The term user experience was coined by Don Norman based on digital interactions—check out our What is User Experience article if you’re interested in a little more background on the term. However, with growing popularity on the subject, it has grown to include more than just what happens behind a screen. The core of UX is about giving users a good experience with your brand, so that shouldn’t end with their experience on your website. Enter: omni-channel UX, or more accurately, omni-channel CX (Customer Experience). Read More

The purpose of consumer personas is to elicit empathy within the marketing, management, and sales process as it relates to the customer experience. Personas are neither real individuals nor should they be dated stereotypes. Personas should be created to illustrate fictional representations of the top targeted consumers for the business or product. Rather than assumptive models, personas should be created with backed research from reverse profiling databases or other forms of consumer data, where you can breathe life into them through more qualitative measures such as interviewing current and potential customers as well as sales associates. Read More

Social media is always evolving, and as we look ahead, a new trend is emerging. Many experts have identified that private messaging is on the rise, as well as sharing via stories and groups. This shift from sharing publicly to privately calls for new strategies for reaching your customers online. Let’s take an in-depth look at what’s already happening, and what businesses should expect more of in the future.

What’s Already Happening Messaging

As someone that manages social media for businesses, I’m already seeing the move toward a message-focused world. Facebook, with its Read More

Design thinking is the human centered approach to innovation. Half a dozen of our team members here at Zion & Zion have extensive training at the Stanford d.school in the process of Design Thinking which consists of five phases: Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. Once you have empathized with your target market and defined a real problem and/or opportunity, you are ready to start ideation.

Instead of trying to solve for the entire problem, often it is much easier and more manageable to break the problem up—a method called problem decomposition. Imagine you’ve been tasked to improve customer… Read More

With mobile traffic exceeding desktop traffic, the web is becoming a cross-device medium and mobile patterns and practices have bled onto desktop. Five years ago we would create specific mobile versions for websites. Responsive design was non-existent and phones didn’t have enough juice in them to handle pages with MB footprints. Not to mention that we would categorize mobile browsing as strictly on-the-go, forking content and scratching features claiming we knew what the user wanted and needed. Read More

Your company has identified that it needs assistance with marketing and advertising, but now the big decision is—do you expand your own marketing department or seek out an agency? You could spend days, weeks, or even months searching for the people you think you may need to have a fully-staffed marketing department, or you could choose an agency that has everyone you need in their arsenal already.

Members of the marketing village

One of the greatest benefits of working with an agency is gaining access to different types of individuals and their expertise. A sole person cannot single-handedly and properly… Read More

In many professions, tools can help drive the success of a project. Having the right tools determines how efficiently and effectively you can attain your objectives. However, finding the right tools can often be a time-consuming task, as you generally don’t know how well a tool will work until you spend time using it. These tools have proven to me that any time spent testing and learning them has been well worth it. Read More

This year, I attended a two-day, Digital Marketing Bootcamp hosted by the American Marketing Association. Hosted in Seattle Washington, the bootcamp ran through multiple aspects of digital marketing and how it all works together in marketing strategies.

As an Account Executive, I felt it was important for me to attend this bootcamp so I could continuously improve my knowledge of digital media and the ever-evolving ways it can work for my clients. Also, Zion & Zion is a big proponent of cross training their employees in different areas to make our jobs more holistic.

The different aspects of digital… Read More