever to reach and attract their ideal customers. On the other hand, customers have higher expectations than ever before. This means that while you have a better chance to drive sales online, it all depends on what you offer your audience the minute they land on your website. 

To make your audience happy, you must focus on three things: content, design, and publishing. It's all connected. The combination of strategic thinking for quality content, digital publishing, and smart design leads to success; it's critical to coordinate all of these efforts. In this article, you'll learn exactly that - the why and the how of coordinating the most important factors for your brand's success. 

Why Content Marketing and UX Alignment Matter

Let's take a look at some stats first. Toptal research shows that 88% of online consumers won't return to a website on which they had a bad experience, and over half of them will never buy from that brand again.

Poor user experience (UX) can result from many things, from bad website design to poor mobile optimization, to irrelevant or bad content posted on it and beyond. The reality is that every visitor will have some form of an experience on your website, and while you cannot control it all, you can certainly do things to optimize it.

For many people, publishing content includes some research, a lot of writing, detail-oriented designing, and, ultimately, ends with publishing. But, for a wise marketing strategist, this involves many stages, including a writing and editing phase, ensuring that the design fits the message, planning the rollout and promotion of the content, and then moving forward to digital publishing. A quality strategy isn't as simple as writing content and pressing the publish button. 

The best way to do this is to align your content creation and digital publishing process with your UX decisions. If you do this right, there are plenty of benefits for your business, including:

  • Higher organic ranking (better SEO). Google and SEO have a significant common interest - to offer the visitors the information and service they want from a given page. One of the purposes of user experience is to understand what the user needs and find a way to present it to them. Google's algorithms, on the other hand, use this as a way to understand the page and rank it. Simply put, if your users don't have a good experience on your site, this will increase the bounce rate and decrease your chances of success. Research shows that 70% of businesses fail because of bad user experience. That being said, proper alignment of digital content and UX design can do wonders for your site's organic ranking.

  • More cohesive experience for the user. No matter what you publish on the web, the content needs to be aligned and meaningful to your industry. This makes the user experience more cohesive and allows users to jump between your blog, store, and other categories without getting confused. 

  • Higher ROI. To achieve what this article talks about, i.e., align your content with your design, you inevitably need to make some changes. This can cost you money since you'll probably have to invest in some tools to achieve it, but the return on investment can be incredible in the long run. 

  • Better connection with the audience. When designers and content curators join forces to appeal to the same audience, they can better connect with it. Everything affects human emotion, starting from what you write or the content form you use to whether or not you'll use impactful color schemes to complement this. 

  • More functionality. Great content will do its magic and drive people to your business. Without proper design, however, they'll leave your site almost immediately, and your efforts will be in vain. When done well, UX design will allow users to find the content and information they need quickly and offer them a pleasant experience. This leads to more functionality and will keep people on your site long enough so that your content can turn them into customers.


Tricks for Coordinating Digital Content with UX Design

Now that you know how amazing content and UX alignment can be for your business let's move on to some actionable tips.

1. Conduct an effective UX research plan.

A research plan and a research strategy are two entirely different things. When we say you should create a research plan, we think of a document that will help you kick off your projects and act as an overview of what you're planning. 

If you don't know how to conduct an effective UX research plan or want to make sure you do it right, Maze has a fantastic list of steps for you. Maze is one of the leading research tools for businesses, and they have narrowed down this process to the following:

  • Define the problem

  • Identify your business's objectives

  • Pick a research method to use

  • Recruit participants for your research (you can do this with Maze, too)

  • Prepare a brief

  • Set a timeline

  • Decide on how you'll present and use your findings

Why is this plan important? A good UX research plan is the top trick for businesses today because it helps them streamline the process and keeps everyone on the same page. Thanks to the plan, you can stay focused, ensure the entire team is clear on the objectives and timelines, get the piece ready for publishing on schedule, and ensure that content creation and marketing are done as planned. 

2. Plan your content while keeping SEO in mind.

Content only works if it is aligned with your business's goals and customers' needs. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how well you write or how much you pay for your content. Essentially, your content must reflect the niche your business specializes in. Design can only do so much - it can point people to your content, but the rest depends on your writing.

