The purpose of graphic design is not only to make something look good but also to organize information to make a message as impactful as possible. In a well-established package, the message hits its target when it combines the right image, an impactful headline, and a professionally written message. There is a prevalent misconception that good graphic design is about great visuals and looking “cool.” Though aesthetics are paramount to digital marketing, quality graphic design takes things a step further and solves customers’ problems by increasing conversions, eliminating pain points, and reducing friction.
Graphic designers provide online businesses with consistent visual identities. Beyond logo development, they create a recognizable and uniform visual identity for future design projects, advertising, and marketing collateral. A target audience will recognize a brand from its digital presence, and graphic design fulfills an important role in developing one for your company.
What Is Graphic Design in Marketing?
In marketing, graphic design helps companies promote their products or services through visual materials. Website design, brochure design, and product packaging are all examples of this. Marketing graphic design is primarily concerned with building brands and establishing relationships with customers. Having a visually appealing design and clearly conveying the company’s message is key.
The human brain processes visuals 60 000 times faster than text, so landing pages and content marketing infused with strategic graphic designs are vital, especially since 93% of all human communication is visual. In addition, 94% of customers have said they would quit visiting a website with poor graphic design, regardless of the industry.
How does graphic design add value?
A company’s brand perception and awareness can be increased through graphic design. This will eventually lead to a higher level of customer loyalty. There are a number of internal elements that contribute to the professional value and make work easier or easier for your team members. Signage, posters, manuals, etc. are just some of them. It enhances the pride of your workers, helps them win respect from customers and competitors, and creates a sense of community on a personal level as well.
Advantages of Consistent Digital Marketing Design
Good graphic design can lead to increased sales for your business because of higher visibility. Your brand will be more visible, credible, and appealing with attractive visuals. The more traffic, the more opportunities there are.
Recognizable Branding
When graphic design is consistent, it creates a powerful first impression that commands the attention of target audiences, reinforces brand awareness, and improves cohesiveness across ad campaigns and channels. A brand’s image is dependent on its logo, website design, product packaging, advertising content, and social media collateral, of which graphic design plays an integral part.
Digital marketing and graphic design is a powerful duo. Perhaps the best example of a distinct brand identity distilled to its essence is the business logo. Take the Apple logo, for example. It is simple and elegant (like the company’s software and hardware designs) and reflects the brand’s values by triggering the right associations.
More than that, visual branding conveys the tone of your brand, evokes specific feelings in audiences, and communicates a company’s overarching message. We recognize our friends and family by their familiar faces; recognizable branding works the same way. When customers come to identify a brand, they are more likely to purchase new products because visual branding has helped build familiarity, AKA trust.
But branding is more than just finding the right logo. It crafts a personality that amplifies a brand or organization’s DNA. Great graphic design leaves an influential impression on customers long after they’ve seen Instagram stories, navigated a website, or made a purchase. Developing recognizable branding helps shape this impression. So, ultimately, when we speak of branding, we’re considering the entire customer experience.
Improved User Experience
The Digital Marketing Institute posits user experience is “key to facilitating conversations and helping [businesses] become a glistening needle in a giant (and vastly oversubscribed) digital haystack.” Confusion and clutter are failures of design. In digital marketing, visual content must be clear, concise, and accessible to your target audience without compromise.
For instance, a well-planned website or social media account draws, interacts, and transforms users. It’s challenging to create a mobile-friendly web design without implementing high-quality UX and graphic designs. A graphic designer will consider a user’s perspective, information hierarchy, alignment, color, and scale to signal importance.
In a Google study that attempted to interpret aesthetic judgments regarding the impression of websites, researchers learned that designs with negative space are highly appealing and more likely to grab attention than cluttered designs. But it’s not just websites. Content marketing demands increased efforts in accompanying visual aid such as infographics and curated social media posts.
Therefore, graphic design is both aesthetic and functional, intertwined and interdependent. Conversion-generating graphic design is where form meets function. Essentially, a function is a purpose for which a design is developed. Graphic design is the visual communication of information to attract and convert leads into customers.
Better Off-Site Engagement
Up to 90% of customers engage with brands off-site. In digital marketing, off-site content refers to any content a business owns or controls that is not published or living on its primary website. This content assumes several forms such as social media accounts, guest blogs, content created via influencers, press releases distributed through third-party sites, or client case studies.
