It takes only a few seconds to actually impress your client or potential customer, but the quality of your design can leave an active impression. Now, this impression can be good or bad and we are aiming for the best impression. It is important that we impress our customers with this awesomeness to make them come back and learn more about our product or business.

Marketing Design, what does the term essentially mean?

We can have a word-by-word definition for Marketing design, however, we are keener to look into the useful strategies that will bring us results, after all, we are here not for the theory but for the practical.

Your marketing strategy and your design concepts need to be in perfect sync to reel in customers from different sources. Now, the bigger question, why is design important in marketing strategy? Well, a visual impact is much more effective than any other promotional content.

A picture will speak a thousand words. So now as you know the importance of design in digital marketing, let us dive fathoms into this topic via this article.

Despite all the emerging theories and practices of syncing design and marketing strategies, there are a handful of companies that are still holding on to the traditional methods.

Here, we will introduce a term, “brand guidelines”. Brand guidelines help to ease the communication between the marketing and design wing of your company. It is vital that your teams exist in co-operative environment. One team should precisely comprehend what the other is trying to say. Brand guidelines are going to be the high bandwidth communication channel here!

Brand guidelines essentially draw a virtual baseline, upon which the design team gets set to work.

If you firmly believe that “design” equals your logo, website, and the essential visual goodies, then you are terribly wrong. Design is above and beyond the “basic” stuff in this information era.

What is the sole purpose of this “design” then? Well, for starters, it is the bridge that connects you to your customers and is a confidence booster too. You will be considered a novice if you hold the belief that design is all about using stunning images and cool graphics. When it comes to design in marketing, there is more than what meets the eye.

Why the need for sync?

You have a great marketing team, they prepare a stunning pitch(according to you) and it fails terribly in the real world. Similarly, you have a great design team, they too prepare a stunning design(again according to you), this time it will be the design team who will taste the bitter failure.

How about you make collaboration between the two teams, then you have a strong new “team” with individual characteristics that will “work” in the real world scenario.

The important 3 benefits of having a great marketing graphic design.

The important 3 benefits of having a great marketing graphic design.

1.   Increased conversions:

Customers want your products to be served to them. If your design and/or pitch is way too complicated, your potential customer will not go the extra mile to decipher it and understand the value of the product.

However, a design combined with the pitch or a pitch visualized by a design will put an instant interest in your potential customer. Once you have their attention, the rest of the marketing designs will reel them in.

To put this into perspective let us look at a rather interesting comparison. Take a look at the image below.

The image signifies the importance of maintaining engagement with your audience the whole time. A rather blunt “continue” looks really shady over the “continue to step 3” which is more specific. Also, the microcopy ensures the customer that “things will not go wrong”.

A marketing team alone would give you the textual content and a design team will give you the blunt continue button. The end result will be the CTA button on the right. However, both teams working in sync will give you a CTA button which looks like the one on the right.

2.   Building trust:

Customers are always skeptical about buying your product because they do not want to spend their hard-earned money on a product they think is worthless.

It is here that trust-building plays a lead role. Maybe, clarifying your policies about the product like the return policy will give them confidence and will make them “try-out” your product.

Also, people are conscious about the detailing that go into a product description so that should be considered as well, but a wall poster of your users manual will not help, so you need marketing design that can speak to your audience every important thing and gain their trust.

3.   What does the customer get?

When someone spends money on something they expect their money’s worth or more. So, if you are able to communicate that “worth” to your customer, voila, you have made every viewer a customer.

So you should focus on incentivization. What benefits does the customer get if they purchase your product is a question that matters to them. You might feel that “the better the incentive the better your sales are going to be”, however, the better the incentive and the best way you present it will convert not the first one alone.

Awesome tips to make a marketing design that will convert!

1. Simplicity and cleanliness:

Let us say that your product has yet to become a “brand”. In such a scenario, go for a simple, clean, and diverse design with the ideal pitch. This will help you build trust in your initial stages of expansion.

The general rule of thumb here is that do not use too much graphic and/or textual content on your design element, say a banner for online advertisement. A “messy” banner will look shady especially if you are a new brand.

2. Contrast, use it wisely:

Your potential customer is browsing through the web searching for something unrelated to your product. When your banner is displayed in such an occasion, your design should be capable of distracting the customer and lure him/her into your banner or advert! And to do so you can make use of “contrast”.

What does it mean? Well, if your design blends really well with the web page or other adverts, then the chances that the customer will notice your advert are remote. Instead, if they look different and attractive, it will grab their attention. So basically you are getting a high rate of impression for the top bucks you are paying your advertiser. The conversion part is coming up.

Size, color, alignment, repetition, proximity, whitespace, and texture are some of the elements that will help you establish this contrast.

Image Credits

Some useful contrast tips→

1. If your aim is to put stress on a message, then make sure that it stands out from the rest of the elements on your design.

2. Subconsciously you want to impress your customer and bring your product under their conscious review. So when choosing the colors, go with colors that match the emotion of your product and its pitch.

3. The next important aspect that will determine the quality of your contrast is “alignment”.

4. Your banner, if it has an identity of its own then it is more likely to attract clicks, and to give your banner this “identity” you can use “repetition” optimally.

5. Too much information will tire your customers as the attention span they invest in an advert is extremely low.

6. Textures will invoke a sensation so when you need to use a brown do remember to go with a “dirt” design rather than putting the blunt brown background.

3. Do not use too many fonts:

With too many fonts you will drive your customers nuts! That is not something you want to do. Say if you are using an online design tool like Glorify, chances are you will be tempted to use the 100s of awesome fonts in a single banner.