That said, if you want to learn how to create a smart content marketing strategy, you need to start by researching SEO. Find out which trends are currently active on the market, and manage the content creators to deliver something concerning these topics. To get started, ask yourself:

  • What questions are my ideal customers seeking answers to?

  • What do they care about?

  • What would they be interested in reading about?

  • What current trend or theme relates to my business?

Opt for digital publishing once you are sure that your content is thoughtfully written and properly optimized. In other words, focus on delivering quality, SEO-optimized content over quantity. Publishing your content on a platform like Issuu automatically makes it more discoverable; a single click enables SEO and optimizes your flipbook publications for search engines and mobile devices.

3. Use minimalist UI to maximize content-to-website alignment.

When scouring a website, don't endless popups, sales offers, and subscription forms annoy you? They do this to most visitors, and unless you create a minimalist UI, you will undoubtedly annoy your customers, too. 

Such elements should be kept to a minimum if you want to improve your users' reading and overall experience. You might even want to invest in third-party platforms to host your content and link it back to your website to ensure it loads efficiently and quickly. Another option is to host your digital publications on Issuu and embed them directly onto your website. Your content will look highly professional, and it only takes minutes. 

Going minimalist doesn't mean that you should stick to a single form of content. The success of digital publishing depends greatly on how engaging you make your messages, for which you'll need different forms of content. Just think of YouTube. Many businesses upload content materials on this platform and interlink them to their website. Combining text, videos, and web or shopping links in a page-turning, immersive format is a great way to grab attention and keep your visitors engaged.

4. Consider using chatbots to boost your marketing efforts.

Chatbots are very popular these days. They allow businesses to engage with users via pre-made prompts and offer immediate answers to common questions. Integrating smart bots into your site and asking your content creators to write specific questions and curated responses will lead to a frictionless user experience. 

This way, when the user finds themselves wondering about something while they read your content or contemplate a purchase, they can simply ask the chatbot and get a quick answer to their question. 

5. Adopt a smart system for links.

The first page that ranks on Google for every search has an average of 3.8 times more backlinks than the following nine positions. This makes links one of the most important factors for attracting and keeping more people on your website.

Knowing this, you should create a smart linking system if you want to keep users engaged with your content and reduce the bounce rate. This, of course, includes the internal links between your pages and your content. 

If you're writing relevant content in your niche, you'll have many opportunities for this. A single article can be linked to at least a few other posts on the website. This aligns your content marketing with your UX design, gives you more chances of keeping people on the site, and boosts your SEO.

6. Create a simplified, seamless conversion process.

The Content Marketing Institute found that companies with on-brand content marketing have 126% more leads than those without it. Why is this important for you?

It's because an overly complicated process of conversion is the biggest enemy you have when it comes to turning cold leads into happy customers. It should take customers little time to find the information they need from you, which is why your content must be concise and to the point. It shouldn't take them endless confirmations, clicks, identity checks, and verifications to buy something. 

In other words, the conversion process should be as simple as possible at every point in the customer journey. Your UX design should meet their needs, the content should give them the information they need, and they should find it very easy to create an account or place an order. 

7. Do regular maintenance on your content.

Most brands publish a piece of content once and never revisit it. Some might try repurposing it at some point, but they rarely do important maintenance work. 

It is not only the design that needs to be maintained and updated regularly. You should also check technical details such as your links and SEO on different pages. This can take time, but such mistakes can severely impact your UX and your ranking on search engines. One-click upload in Issuu means republishing your digital content is a breeze every time you make changes, no matter how big or small.

Ready to boost your business? These tricks are all you need!

If you were trying hard to publish amazing content, but things didn't work out as you wanted, it's time to consider the alignment between digital content and your UX design. If your audience starts by reading your publications and clicks through to your website, or if it happens the other way around, you want the customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) you deliver to be seamless and consistent. By following these tricks, you can expect to reap all sorts of benefits, such as lower bounce rates, higher conversion rates, higher ROI, and more. Good luck!

This is a guest post by Ljupka Simonovska from Skale.


Are you looking for an interactive way to publish and distribute digital content? Issuu is an all-in-one platform that helps you instantly transform your images, text, videos, and PDFs into ready-to-publish content for every digital channel, format, and device. Learn more about Issuu.