Words alone aren’t going to reel your customers in – human are visual creatures and memorable graphics are often necessary to make an impression.
Design is often overlooked by many businesses – no matter the industry. Whether it’s a product launch, a logo reveal or the announcement of a joint venture, design is a small thing which plays a huge role in appealing to the masses. Here’s how you can use design to improve your marketing strategy.
Beat your competition
Before you can beat out your competitors, you must first identify their strengths and weaknesses. Do their marketing campaigns seem piecemeal and uncoordinated? Is their copy often rife with errors? Are they approaching, say, young twenty-something first-jobbers with an advertising tone that might be more congruous with forty-something C-suite types? Sit down with a creative agency of your choice and identify the weak points in your rivals’ online strategies or keep an eye out for market segments that could provide opportunities for entry.
Once you’ve done that, begin designing (or re-designing your brand identity) Case in point? American Express. AMEX has been around for awhile – since the 1850s, to be precise – but this hasn’t stopped them from appealing to the younger generation with their quirky animation videos. After all, the 20-somethings of today are the high rollers of tomorrow. American Express knows exactly how to spice things up – even with subjects as boring as personal finance.
Career opportunities for financial services only? Scratch that – there’s more than meets the eye at American Express.
Promotes your business
Whether it’s a service or product, good design will bring your business to life.
But you might think that a start-up specializing in say, biomedical sciences has no need for a sexy website because that’s not your core business. In fact, you might think “if you are good, they will come”.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Source: Etsy
Advertising is always aimed at a human audience. You aren’t selling to robots capable of parsing data for hours on end in search of information demonstrating that you’ve got a superior product. In fact, the products that do best in the market aren’t always the best products.
Take Etsy, for instance. They’re an e-commerce website but you wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at the images below:
Rather than just summarizing their core values in a couple of sentences, they chose an illustration style that charms with its hand-drawn shapes, freehand lines and lack of flourish to create approachability. This contrasts sharply with the clean lines and angular shapes of most corporate style.
What’s in a picture? Information conveyed, without uttering a single word!
If you’re neglecting visual design, you’re neglecting a very important touchpoint.
Drives conversion rates
Getting hits on your website is a very paltry first step towards getting conversions.
The only way to increase your bottom line is to convince your visitors to click on the purchase button beside your products or services. Even if you have an amazing product with a reasonable price tag, you need to present it well on your website.
Here’s where design comes in! How well your marketing material flows and gets itself across to customers, the visuals used to build a connection with your brand, the colours, shapes and graphics all contribute to the feel of your business.
Just look at how Gatorade did their ad – in honour of Usain’s Bolt hard work and determination, Gatorade decided to put together a 7-minute clip of his life story. In fact, we couldn’t really tell it was an ad till we reached the end.
Makes your marketing strategy as clear as day
Putting thought into design enhances marketing & sales, making words and information clearer and easier to decipher for customers.
Put it this way – you’re not going to generate a lot of buzz by overwhelming someone with jargon. Why? Technical terms really aren’t that sexy.
You need to come up with creative and appealing visual metaphors and analogies to phrase things in terms that the man on the street can understand. An explainer video, story-telling piece, product launch – all these are perfect for catching the attention of the audience.
Just take a look at what Oreo did – they twisted the stories of famous fairytales like Red Riding Hood and ‘evil’ beings such as the vampire. Everything became bright, cheerful and pleasant in an instant.
A cookie powerful enough to turn bad beings good. That’s pretty heady stuff there.
Conclusion:
Your marketing strategy, website or any other product or service would fare a lot better with pictures and videos.
Wordy content is either going to bore your audience to death or leave them confused. Lucky for you – design is here to save the day! So, have a reliable video animation company by your side to condense information into pictures and you’ll have nothing to worry about.
