Welcome to the ‘Silicon Gorge’, where amazing conferences about technology, marketing and user experience (UX) happen on a regular basis. Bristol is notoriously becoming a hub of creativity and innovation, where like-minded professionals regularly meet to discuss new ideas and strategies. Some of them will get together on 5th October at the Digital Gaggle Conference, a free digital marketing conference organised by Bristol-based search engine optimisation (SEO) and social media agency Noisy Little Monkey.

The conference will run during the morning at Colston Hall. This year’s topic is ‘It’s not me, it’s UX: how to stop breaking up with your customers’ and will highlight the connection between great marketing, customer service and user experience (UX), plus how poor UX is killing the potential long-term relationship you could be building with your customers.

After the conference, Josh Baldwin, Local and Mobile Search Specialist at Noisy Little Monkey, will lead a training session titled ‘The Three Tech Pillars for Non-Techies: Essential Fixes to Improve Ranking, Bounce Rates and Conversions on your Site’. People for Research managed to grab Josh for a quick chat before the event.

🎙 Do you feel like a lot of marketers are still unaware of the technological possibilities they could be using to improve results?

Yes, completely. We run into it with new clients all the time. We might ask a seemingly simple question like, “who are you hosted with?” and we’ll be met with blank stares because they’ve palmed their “techie website stuff” over to web developers and don’t realise the importance of that kind of “stuff”. Marketing managers generally don’t realise how making small but significant changes like improving your TTFB (time to first byte) or page load time can increase your rankings on Google and offer a more pleasing user experience on site.

🎙 How do you plan to explain these ‘three tech pillars’ in a way that non-techies can quickly assimilate?

Well, luckily, we have someone who is a half-techie and someone who is a full blown techie leading the training. I’ll be co-presenting with a slightly more handsome man called Tim Fairchild, who is a weapons-grade technical expert. I consider myself to be a “Mar-Techie”, which means I look at tech fixes from a marketing background. Essentially, I’ll be there to help translate Tim’s genius and bring the tech fixes back into people’s marketing strategies and help them understand how they can apply it.

🎙 There is clearly a growing connection between marketing and user experience. Is it possible that marketing is becoming more user-friendly thanks to UX?

I think that with the growth of technology, there’s been a massive switch from traditional outbound marketing (i.e. disruptive marketing which is all about taking up as much space and making as much noise as possible, trying to grab people’s attention) to inbound marketing. With inbound marketing, the power rests entirely with the user or buyer; they’re looking for you…you’re not cold calling or broadcasting at them. In today’s marketplace, you’ve got to win your customers round and in order to do that, you need to make sure that your user experience is better than your competitors’. It’s a buyers’ market.

Wally Olins once said that “marketing is a question of persuading, seducing and attempting to manipulate people into buying products and services”.

🎙 Do you think marketing is still “seductive and manipulative”? And aren’t the UX principles similar to the marketing core principles, but with a different process and goal?

I think marketing has moved from “seduction” to “education”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still about being sexy and attractive to your consumers but behind this façade, you want to make sure that you are engaging your customers with informative and educational content. I think marketing will always be a tad manipulative, it has to be. You won’t find any companies shouting about being “the world’s number two brand” for x, y and z.

I would take the core principles of UX and compare them to the typical buyer’s journey. It’s a lot harder to market effectively if you’re oblivious to your customer’s lifecycle stage, pain points or wants and needs. Likewise, it’s hard to cater to and please particular demographics without knowing who they are and what their habits and preferences are.

🎙 How can marketing and UX work together to attract customers and convert them?

It all comes back to creating and familiarising yourself with your buyer or audience personas. Buyer personas are an age old marketing tool, which hold a lot of value when brought into the UX discussion. They should inform all of your marketing or UX efforts whether that be design or layout for a new website or crafting copy for promotional materials or blogs.

The user or audience always comes first. If you’re not targeting your message or experience, you might as well revert back to scattergun outbound tactics (and no-one wants to do that). To help marketers get started on creating their personas, Noisy Little Monkey has created a free Buyer Persona guide and template. It gives you, step-by-step, everything you need to create buyer personas from scratch and start making them work for you. I think it’s a really useful guide. But, then again, I am biased.

Maria Santos, Head of Digital Ops & Data Protection

If you would like to find out more about our in-house participant recruitment service for user testing or market research get in touch on 0117 921 0008 or info@peopleforresearch.co.uk.

At People for Research, we recruit participants for UX and usability testing and market research. We work with award winning UX agencies across the UK and partner up with a number of end clients who are leading the way with in-house user experience and insight.