Five Handy Tips to Help Marketers with Design Thinking

The world evolves at a swift pace and things change daily. Given this, customers evolve too, and their demands also change by the day. These dynamics provide a way of feeding into marketing, and this is where innovative solutions from design thinking come in. 

Design thinking is a systematic approach that allows people to get solutions to their problems. In the marketing context, it involves the process of innovative and step-by-step thinking that will allow you to arrive at holistic and creative solutions to a particular problem or issue. 

There is a need for marketers to craft models and strategies that fit well with today’s consumers. The marketing content that consumers would likely prefer today is different than the content they consumed or preferred at least a year ago. 

This speaks of how innovation and creation are essential in this area and further reinforces how vital design thinking is. The systematic approach that design thinking follows is a proper and optimal methodology for generating solutions. 

Going about design thinking requires putting some of these aspects into perspective:

• Understanding the consumers and the target audience
• Focusing on solutions
• Approaching solutions from multiple angles
• Remaining focused
• Using visuals

We will explore these 5 tips and understand how they can help a marketer put things in a better place.

#Tip 1 Understand the Target Audience

It is challenging to come up with solutions or strategies for a particular group of people without understanding them well. This is like going in blind and inadequately knowing what to solve. Since design thinking is all about procedures, steps, and systems, it is important to understand the target audience. 

Recognizing user behavioral patterns, trends, likes, and preferences give an informational advantage. By understanding the consumers, you get to know where the marketing challenges exist and what can be done to address them accordingly. 

Indeed, there can be no substantial ideation process without the prerequisite information about the customers. Information will help to form the base of knowledge or facts at hand, which in turn, will help to shape and influence the creative and design thinking process. 

#Tip 2 Focus on Solutions

The marketing scene is dynamic. Challenges have existed for some time, and there has been a shortage of tangible & lasting solutions. In some cases, the continuing shift in consumer preferences quickly obsoletes existing marketing strategies. This explains why you need to have a solution-oriented or problem-solving mindset. 

As a marketer, you need to ensure that your innovations and creations solve a particular problem. These could be solutions to previously existing problems or solutions to anticipated challenges. 

                                          Image Source: picjumbo.com from Pexels

Having a solution-oriented mind is, therefore, an incredibly important ingredient in the design thinking process. This helps come to a conclusive solution while keeping the company's goals and technology constraints in mind.

#Tip 3 Approach Solutions From Multiple Angles

Sometimes, you come across many solutions, which is good but then it can make you confused also at the same time. You can sort the ideas coming up in your mind by listing each one of them down and figuring out the best one as per their effectiveness.

Design thinking is a systematic approach that uses several variables as inputs and factors in considerations to create solutions. Analyzing these options from several different angles is critical but implementing the best as per the necessities can lead to desired results. 

#Tip 4 Remain Focused

It is possible that in the process, you might think of other aspects related to marketing but not exclusively associated with the solutions to your marketing problems or challenges. Having a sense of focus is thus an essential part of the design thinking process as it assures you of proper and accurate results. 

A keen sense of focus is important as it can help in the cultivation of clear objectives as well as a much-needed sense of direction in the marketing design thinking process.

#Tip 5 Visuals Can Aid the Process

Most people synthesize visual information faster than written information. This is so because visual information is easy to understand, and does not consume much time to review compared to written information. This is why academic writing services and other educational resources like TEDx have been adopting more visuals and video content to make things easier for readers.

In the same vein, the visual representation of information can help you to understand the information more easily and accurately.

Hence,  given the multi-pronged nature of marketing strategies, they help in addressing a broad array of problems and aid the design thinking process hugely with the use of visuals.

Bottom Line

There is a level of dynamism that comes with marketing. Indeed, customer preferences and tastes change daily. 

Thus, it calls for constant innovation and creativity from marketers. Design thinking can help marketers arrive at customized and innovative solutions when it comes to product marketing and publicity. Given the systematic and step-by-step process design thinking offers, marketers can harness it to craft solutions that will work for them. 

**This post is written by our guest author Jessica Fender. She's a blogger and Chief Content Officer at OnlineWritersRating.com.

Interested to write for us? Drop a mail at guestpost@srijan.net with your awesome ideas