Your business’s marketing budget has to cover a lot of ground.
From paid ads and content creation, to social media management and email marketing, all of these efforts help push users through the marketing funnel in different ways, but one thing has to be a big part of the process: design.
Strong design has the power to influence a brand’s target audience. The most successful brands see the value of design and make sure there is just as much thought behind it as the strategy itself. Heck, we would even argue that businesses who don’t take design into consideration will not see the results they expect.
Need more convincing? Let’s take a deeper look at how design can impact your business’s marketing success.
Strong Design Get People’s Attention
When something (anything, really) looks cool, unique, or makes you want to take a second look, you’ll give your full attention to it. The first impression your marketing efforts make comes from your visual elements, and if they’re flat, boring, or just like everything else, no one will pay attention to them.
It’s no secret people are being exposed to thousands of marketing pieces a day, and it’s up to your designs to cut through the clutter and stand out from the noise. By investing in strong design upfront, your marketing messages will have a higher chance to be read.
Strong Design Provokes Emotion
The most successful marketing strategies focus on their audience’s emotions and not their product/service’s features.
A bakery does not create dairy-free baked goods just because they want to expand their market; they do it to serve an emotional need for those who miss the taste of chocolate chip cookies.
This same thought can be applied to your campaigns’ designs, but as this look and feel is used more in the future (more on this later), they will associate this emotion with your brand.
A great place to start is to brainstorm the feelings you want to provoke with your audience. Do you want to be the fun, modern communications app that makes team collaboration a breeze? Or, are you the caring, heartfelt insurance company who will be by your clients’ side if their home was destroyed in a hurricane?
By associating these feelings with your brand, it will be easier for your audience to see you as a part of their lives.
Strong Design Makes it Easy on Your Audience
A common misconception about design is it’s all about making things look nice. What people don’t always realize is that strong design exists to make things easier to use; there is usually just as much strategic planning in design as any other marketing strategy.
Take your website as an example. If you didn’t consider design in the web development process, the final product would be something technical sound, but not user-friendly.
Design takes details such as usability, readability, and user behavior into consideration, and it’s in this consideration that creates a “nice-looking” product.
Strong Design Encourages Brand Consistency
The most memorable brands are consistent in all faucets of their marketing. Period.
When designing any collateral for your business, it all needs to evoke the same feeling, personality, and look like it comes from the same business. If this is forgotten, the result will be a look that is detached from your brand, which could lead to brand confusion.
No matter what you’re creating, make sure brand consistency is kept throughout the look and feel of your pieces. Without consistency, you don’t have clarity, and lack of clarity leads to confusion, which turns off your target audience.
Strong Design Builds Trust
Picture this: you’re in a new city and want to find a local cafe for your morning coffee and pastry.
After a quick Google search, you’ve found two options close by and visit their websites to look at their menu. Cafe One’s website clearly displays their menu and prices, but Cafe Two’s website is a single-page website that’s cluttered with stock images of coffee, making the menu difficult to find.
Based on this interaction with these websites, you will more than likely visit cafe one. Even if Cafe Two has the better coffee and pastries, it’s human nature to judge a business by this first impression.
That’s why design is so important; it has the power to build trust with new customers before they even do business with you. Your brand’s designs need to be not only presentable, but created with your target audiences’ intent in mind.
It’s no question that strong design plays a big role in defining your brand’s personality, voice, and dedication to your customers. Keep this in mind for your marketing assets, and the results will speak for themselves.
To learn more about design or to have our team create on-brand marketing collateral for your business, contact GreenMellen today!
