How to Use Graphic Design in Marketing to Communicate Successfully

Think graphic design in marketing isn’t a factor? Think again! Learn how to use graphic design to drive your marketing strategy effectively.

Graphic design plays a huge role in your marketing plan ranging from message delivery to user experience. Read on to learn how to use graphic design in marketing.

If you have a business, then you must know that graphic design in marketing is essential to finding sales success.

Strong graphic design for your website paired with the right marketing tools will help your business stand out in the crowd. Graphic design is the marriage between skill and science and it will help your brand shine, make your brand memorable, and convert potential consumers into actual customers.

Our guide below will show you how to use graphic design in marketing to help your business thrive.

1. Use the Right Tools and Resources

To ensure your business has success with graphic design in marketing, then take advantage of resources available to help you succeed.

You may be the best at what you do, but that doesn’t mean that you’re prepared to single-handedly take on every aspect of business marketing strategy and that includes graphic design in marketing. What you can do is use some high-quality tools to help you increase your your understanding of how best to reach your consumers and boost your sales.

Here’s a List of some of THE BEST online tools to help guide you:

Quick Sprout – The Complete Guide to Building Your Personal Brand

Forbes – 6 Steps to Decoding Your Target Audience

Canva Color Palette Generator – The Easiest Place to Define Color Palettes

Canva Create Designs – Design Professional Media Online

Font Squirrel – Free Fonts for Design

Pixabay – Free Stock Photos Online

Hubspot – Free Online Marketing Ad Spend Calculator

The Right Team – Why Should I Hire a Professional Marketing Agency

There are definitely a LOT of great tools out there to help you build your brand and define your marketing strategy, but truth be told nothing trumps expertise that is earned by years of hands on experience. Companies like Pixel Productions can help you utilize graphic design to build a brand for your business that will truly help you achieve the success that you are looking for.

Professional design and marketing companies are equipped to help you communicate directly to your audience through design and prevent you from making any graphic design mistakes that could detour potential customers from becoming actual customers.

2. Typography

Typography is the essence of clear communication, but is also much more than that; it will be the voice of your brand. It evokes the mood, character, tonality, and intention for your business, which influences your overall personality. Your typography should be as clear and consistent as your marketing strategy.

Typography can be quite influential on your visitors! The first thing that typography does is draw people in and express a general feeling about the content that a user is about to read.

Your typography needs to come across strong in all channels, especially for mobile devices. You will need to ensure that it connects with your audience, no matter the circumstances, and communicate what you’re trying to send out.

 

3. Contrast

Successful graphic design takes advantage of contrast.

Contrast emphasizes what is important to you for your audience. When you have to have the right amount of contrast between visuals and whitespace for overall visual quality it makes your website and marketing materials more interesting and engaging to your consumer.

Consider contrasting size, value, color, and type when you are designing for your brand.

This Sephora Ad does a great job of utilizing contrast in color and imagery to guide the eye, communicate a message and motivate an action. This is a great example of how graphic design should work in marketing your products.

 

4. Color Theory

Color theory is another aspect of graphic design in marketing that impacts the sales funnel.

Color theory isn’t just a theory – when applied to marketing it’s about understanding the role that color plays in psychology. A little more to the point; how color affects your customers’ decision making. The colors you pick to represent your brand may indeed be pleasing, but are they motivating the response you want?

Using color theory in marketing psychology is a course unto itself and since I’m covering the use of multiple graphic design principles used in marketing such as; landing pages, ads, logo, art, and other marketing tool for your business .

 

 

5. Adopting a Minimalist Approach

As a general rule for applying graphic design to your business marketing strategy, take a more minimalist approach to thrive.

We’ve all heard the old “less is more” adage, but many companies understand the power that a minimalist approach to marketing has on the consumer.
There is so much clutter in both the retail environment as well as online, it’s almost impossible to be seen or heard no matter how good or compelling your product or message is. Sometime the best course of action isn’t to ramble on about how cool your product is or what it can do. It’s way too hard to get people to stick around for your whole pitch.