It’s as simple as this: Good, thematic graphics make customers more likely to engage with paid ads and email campaigns, for example. Search engine optimization is frequently referenced as a strategy to improve engagement, but graphic design is also of importance. You can deliver high-quality products, but if the majority of your advertisements are unappealing, warm leads won’t convert, and only loyal customers will understand your value.
Content that’s hard on the eyes (text-heavy and dense) won’t get engagement. For example, web pages and articles without any images receive 94% fewer views than articles with at least one visual. Even for non-visual content types such as podcasts, well-designed marketing materials can help reach more potential customers and drive increased impressions. Gimlet Media’s show icons are a good example of this.
Other studies show Facebook posts get 2.3 times more engagement when there’s an image, and Twitter posts get 150% more tweets. Image-orientated platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat necessitate strong graphic design, which should be incorporated into online marketing efforts. Those without financial resources can use software like Canva to create basic visual assets.
Facebook posts get 2.3 times more engagement when there’s an image, and Twitter posts get 150% more tweets.
Gets to the Point
In an epoch of visual culture, it’s no surprise studies show people recall 65% of the visual content they see up to three days later but only remember about 10% of written content they’ve read. This indicates they’re more likely to remember design elements than written information, and sometimes, this is all that’s needed to improve sales.
Perfume ads remain an excellent example of this. They produce a powerful message through evocative imagery with little text. In this sense, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Recently, the Korean fragrance L’Absence ran a mobile-first Instagram and Facebook ads campaign, which achieved a 4.3% increase in purchase intent.
Think about it like this: Let’s say you wanted to convey competitive insights about a case study. What do you think potential customers would prefer? Reading a text or viewing an attractive infographic? Moreover, which do you think would work better?
If part of your digital marketing strategy is to communicate key pieces of information in such a way that you outperform the competition, then make sure you hire graphic designers to format information in a visual way. Key takeaways are best communicated with a graph, chart, or image. The usage of visual aids is super important for fostering positive lasting impressions.
Improved Sales
Effective graphic design can enable a business to attain greater visibility, resulting in increased sales. Eye-catching visuals, clear communication of ideas, heightened visibility, and improved credibility can attract more attention to your brand, ultimately driving more traffic. As traffic grows, so do opportunities for your business.
Graphic design influences on a visceral level. An Adobe State of Create report found 59% of respondents would choose a particular product or service over their competitors based on good design, with 45% of them confessing they would pay more for a better-looking product or service. Another report, Accenture Strategy’s Design In Business, discovered companies with well-designed advertisements get a 12% return on their design-related investments.
The UK Design Council also learned companies that view design as integral to their digital marketing plan don’t have to compete on price as much as others. Meaning that the way things look becomes a primary determining factor, not just which product is cheaper. Of course, this depends on LSMs, but it is insightful for luxury brands, for instance, where consumers who possess unlimited buying power are less deterred by the price and rather quality and the perceived elitism.
companies with well-designed advertisements get a 12% return on their design-related investments.
Better Lead Generation
Graphic design can be applied to print media, billboards, social media, email marketing, websites, and paid media campaigns. It’s the perfect creative tool for overcoming geographical barriers and reaching customers wherever they are. In the “Experience Economy,” we measure design in terms of “purchase influence” and emotional impact.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 7 out of 10 content marketers attribute the importance of graphic design to their business success. Particularly B2B marketers, who use multiple types of graphics to promote their products, nurture leads, and build loyalty. Something as simple as using color psychology and designing call-to-action buttons that stand out on landing pages can make a significant impact.
Getting your user to click on your call-to-action button is the central purpose of any landing page. The CTA should stand out at a glance, even if the user is scrolling through quickly. That means contrasting colors rather than complementary ones for the all-important CTA button! In fact, 43% of websites have a clear call-to-action button that takes users 3 seconds or less to see.
Conclusion
Graphics are a digital storefront window for big and small businesses that no company can do without. Effective and creative graphic design engages with customers, builds brand awareness, and influences the customer decision-making process. From a blog post to a business card, web design, and more, creative graphic design imbues brands with a competitive edge.
At Comrade Digital Marketing Agency, we offer full web design development and digital marketing strategy for a range of businesses. We are always up-to-date with the latest trends and shifts in consumer behavior; our experienced team of strategists and designers is here to implement a graphic design that grows revenue. For a free consultation, click here.
Frequently Asked Questions
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