Apps like Glorify come with templates for a reason. They make use of innovative design rules and generate the ideal font for the occasion, you will be better off sticking to suggestions that apps like Glorify give you.

If you still feel like using multiple fonts keep in mind that the best practice you can follow is to use at-most a pair of fonts, that too with minimum contrast, you need contrast from outside elements, not within internal components.

4. Experiment with font sizes:

Font sizes and formats will enable you to stick to the 3rd tip we just mentioned above. With this tip you can use a single font to communicate effectively, meaning that you can reduce internal contrast.

To emphasize important messages you can use a larger font, also you can experiment with font formats, like italics, bold, etc.

Here too, do not make a mess of your design, keep it clean and simple with the minimum amount of internal contrast.

5. Remember the brand guidelines and stick to it:

A unification and cohesiveness are important to keep your brand alive. While designing an advertisement element, you must remember that it is going to be your identity in the coming days, months, or years.

So if your present your customers with different and way contrasting designs, your adherence to a cause is questionable which will decrease the cohesiveness of your customers.

6. Color matters! It is a psychological thing:

Color is important in the design and that is why there is an entire study done on it. Commonly known as “color theory”, adhering to its standards will prove beneficial to your marketing design strategies.

Art and science make a perfect union in “color theory”.

7. Timing is important:

When is the best time to let your campaign fly? The best time could be a holiday, even the minor ones.

How do they work? Well you get great user interaction and engagement during holidays that are related to your product.

While targeting holidays you must always keep in mind the need for the theme of your holiday and your product, they should match, obviously!

8. Lines will be your lifeline:

Long, short, curved, dotted, non-dotted, straight,  horizontal, vertical, diagonal, solid, dashed, thick, or thin, lines are very versatile tool for making your design more competent.

Let us look at some quick tips on how lines can help improve your design.

1. You can draw a boundary between elements to distinct them from adjacent elements to increase cohesiveness and highlight important data.

2. Textures can be simulated by use of lines with different designs.

3. We often say “eye-catching design”. If we take a closer look at these designs there will always be one element common to these designs and they are lines!

4. Curved lines can give your design a dynamic look.

5. Varying dimensions of these lines help to make a statement.

Final Words!

Marketing design can be a tedious task. If you have a dedicated team for designing your product you may not feel the need for a tool as such. However, you could gift your design team with Glorify to speed up their design jobs giving them a flexible working experience.

If you are a small enterprise, chances are you are working alone initially, here too Glorify can save the day by offering pre-prepared design templates, 1000s of free stock images without copyright issues, several design elements, 100s of great fonts, and much more.

Always stick to a good tool in both cases. Glorify has personal and enterprise plans at awesome deals. Also, there is a cardless 14-day trial for you to find if your team and you yourself are in sync with this awesome tool.

Marketing Design:FAQs:

1) What is the benefit of marketing designs?

Marketing designs essentially collaborate with the pitching team and your design team to produce 6 times the results.

2) Will we see a hike in sales courtesy of marketing design?

Definitely, because marketing design enhances the visual appearance and this will result in more customer interaction, then your product and its charisma will result in an increased amount of sales.

3) Which type of audience will engage with marketing design?

The answer is “all of them”. The catch is how you design your advert will be the factor that determines the demographics of your customer. And no advert is ideal for everyone. So you have to improvise and make an advert for everyone without losing your cohesion with your brand.

4) Is marketing design costly?

It depends on your approach to spending your funds. Online design tools like Glorify can considerably reduce design costs. There are individual as well as enterprise editions of Glorify.

5) Won’t repeating designs online will reduce customer cohesion?

Yes, repeated designs will tire out the customer and will generate a negative emotion towards your advert and product in the long run.

6) How can we not annoy customers with repeated adverts?

The simple solution is to shuffle your advertisement campaigns across the different audiences and using multiple designs without losing cohesion to your brand.

7) Google is banning my ad, why?

Companies like Google are very strict about copyright protection, so the possible reason is that your ad element may have violated a copyright content policy. To avoid such confusing bans, we recommend that you use trustworthy design platforms like Glorify.

8) How can I edge ahead of my competition in marketing design?

By using the best designs possible and doing them within the shortest of time limits. Both these can be achieved by using the awesome tool called Glorify.

9)How much of a product satisfaction can we retain from marketing design ads?

Product satisfaction normally occurs after a sale. However, with intuitive marketing design, you can advertise the incentives of your products beforehand and generate a virtual product satisfaction before the customer even buys the product.

10) Will captions prove effective in marketing design?

Captions will enhance the textual coherence with spending very few words. This can help to keep your design very simple and clean.

11) Can marketing design be used on different platforms?

Sure they can be used on different platforms. Basically it is a well thought out design, you can advertise it on the web to a moving city bus.

12) I have no design team and no design experience, should I hire an advertising agency?

In this digital era, you do not need much experience to create an awesome advertisement based on marketing design. Tools like Glorify can help you design such elements way cheaper than an advertising agency.

13) Is adding my business location feasible on marketing design?

It is very good that you add a location to your marketing design, if you have a website, which you must have, add its link too.

14) How can I add my location and contact details in a simple and non-intrusive way?

The best way to add more info without eating into your design is by using a dynamic QR code. These codes can contain information like location, links to websites or online stores, etc.

15) I have a lot of partner businesses, can I use them on by marketing design?

This is a matter of internal affairs and you will have to check with your partners, also it is better to keep marketing design free from partners and provide a link to your website via a QR code where you can detail your partnership.

16) What is the future of marketing design?

Marketing design has a great future and as a result, you need to secure your position because an increasing number of businesses both online and offline are getting into marketing design, it is important that you secure your future in marketing design by adapting to it as soon as possible.