 

 

6. Brand Recognition

You want your graphic design to further the recognition of your business, to separate you from your competitors.

Brand recognition is the culmination of design, marketing message, usability & customer service.

Brand recognition may start with a logo and accrue by keeping marketing messages uniform on all media channels to deliver consistently and effectively, but really brand recognition is the culmination of design, marketing message, usability & customer service.

Branding through graphic design is what will shape the message delivery that will help you connect with consumers. How successful you are at communicating with your audience is what will shape your brand recognition.

Lewis N. Clark is a great example of a company who has successfully built brand recognition as a leader in travel and outdoor gear. Everything from their logo to their beautiful photography and messaging support their objective of supplying the best gear to those interested in travel and outdoor activities. Their customers support their claim that it is, “the best gear to get you there”.

This is an important distinction; having a brand strategy to focus your graphic design and marketing message will keep you from putting the cart before the horse.

 

 

7. Mobile-Friendly Landing Page Optimization

Today, graphic design isn’t just the art of arranging graphics, text and space — it’s the art of user experience and that means mobile-friendly design.

Sure making your website mobile-friendly will help you rank higher in search results, but more importantly graphic design applied to websites will guide your consumers, motivate actions, increase sales and generate leads.
Ecommerce is one area that we can very clearly see exactly how graphic design is used in marketing directly to the consumer.
Check this out:

1. Design for Navigation – Responsive, clean design to guide the consumer.
2. Design to Motivate an Action – Color, text, design = actionable message delivery.
3. Reinforced Incentives & CTA’s – Reinforce calls-to-action with messaging that matters.
4. Funnel Traffic Effectively – If you haven’t noticed… it’s about getting customers where they need to be.
5. Feature Incentives & Drive Sales – pick & promote items you know your customers will love.
6. Delivering Useful Content – shaping and delivering content that keeps your customers coming back.
7. Generate Leads – Every landing page should allow you to collect customer information.
8. Build Trust – Allow your customers to feel good about purchasing with you online.

 

Test out your design to see how it transfers over to other devices.
Make it responsive, for consumers, with:

Viewports
404 for Users
Interstitials
Accurate Loading Times
Equal Elements
Bold Font

Since smartphones are the future, keep your graphic design mobile-friendly and you will see success from mobile traffic.

 

 

8. The First Impression

Our last point of graphic design in marketing, which is to ensure that you make a great first impression.

Potential consumers will judge your business in a few seconds based on your graphic design, messaging and their experience.

It’s really a what they see is what you get type of scenario.

High-quality visuals will give your business credibility and authenticity to increase business and sales.

To make a great first impression, however, you must get into the mind of your consumers. You need to understand their problems, preferences, concerns, and financial situations to entice them.

Keep your design consistent, clear, and engaging just on the first glance. Build a cohesive identity to help you stand out among your competitors. This will help your overall marketing strategy and help your business find success.

Here are some interesting statistics that show us just how important your first impression is:

1) Given 15 minutes to consume content, two-thirds of people would rather read something beautifully designed than something plain. (Source: Adobe)

2) 39% of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long to load. (Source: Adobe)

3) 51% of people think “thorough contact information” is the most important element missing from many company websites. (Source: KoMarketing)

4) 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content/layout is unattractive. (Source: Adobe)

Utilize Graphic Design in Marketing Today

Strong graphic design can convert consumers, provide branding to your business, and spread your message to your audience. The graphic design process just like your overall marketing plane is all about strategy. Your business should focus on the goals they believe in and the people they are serving, before making any design decisions.

I hope that these graphic design and marketing tools assist you in building your brand recognition, but sometimes you may just find that a DIY approach isn’t nearly as beneficial as sitting down with a professional company, that specializes in design and marketing strategy. If you have questions, you can always reach out to me at Pixel Productions!

 

Source : 5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs An Unlimited Graphic Design Team