Empowering Marketing Teams with Design Systems
-Rohan Tiwary
Design systems are typically thought of as bridging the gap between designers and developers. But there’s a problem with that statement: Why leave marketers out? Your website is your best marketing tool. It only makes sense for marketers to be directly involved in building it, right? This is why we need to build design systems with marketing teams in mind.
What is a design system?
A design system is the single source of truth containing elements that help teams design, conceptualize, and develop products and marketing websites that deliver satisfying and consistent experiences to users.
These elements include (but are not limited to:
- Brand guidelines
- Design principles
- Typography
- Color
- Layout
- Reusable components
- Webflow implementation guidelines
- Design implementation guidelines
These elements help teams tie the product or website together into a solution meant to delight and help their target audience.
All in all, a design system does the following:
- Provides a shared language for designers, developers, AND marketers.
- Allows designers, developers, AND marketers to reuse images, buttons, codes, and styles on the fly.
- Encourages a modular approach to product and website building.
What can a design system do for marketing teams?
Give marketing teams the platform to translate their ideas into visual form, and they’re far more likely to hit their KPIs. This can only help your website smash its marketing and lead generation goals.
Marketers, after all, play a huge role in identifying the needs of customers and in implementing a brand story that fulfills those needs. Marketers think in terms of demographics and personas, and this knowledge will come in handy in building digital products that customers will love. They’re the folks who can point out if your website is resonating with your audience and whether it’s enforcing the company’s branding goals.
While marketers mostly deal with KPIs, brand messaging, and marketing touchpoints, that doesn’t mean they’re not capable of thinking visually. Marketers (or some of them) may have limited knowledge of UI and UX design, but put a good design system in their hands and they’ll be able to build websites like a professional designer in no time.
Benefits of design systems for marketing teams:
1. Improved collaboration
Marketers are concerned about brand messaging, KPIs; and marketing strategy, but it can be useful to give them the tools to present their ideas in visual form. With a design system at their disposal, the marketing team can create more detailed and conversion-focused web pages; eliminating a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth that tends to waste everyone’s time.
By implementing a design system that allows your marketing team to create simple websites with ease; designers and developers can focus on creating customs and new components that will add more value than repetitive work ever could.
2. Consistent and better user experiences
Giving marketers a platform to communicate their ideas visually in service to the company’s core goals doesn’t just improve collaboration — it leads to better user experiences.
When you have a centralized design system that contains preapproved components and assets, marketers can create web pages and user interfaces without compromising visual consistency, resulting in solutions that create better experiences.
3. Better efficiency and reduced expenses
A design system contains reusable assets and components that marketers, designers and developers can use to create web pages on the fly. No one has to create anything from scratch because everything they need is within the design system.
Pretty convenient, right? This means no more resources wasted on duplicate assets. And because everything is consolidated in the system, the company is less likely to incur “design debt;” allowing everyone to complete their respective tasks more efficiently.
Implementing a design system and maintaining it will require resources, sure but when you have a single source of truth that creates efficiency across the board; the positives far outweigh the negatives.
Even if your internal team lacks the know-how to build websites (or is too busy to learn about it); you can always get help from agencies like Bons.
4. Ability to create yourself without depending on anyone
You may have the best product, but if you can’t launch your offering before your competitor does, you’re going to get beat almost every time. Remember, in today’s fast-paced, competitive environment, you will lose out on opportunities, customers, and market share if you don’t move fast.
The point? Your marketing team can’t afford to wait for your design team to step in if a similar product is already gaining traction in the market. Why wait around when marketers can design their landing pages themselves?
With design systems in place, your marketing team can capitalize on current trends and get ahead of the pack by launching marketing campaigns without waiting for the design team.
Design systems help in bringing conversions and it also plays a crucial role in Conversational Marketing.
Conclusion:
To truly empower your marketing team, make them build stuff. Don’t just leave them to draw on whiteboards all the time. Because believe me, if you give them a design system that is tailored to their needs and provide them with the training to help them maximize its benefits, they will accomplish great things. And that will only help elevate your brand and smash your ROI goals.
