This does not only refer to creating “pretty” products or products with a design that is pleasing to the eye, but also to making design part of the company’s philosophy.
A key point in design thinking is putting the user at the centre, something that current marketing has been incorporating for some time now. Therefore, it is natural that marketing is one of the areas most interested in design thinking within any business.
Having a process that helps create strategies and campaigns thinking from the user's point of view can be a great tool for a company.
What is design thinking ?
Design thinking is a method that allows users or clients to better understand their needs, create innovative solutions and iterate quickly to correct them. These solutions, in addition to meeting needs, must be technically possible and be within the company's business strategy.
The method establishes a series of steps to follow in order to reach a solution to a design problem. There are many schemes that exist in relation to this methodology, however we stick with the one from Stanford d.school :
Design Thinking Process
This is not a linear process, going from phase one to phase five. It is a process with iterations from one phase to another. For example, while prototyping, we can re-empathize with the user in order to validate what we are doing. The results of each of the phases can feed into the following ones, as well as the previous ones.
Furthermore, it is a process that seeks to set aside all previous ideas we had about a problem. It is not until phase three, ideation, that we begin to think of solutions.
To make the process easier, it is important to have a multidisciplinary team, with different backgrounds, in order to obtain different points of view within the same work team.
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Step by step: How to apply design thinking to marketing?
We said that design thinking should be part of the company's DNA. Therefore, every product, service, website, in short... the entire business should revolve around solving user problems. However, this is an ideal that is not always possible, especially in a more traditional company.
Marketing often acts as an intermediary between the user and the product design. Let's not forget that one of the 4Ps of the marketing mix refers to "product." Therefore, making design decisions is not alien to the marketing department. With design thinking, it has a powerful tool to achieve this.
But leaving aside product launches, can design thinking be applied when it comes to digital marketing?
At the marketing strategy level, applying the design thinking process is very useful when defining the value proposition and the key messages to be communicated.
In this post, however, we will focus on the application of the process for creating a campaign. Let's imagine that we already have a clear strategy and we want to design a digital marketing campaign applying the principles of design thinking. Let's go step by step.
1. Empathize with your client
For this you need to really know him.
Start by gathering all the information you have on hand about your customers. Not just information about website usage, email campaign responses, or social media. But also adding all the knowledge you have about sales, customer service, and any other point of contact with the customer.
But this is not enough.
You need to conduct interviews so that you understand the entire process your users go through. This is not about how they use your product, but how they solve a problem :
Observe what people do to solve their need.
How do they do it? How much effort does it take them to solve that problem?
Why do they do it that way and not another?
Reaching this level of customer knowledge is an effort that will pay off for this and future campaigns.
2. Define the problem
This is the time to take all the information you've collected, analyze it, and synthesize it to define a problem. Think of it as the scientific method; we can't come up with solutions if we don't know what question we're trying to answer.
Therefore, the problem must be described from the user's point of view.
This step is very useful when coming gambling data taiwan up with a new product or improving an existing one, but it can also be useful at a campaign level.
For example, we could design campaigns that speak to a specific customer need or a common point of frustration for your users . Think of the typical infomercial: “ Tired of…[continuing to do X in Y way] .” It’s time to define what’s in brackets.
3. Produce ideas
This is the most well-known phase of the process. Most people, when they hear “ design thinking ”, think of a wall full of post-its (yes, like the ones in the image of the post).
This is the part of creativity, of opening the mind to possible solutions. There are many techniques to generate ideas besides brainstorming , but in general in this phase you should:
Accept all ideas, no matter how crazy they seem.
Build on previous ideas, instead of saying “no” “yes, and…”.
When finished, group the ideas into common silos and prioritize.
In our case, where we are looking to design a digital marketing campaign, the focus would be on defining the channels to be used, as well as the type of content to be created . Most likely, a campaign will include a combination of channels, formats and content. This is the phase where that is defined.
4. Prototype
The goal here is to produce something that allows us to show the target audience the solution we have proposed . This can be done quickly and without incurring large costs.
Consider, for example, A/B testing your campaigns or creating blog posts on different topics, before developing a tool related to that topic or creating an ebook.
Many social networks allow you to conduct surveys, so look for quick feedback from your users when you have questions. According to the study Brands with Values , today's consumer wants to be a co-creator, so use this attitude to make decisions at this stage.
5. Test
It seems like the end of the process, but it is not. It is time to gather the best solutions obtained from prototyping to materialize a solution.
This is not the end of the process, because by implementing a solution and leaving it in the hands of the user, we will have new data to feed back into the empathy phase. It is important to understand what works and what doesn't, as well as whether the user's initial situation has been improved.
This is essential for designing and improving products and services, but also marketing campaigns. The results of each campaign are inputs to feed the loop with more information.
In digital marketing, everything is real-time data. This allows us to be agile and iterate. If, for example, you launch a Facebook Ads campaign and it doesn't give you the results you expected, review the information and ideas you have after going through all the phases of the process and try something new.
Now it's your turn
As you can see, the principles of design thinking are applicable to creating digital marketing campaigns. For success, it is key to put the user at the center and remember that we are talking about people more than data .
My point of view is that this methodology should be applied to the entire company, so that it works around the user. So, if you want to delve deeper into the design thinking methodology , we recommend:
