Marketing design is a vital aspect of business branding, but this is not something many entrepreneurs understood until recently. It is clear now that effective business branding and marketing means stimulating visual impact, which leads to stronger connections with customers, higher sales numbers, and improved brand visibility.
Not only does quality design help you attract attention to your brand, but it can also stick in the mind of your target audience and swing their perception of your establishment. Moreover, you can use visual elements to enhance your message’s quality further.
What is Marketing Design?
Marketing design is the process of coming up with graphical assets for the objective of creating exciting advertisements, performing relevant branding, and other promotional tasks. Simply put, marketing design strives to improve a brand’s impression, visibility, and commercial success.
The designers base their work on design principles and how the outcome can define the brand they are advertising. Though one reality is a constant within this domain – the goal is to attract audiences while reinforcing the brand identity through consistent messaging and illustrations.
Various Marketing Design Fields
There are so many factors in a business that requires a graphic designer’s expertise. To give you an in-depth view, here are some of the most common marketing fields where design plays the lead role.
- Branding Design
- Digital Marketing
- Web Design
- Print Advertising
Let’s expand our understanding of these terms:
1. Branding Design
Branding design is a discipline in itself, but it still falls under marketing design. Branding design refers to a brand’s critical features such as the logo, colour scheme, typography, symbolism, packaging, use of photography, and other design elements that distinguish the brand from others, making it recognisable to consumers.
Essentially, it helps the viewers form an impression of the brand. Whether positive or negative will depend on how well executed the designs are.
Exemplary branding is done by thorough research on the brand’s missions, values and stories while keeping an eye on current trends and competitor strategies. Above this, expert designers sketch initial logos and create concepts and illustrated identity systems built upon as the brand is expanded.
Suppose you begin a business in pet foods, sports equipment, household gear, or any industry, as a matter of fact. In that case, branding design is inarguably a highly essential parameter as it operates as a base for every marketing tool the company may use in the future.
Image Source:- https://inspirationfeed.com/branding-design/
2. Digital Marketing
This type of marketing is most dependent on aesthetics and copy quality to lure customers into taking action. To thrive in digital marketing, your design has to be eye-catching and memorable – while wittily indicating your message to audiences, whether at the bottom or top of your sales funnel.
People, or rather, potential clients, have an attention span of eight seconds, which means you need something extraordinary to grab their attention.
The most important aspect of digital marketing is social media marketing. You’ve undoubtedly seen your fair share of ads on your social media, whether on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, or other streaming platforms. If the designers crack the design, which pockets greater conversions, your brand is in for a profitable month of customer growth and sales.
Social media is constantly changing trends. To keep up, graphic designers have to be aware of the changes and vary their designs with colour combinations, merging shapes creatively and opting for catchy fonts that’ll attract the viewer’s eye while staying true to the brand. Whichever designer team you onboard, make sure they’re mindful of how to make effective and engaging social media graphics.
3. Web Design
For businesses that don’t have an actual outlet where people can come and go, their online presence is everything. Amongst the tools in their online arsenal, the website plays the role of the key digital footprint. This is because their website is where their patrons directly learn about the brand.
Moreover, the website makes the perfect place to display your brand’s unique identity and tone of voice, whether narrated through design or words.
Web designers are the ones who make the stunning visuals and UX elements for websites, from the home page to the tiniest elements like CTA buttons and strategically designed enquiry forms.
Throughout this creative process, they need to keep in mind the brand’s communication guidelines, the mindset of their target audience, and trends in website design to which top brands are resorting.
4. Print Advertising
Although it’s fair to say that digital marketing is a top branding medium in the 21st century, print advertising is certainly nowhere close to dying out. Print design is still all around us, in the form of billboards, magazines, stickers, flyers, brochures, and so much more.
For graphic designers specialising in print advertising, they don’t just have to create designs, but they also have to optimise the designs for printing. This means knowing the necessary dimensions and ratios, using the right colours, and knowing their way around materials and textures.
Print advertising designers have to work on posters, newspaper advertisements, stickers, brochures, billboards, tote bags, notebooks, and even decals for buses and buildings. While these marketing pathways do not display in the digital space, the approach to presenting them is vast.
Image Source:- https://mumbaidreams.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/TYPES-OF-PRINT-Ads.jpg
Why Should You Use Marketing Design?
A business should invest in high-quality marketing design for the following benefits, each of which is instrumental in developing a trustworthy brand image:
- Brand recognition
- Emotional response
- Delivering brand message
- Improving sales statistics
1. Improving Brand Recognition
Brand loyalty is a powerful way to increase sales. But to achieve this loyalty, you must consistently remind potential consumers of your products or services and how they benefit from them. It is essential to flash your visuals, logo, website, packaging, and social media creations regularly, promoting the development of a cohesive brand image.
Whether you create designs that non-target and target audiences resonate with, basic aspects such as colour-coding and typography variations allow prospects to your services and brand. It would help you stay consistent with your marketing design to gain loyal customers.
For example, this advertisement barely has many visuals to display, yet we can instantly decipher which company runs it.
Image Source:- Source:- https://strategylab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Most-creative-ads-ever-shes-tired-of-waiting.jpg
2. Emotional Response
“A picture is worth a thousand words” is not only an age-old phrase but is the driving point of marketing design. The aim is to invoke emotional responses through your designs, whether it’s funny, serious, sad, or awe-inspiring. These emotions make your brand linger in your audience’s mind—much more than if it were to be explained through words.
Keep the brand’s tone of voice and visual identity at the crux of your marketing design’s methodology. After all, the message you put out will be affiliated with the brand itself, making it easy to share the brand story.
Image Source:- https://assets-global.website-files.com/6185b708a2657014268d2eaf/61f7f2a752675a57c3cfb9fa_pasted-image-0-4.png
3. Delivering Brand Message
Your brand message can be conveyed to the public in unique ways through marketing design. These could come through videos, static images, GIFs, blogs, newsletter formats, live presentations, stalls, and an entire treasure trove of marketing wonders.
For example, you can read this blog because you are fluent in English. However, regardless of their mother tongue, people can understand graphics.
With the internet-breaking down geographical barriers, it is essential to appeal to a multilingual audience. And what better way than through graphic design?
4. Boosting Sales
Your brand’s visuals are capable of playing a trick on your consumer’s minds, convincing them to take a step deeper into your sales funnel. People are innately attracted to unique things. It could be exquisite packaging, product design, or captivating emblems.
Through quality designs, people may feel that the quality of your product or services is also high, leading to increased sales.
Clever and innovative marketing goes hand in hand with premium marketing design. To give you an example, Coca-Cola’s ‘Share A Coke’ campaign was insanely profitable. Beginning in Australia, Coca-Cola transformed the product’s design by personalising the bottle with the country’s most popular names, giving the consumers a ‘just for me’ feel.
Image Source:- https://cocacolaunited.com/blog/2015/05/18/share-coke-bigger-better-ever/
What Makes a Good Marketing Design?
A good marketing design can be the deciding factor for clients. Think about it: would you choose to buy from a company with a shabby website or one with a well-thought-out design and an easy-to-navigate user interface?
The answer is crystal clear.
The question is, how do you know your marketing design is any good? Well, a proper marketing design:
- Establishes brand identity, look, and feel
- Raises the visibility of your campaigns
- Influences conversions and ROI
1. Establishes Brand Identity, Look, and Feel
When you think of a well-known brand, you can immediately visualise its emblem, colour mixtures, and the style and spacing of the textual components, if any. For a food-inclined individual, red and yellow remind them of McDonald’s, while red and blue are Dominos.
All this isn’t just something these brands came across by luck. There was an immense effort in developing the logo, finding the perfect colours, and making the correct font choices with graphic design. Moreover, they had to study how past food brands associated colours with emotions and product types, further deciding how to incorporate them in what ratios.
People perceive different colours in separate ways, making it critical to choose the right colours that evoke the feeling the brand inspires to generate. Some colours can create happiness, others sadness, and a few can induce a “fear of missing out” kind of emotion, also known as FOMO.
Owing to the correlation between colours and emotions, it’ll benefit from choosing the suitable colours that match your brand’s message.
For example, high-class brands will often use black, white, gold, and silver. Look at Versace, Gucci, Bentley, Adidas, Nike, Jaguar, Prada, and many more luxury brands. Their monochromatic emblem type introduces the charm of timelessness. This allows you to use a flexible marketing design that can be tweaked only via specific marketing parameters whenever trying new strategies or launching seasonal campaigns.
