Design in marketing is more than the logo design, images, page layouts, and unique fonts that comprises your brand identity and overall aesthetic; it is the corpus callosum that connects your company to your brand, and ultimately to any potential customer.
The level of care you invest towards a service or product design should be reflected in your marketing strategy.
Many companies, especially those in their adolescence, are tempted to take on the job of marketing design themselves. They rely on whatever limited design elements and resources they have to get by, rather than using a dedicated professional marketing team or graphic designer. While doing the design work yourself can reduce costs in the short term, the benefits of engaging a marketing designer or digital marketing agency to craft a cohesive design for your marketing are far reaching and can inoculate your business against some of the pitfalls that weak design can marry.
Here are three reasons great design is so important to marketing and how design fits into your marketing efforts. Consider these when you decide whether hiring a design agency is the right move for your company.
Design Drives Conversion
At every stage in building a marketing campaign for your product the central question is how do you create engagement with the customer and how do you convert that engagement to your desired outcome? How does a call to action become a sale? How does an experience with an ad become brand loyalty? Beyond excellent concept and copy, design is what takes a pitch and evolves it into an emotional response from your customer. How your marketing material flows, the images that you connect with your brand, the colors, shapes, and the feel of your business in the eyes of the customer is often exclusively dependent on your design decisions.
Design Makes Your Product Visible
Think about the amount of advertising an average person sees on a daily basis. From the feeds on social media to banners of websites, marketing is absolutely everywhere. The demands for attention are constant. Eye catching, elegant, and persuasive design can be a beautiful thing and is what separates successful marketing efforts from everything else bombarding your prospective customer in the digital space.
Social media has become a dominant force in how products are marketed, and in the social media landscape content is king. Photos and videos are the most shared items on every platform, both of which rely heavily on design to be engaging.
To compete in the sea of social media you need powerful and distinct branding.
Marketing is the conversation you have with your customers to engage them with your product. Branding is the personality that you project in that conversation. In the age of social media excellent design can be the element that pushes your company forward and increases brand awareness. It can be the first impression you make or the differentiator of your product/service.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs
But ultimately what is most important is that design can play a role in why your target audience converts. CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) is often driven by strategic and concise design decisions, as simple as changing the color and location of a button on a page, that can yield significant increases in conversions and other desirable customer behaviors. It’s good design decisions like these that are responsible for the experience a customer has once they interact with your product/service. Not only does having a great user interface design make the purchase process easier and more viable for your customers, but it can help provide important information that can impact all aspects of your business. Following good design principles can bolster conversions for your company.
Simply put: your customers can recognize the difference between good and bad marketing design.
Ask yourself, if a person’s first experience with your business is your marketing material, how does your design communicate your value? You only have a few seconds to convince a potential customer from sticking around to learn more about your offering. Good design creates confidence in your business. Think about it. You know the feeling of visiting a cluttered, outdated website design and the assumptions you make about the company that owns it. Are you willing to stick around or do you bounce right off the page?
Web design, in many ways, is the face your business shows the world.
Professional, clean, compelling design elements immediately communicate the value of your business or product to a prospective customer. It creates confidence in your quality and in your professionalism. It spurs a dialogue the audience can partake in. It draws a customer in and guides them along an experience. And ultimately, it is often an integral part in communicating with that voice in the back of your customer’s head saying… yes, I should invest in these people.
