They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. But how many impressions, engagements, and conversions is your marketing design worth?
In a matter of seconds, you can leave a lasting impression on a potential customer, whether that’s good or bad. Ideally, you want to make a good impression so that people stick around and learn more about your business.
Ask yourself this: if someone were to see right now one of your marketing materials, would the design communicate the value you’re offering?
In case you can’t answer right away, then stick around and keep reading to find out how to improve your online marketing design.
Source: Arena Animation Banashankari
What is Marketing Design?
Marketing graphic design is all about communicating and promoting a brand’s products or services in a visually appealing way. Not only that, but all the materials created need to adhere to the company’s visual identity.
Let's dive a little deeper on what this means.
Marketing and design need to go hand in hand. Why?
In marketing, you can write clear copy and do targeting the best way you can, but in the end, if it doesn’t perform, it can’t be called a success.
Similarly, when we talk about design, you can create a stunning ad, but if it doesn’t end up converting people, then it doesn’t really matter.
That’s why smart marketing needs to be combined with great design. Marketing creates interest in your brand, while design helps you visually communicate your brand. However, in some companies, there’s still a disconnect between the two.
3 Top Benefits of Great Marketing Graphic Design
1. Increases Conversions
Beautiful marketing design has the potential of motivating people to take action by providing a clear, easy path to conversion.
For example, you can see in the image below the difference great design can make when creating a call to action button.
Source: UXUIMaster
The important thing is that at every stage of your marketing campaign, you need to think about how to create engagement with your audience, and then how to convert engagement into the desired outcome. Ultimately, the design is responsible for creating an emotional response from your audience.
2. Builds Trust
Great design can reduce the anxiety that people may have towards converting. This can be done by addressing the fears and concerns someone may have around the product or service you’re advertising for.
For example, you can talk about the type of material the product is made out of, whether people can return it, or if they can test it out in person before buying it.
3. Provides an Incentive
To encourage consumers to use your product or service, it helps if you showcase them in context using design. More specifically, your audience needs to see how you can help them fix a problem they’re having or how it can bring them joy. By viewing the product in context, a person can visualize much more quickly whether it can work for them and their current lifestyle.
One example is this advertisement of how harsh other body washes are, using smart design which parallels their damaging effect using a scratch card. In comparison, Dove's body wash offers consumers a gentler option for cleansing your skin.
Source: PreEdge
Powerful Marketing Graphic Design Tips
1. Good Design is Simplicity
In case you don’t have a brand that’s quite popular yet, then you need to use clean marketing design as a way of establishing your credibility on the market.
The recipe you should follow is not too much text, and not too many graphics used in the same banner. Doing the opposite will result in a confusing banner that no one would want to click on.
This Taxi advertisement sends an impactful and clear message with only one bold colour, a simple sentence, and the taxi top sign (notice how we don't need to see the whole taxi to understand the context?).
Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the main message you want to send out is not burdened with non-essentials.
Source: Digital Synopsis
2. Take Advantage of Contrast
Before you can keep someone’s attention and make them engage with your visual, you first need to capture their interest.
Contrast has the power of making your designs stand out when you communicate online.
To create contrast in your design, you can use size, color, alignment, repetition, proximity, whitespace, and texture.
Here are some ideas you can use when experimenting with contrast on your designs:
To emphasize a message: make it more prominent than the other elements in your visual using size, colour, or boldness
Ensure colors match the emotions that you want to transmit to your audience
Alignment can create structure in design, and it’s going to help you dictate the value of an element
Elements that are close together will be viewed as a group
The importance of whitespace can’t be emphasized enough – use it to avoid overwhelming your audience with too much information;
Consider textured backgrounds, such as dirt, because they’re familiar with the smell and feel of it, compared to a plain brown color.
Source: Allan Peters
In this advertisement for Target, a contrast in scale is used to emphasize the familiar symbols and sights of summer, to support their tagline "Expect More. Pay Less".
3. Limit Your Fonts
When designing your graphics for your brand, you have access to dozens of amazing fonts. Because of this, you may be tempted to use as many of them as you can in your designs, which is not necessarily the best thing to do.
A good practice is to use the fonts that are from your brand guidelines. If you want to play with your visuals for a specific mood, pick another font that goes well with your main font.
4. Adhere to Brand Guidelines
Great online marketing design is also about making sure that all your materials are following the brand guidelines.
This means making sure that you incorporate your logo, color palette, typography, and other brand elements that are specific to your business (like an icon, a pattern, or a particular photographic style).
Ultimately, this will keep your brand’s presence unified and cohesive across all your marketing and communication channels.
Source: Epica Awards
Marketing and Design Come Hand in Hand
Marketers talk about how important marketing is, while designers talk about how important design is. Instead, we should all focus on discussing how teams can leverage creative marketing design.
Need help in turning your online marketing design from good to great? Drop us a message here for a chat!
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