UX CONTENT RESOURCES
As a UX professional, there are lots of ways you may be involved in a project, service, or product. Whatever the focus of your role, you will need to consider the user. With marketing writing, you’ll be thinking about the customer journey: all of the interactions they’ve had with your brand and how content can lead to successful and positive user experiences.
In this article, we outline some of the key marketing writing considerations that UX professionals should consider. There are examples and advice throughout, and all of the topics (and more) are covered in more detail in the Marketing Writing for UX course.
As defined in our course, “customer experience is an approach to business and marketing that focuses on customer satisfaction to grow a business by attracting new users and retaining existing ones. Writing for customer experience is all about creating customer-focused content for products that people want and need.”
Customer experience encompasses all interactions and touchpoints a customer has with a brand, product, or service throughout their journey—from initial awareness to post-purchase support. It includes physical, digital, and emotional elements. It’s not just about the transactional aspects but also about the overall feeling and perception a customer has during and after their engagement. A positive customer experience is essential for building loyalty, advocacy, and long-term relationships, as it directly influences customer satisfaction and retention.
In the context of user experience (UX), marketing writing and customer experience matter for several reasons:
Effective marketing writing ensures clear communication of the product or service’s value proposition, features, and benefits. This clarity is crucial for users to understand what is being offered and how it can meet their needs. This is where they will learn the benefits gained from using a certain product or service.
Well-written marketing copy can capture the user’s attention and maintain their interest. Engaging writing can create a positive and memorable experience, making users more likely to explore further and stay engaged with the product or service. Prolonged engagement leads to customers becoming brand ambassadors and advocates who can then influence other potential customers.
Trust is a vital factor in user experience. Marketing writing that is honest, transparent, and highlights the credibility of the brand can contribute to building trust with users. Trustworthy content can enhance the overall user experience.
Marketing writing is not limited to a single platform: it spans various touch points, including websites, social media, emails, and ads. Consistent and cohesive messaging across these channels helps users maintain a unified understanding of the brand and its offerings.
Effective marketing writing can evoke emotions and create a connection between the user and the brand. Emotional engagement is a powerful factor in user experience, influencing user perceptions and loyalty. We all have our favorite brands and part of that is because of the way they may us feel and the aspirations they stir in us.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often intertwined with marketing writing. Well-optimized content can improve a website’s search engine rankings, making it more discoverable to users. This, in turn, contributes to a positive overall user experience.
Marketing writing plays a crucial role in shaping the user experience by providing clear, engaging, and trustworthy communication that resonates with the target audience. It helps establish a strong brand presence, encourages user interaction, and contributes to building lasting relationships with customers.
When creating, managing and publishing content, there can be different rules and guidelines to follow. Those rules and guidelines may be fixed or may need to be adapted depending on the format of the content and the channel it’s being published on.
Let’s break down these three components, with examples, so you can be sure you’re creating the right content, in the right format, and publishing to the right channel.
When working with content you may need to check and use:
Some organizations won’t have any guidelines at all. For those organizations that have documented the rules and guidelines for their content, they may be included in one document or several smaller documents in different formats.
It can be hard to piece together everything that’s available as a UX writer. Any guidelines you do reference in your writing should be current and accurate. Where possible, they should also have do and don’t examples of content so that they show as well as tell.
As a UX writer, you may be tasked with creating or managing guidelines. There are lots of publicly available guidelines that you can use as inspiration or a basis for your own. Two examples include:
It’s good practice to get feedback from internal users on the guidelines and do some testing. Any guidelines you do create have to be useful and usable.
There are different formats you can create content for. Each comes with its own requirements, commitment, and benefits. Examples of content formats include:
You may consider having repeatable content patterns so that you have consistency across the content formats you create and publish. This can also make the process of creating content faster as the patterns make a template for writers to follow.
Creating strategic and measurable content that is on brand and meets a user need is time consuming. To be as efficient as possible with your content and resources, repurposing content is an effective way to make the most of your content.
An example of repurposing content is a webinar that you may host. Once the webinar is over, you can repurpose it as:
You don’t want to duplicate content in all formats but communicate the key messaging in an appropriate way for the formats.
Your organization will likely publish content to multiple channels. These can include:
Regardless of what channels you use, there must be a purpose to publishing to a channel and it must be maintained. An out of date social feed can lead to confusion and mistrust by the audience. Ask yourself if it is better not to publish to a channel at all rather than have a dormant and unused channel. Some organizations are also guided by competitors. “If they’re publishing to Instagram, then so should we.” This isn’t a good reason to add to your to-do list as the channels you use should be informed by your organizational goals and the needs of your audience.
Once you have established what channels your audience uses, you can create content specific to those channels with the user needs and overall customer journey in mind. You can write about the same benefit or message but adapt what you say and how you say it to suit the channel the content is being published on. For example, you may be a bit more formal in tone when you publish on LinkedIn compared to when you publish on X. Or your help content may be more serious in tone than your newsletter.
Conducting an audit of the channels an organization publishes on is an insightful task. It’s common for channels to be uncovered that may not have been used for a while and it also considers channels that the organization may not own (YouTube) but does publish to.
Having an oversight of the content formats and channels that are used by your organization starts to build an ecosystem that you can then manage and change as needed.
A marketing writing toolbox should contain a variety of tools and resources to help marketers effectively communicate their messages to their target audience. Here are some essential components that should be in a marketing writing toolbox.
Reference materials such as grammar books, style guides, and online tools like Grammarly ensure accuracy and consistency in writing.
AI-powered tools, such as natural language generation (NLG) platforms, can create content at scale. These tools can generate product descriptions, blog posts, social media updates, and more, saving time and resources for marketers.
AI algorithms analyze vast amounts of data to identify trends, preferences, and patterns in consumer behavior. This data-driven insight helps marketers optimize their content strategy, including keywords, topics, and formats, to better resonate with their target audience.
AI enables marketers to deliver personalized content experiences to individual consumers based on their preferences, browsing history, purchase behavior, and demographic information. Personalized content increases engagement and conversion rates by providing relevant and timely information to each customer.
AI-powered translation tools can quickly translate content into multiple languages, allowing marketers to reach international audiences more effectively. Additionally, AI can assist in localizing content by adapting it to cultural nuances and preferences.
AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants can engage with customers in real-time, answering questions, providing product recommendations, and offering assistance throughout the customer journey. These conversational AI tools improve customer satisfaction and streamline communication.
AI algorithms can analyze social media conversations, customer reviews, and other online content to gauge sentiment and identify trends. This helps marketers understand customer perceptions, identify potential issues, and adjust their messaging accordingly.
AI-powered predictive analytics tools forecast future trends and consumer behavior based on historical data and current market conditions. Marketers can use these insights to anticipate customer needs, optimize their marketing strategies, and make data-driven decisions.
When used effectively and with continued human input and skill, AI can help marketers to create more engaging, relevant, and personalized content, leading to improved customer experiences, increased brand loyalty, and higher ROI on marketing efforts.
