Are you planning on launching a marketing initiative soon? While you may have worked on all the aspects of the campaign from the audience targeting, copy, to the brand, but you may not have put enough work into the actual design. This is a common mistake that is made in many companies due to the desire to minimize spending on other aspects of a campaign that isn’t marketing. Design in marketing is important for several reasons as it impacts marketing in many ways.
For example, web design can have a strong influence on conversions. Everything from improving user interface and user experience, by changing the layout, rearranging the action points, and presenting visuals in a unique way can produce small lifts in conversions. Sometimes, testing designs may only result in a small increase in conversions. But when you experiment with multiple elements and figure out what other elements improve conversions. The small increments add up to a respectable figure that significantly impacts your bottom line, that is complete UI/UX design exercise comes in.
Another example is design’s impact on content marketing. Many companies use content marketing to engage their target audience with valuable articles, videos, blog posts, social posts, etc. But the text by itself can only do so much in getting a user’s attention. The design must facilitate engagement when it comes to content. You’ve probably experienced instances where you dismissed a great piece of content because it didn’t look visually appealing only to come back to it later after hearing praise about it.
A popular type of content that demonstrates how important design is in content marketing is infographics. Companies found out that infographics are incredibly viral because they are visually appealing. It’s the visual presentations that makes users want to learn more about what it’s about and continue to consume the content until the very end. And it’s the same type of visual presentation that makes a company’s brand appealing.
Branding has always been about imagery, but companies have gotten away with minimal investment into online brand design for a very long time. Today, you cannot simply overlook the importance of design in online branding. You have to remember that users are always 2-3 clicks away from your competitors. If your design doesn’t communicate what makes you unique and why your brand offers an advantage, then you’ll end up getting ignored and lose a customer to the brand that has invested into their brand design.
The visual elements and the way a website is designed is vital to communicating your brand’s message. If you are trying to communicate quality and luxury, you must convey that with the visual presentation and imagery on your site. The design will reinforce your message and help evoke an emotional response from the user. A unique logo and catchy text alone cannot do an effective enough of a job in communicating your intended message anymore. You need to stand out from the crowd with unique imagery and presentation.
No matter what your marketing initiative is focused on, it’s important that you really invest in your design. Design is every bit as much of a cog in a wheel as all the other aspects in a marketing campaign. You’d be surprised at how much of an impact it makes to the success of a marketing campaign if you’d actually bothered to test and track the results of different designs.