Similarly, a lot of work goes into devising the ideal font for your designs. Typefaces, sizing solutions, and presentation styles are the main choices that can make or break a font for your brand.
You won’t use Comic Sans to email your boss. In the same way, fonts can make you seem presentable. Again, it is vital to keep the brand in mind while selecting the font since it will reflect your company’s consideration of how it represents any textual designs.
Image Source:- https://thestrategystory.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/josh-redd-Q9S0w7Bhx3A-unsplash.jpg
2. Raises the Visibility of Your Campaigns
Endless brands are fighting for attention on online platforms. But having an outstanding design will differentiate you from the crowd.
Your campaign must stand out to the viewers. To achieve this, designers need to visualise the marketing from the target audience’s point of view, helping determine changes to keep the design appealing to the masses.
For instance, the Copenhagen Zoo’s customised tour bus has a snake wrapped around it that is sure to catch eyes everywhere it passes. This design also resembles how enticing and thrilling the Zoo tour is!
Getting your audience’s attention is one thing, but keeping it on the design is another ballgame. However, with excellent graphics, such goals become easily achievable.
3. Influences Conversions and, in turn, ROI
In the end, marketing design is an overly valuable method to increase clickthrough rates on your websites, emails, and product description pages. In many cases, eCommerce store owners and businesses depending on ad revenue, emphasise marketing design on a high level. If your checklist to attract large audiences ticks off, expect to attract potential customers and improve your ROI.
Using the right design helps influence people to convert to a user of your brand. If you place people in your designs, the audience will feel a deeper connection to the images, increasing empathy. Not to forget, women, babies, and attractive people are all standard and known to increase visual response rates.
On the other hand, photos of objects help increase trust in the brand. Your sales are bound to go up when CTAs, pictorial representations, and graphic design elements are craftily combined and placed in areas with high-conversion opportunities!
Tips for Better Marketing Design
By now, you are sure to understand the importance of marketing design, but how can you create something that stands out and stays in your audience’s memories?
Here are some tips that can help you achieve better brand recall rates:
1. Keep Experimenting
It is refreshing to break a chain of design mundanity. If you feel like your marketing efforts aren’t yielding what you thought they would, maybe it’s time to switch between designs are curate more relevant formulas.
Big brands with the premium design and time-tested designing concepts also experiment to get more attention, whether Pepsi and Coca-Cola trolling each other or Burger King changing its logo.
As long as these marketing experiments don’t do more harm than good, you should aspire to be creative.
2. Be Relatable
In this day and age, people must see their thoughts and ideas represented in the media, and what better place to start than in advertisements?
Being body positive, having a cast of diverse people, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, helps the audience realise people are behind these products and services. Knowing they are human, just like them, will help the audience respond better.
Not just demographics but relating with human emotions will also help gain more clientele. People will see your ad and think, ‘Oh wow, that’s just like me’, and then likely look your company up to see what you offer.
3. Be Creative
The billboards, digital ads, and flyers aren’t all that can convey your message to the world. If you can think of a creative way to add to your brand, it will only attract more people to you.
For example, here is a creative masterpiece in terms of marketing design. KitKat made these benches look like giant KitKat bars, reinforcing their ‘have a break’ slogan – literally. It is a clever way of standing out while remaining faithful to their brand’s core messaging style.
4. Try Moment Marketing
When the world is continuously talking about a topic, brands can use that as an opportunity to come up with a new campaign. Moment marketing is known to help brands go viral.
For example, remember when the last season of Game of Thrones came out? Many companies took the obsession of the masses as an opportunity to try their luck with moment marketing.
The crucial part of moment marketing is to post and market while the craze is still going on. You don’t want to be outdated in terms of current happenings.
Verdict
Marketing design is vital for brands to be remembered and trusted. Each brand needs to have its unique design and strategy, a complete visual identity that consumers can instantly recognize. For this, hire a team of experienced graphic designers who have expertise in brand building – irrespective of the niche.
Investing your resources in marketing design will only help the brand become more prominent and successful, both economically and in the minds of the masses.
