Back
If you’re involved in the creative industry, you might have probably heard the term, “Great Design is Invisible”.
Do you know what that means?
It means when something is designed perfectly, you hardly notice it and it’s easier to use.
A good design opens up valuable opportunities for your business. The design aspects of any business are often ignored but they can bring tremendous benefits if used correctly.
A good design can help you turn ordinary features into competitive benefits. It allows innovative marketing ideas and discovers customer’s needs and preferences.
What is Marketing Design?
Marketing design is all about communicating a brand’s value in a visually appealing way. All the marketing content you create must adhere to this design identity.
marketing and design must go hand in hand.
Marketing creates curiosity about your product, but the design experience is what makes them stay.
Even with this apparent reason, many businesses fail to blend their design and marketing.
A great marketing design goes beyond font, logos, and images. It is what bridges the gap between you and your customers.
Why Marketing Design is Important to your Business?
Many companies, especially in the beginning, are tempted to handle the marketing design part themselves. Their budgets don’t allow them to hire a design agency. But the benefits of hiring a design agency can be seen in the long term when businesses fall into the common pitfalls that poor design brings in.
Here are a few reasons why marketing design is important for your business.
Marketing Design Drives Sales Conversions
Every stage of your marketing design strategy is analyzed to see how it can help you drive sales. How can you make customers engage with your brand? How can you turn that engagement into sales? How to turn this sale into brand loyalty?
Beyond strategies, design is something that elicits an emotional response from the consumer. How your strategy flows, how the colors, fonts, images are used. What emotion does your brand promote? All these factors are important for sales conversions. You sell a lot when customers trust your brand, and a good marketing design is necessary to build that trust.
Design Makes your Product Standout
Your business is not only jostling for market space, but also for thousands of other things to get customer attention. Design helps you stand out from the crowd. Especially if your product provides services similar to your competitors’. Eye-catching, elegant and persuasive design makes your business stand out.
From social media feed, advertising banner to website navigation, design determines the success of all marketing collaterals. It’s important to keep uniformity throughout different marketing assets.
Design Elevates your Brand
A customer can tell the difference between a good design and a bad design. You only have a few seconds to convince your customer to stick around. A good design should leave customers wanting more. Imagine visiting a website for crucial information and you are welcomed with a cluttered design with no proper navigation. The user experience decides how long a customer wishes to stay with your brand.
Your design is a reflection of your company’s value. A professional, clean design creates confidence in the quality of your product.
How to Make Great Marketing Design a Part of your Business?
Marketing design deserves more attention than it usually gets. It is looked upon as the finishing touch when the entire campaign is designed. But design is more than just aesthetics. Marketing design includes the journey a prospect takes even before becoming your customer. What emotions would you want to evoke to make that happen?
Is it FOMO? Is it a promise of success?
Marketing design may also include discovering new ways to interact with your customers.
Here’s the 5 step process to implement design thinking in your marketing process.
1) Empathize: The first step of any marketing design process is to understand the user’s point of view. This phase helps you pinpoint the exact problem your customer is facing. To do this effectively, you’ll need to let go of your assumptions. This allows you to objectively consider what customers think about your brand.
Typical activities include general observations and qualitative analysis.
The qualitative analysis includes interviews, surveys with individual customers. Their experience with your brand can give you a good idea to pinpoint the problem.
2) Define: This phase includes putting together all the information you get during the first stage. Clustering all the information together gives you a common theme across different customers. This phase helps you define the problem statement. For a marketing design strategy to work, you need to make the problem statement and solution centered on your customers. For instance, your goal shouldn’t be to increase website traffic by 20% but to help the customer receive the product by following the least possible steps.
3) Ideate: Now that a problem is defined, you need to find solutions to address these problems. The initial stage includes all the possible ways you could solve the problem, irrespective of its feasibility. Gathering fresh ideas helps you consider distinct possibilities and synthesize the best approach.
The ideation stages take you from identifying the solution to forming a possible solution. The ideate phase is the most creative part of the marketing design process.
4) Prototype: This phase includes experimenting with possible solutions and the result it produces. The marketing design process includes a scaled-down version of your solution or a list of questionnaires to be tested against a selected group of individuals. For example, you can test different versions of your website structure and check what version works best. Based on the feedback, you keep improving the solution.
5) Test: Now all the steps come together and you test your marketing solution in the ultimate stage. You test the product with real users. It’s still an interactive stage. You gather feedback in real-time and make changes accordingly. You want to see what real people think about your idea at scale. You need to revisit the empathize stage and see if your solution solves the problem you wanted to solve.
Use Marketing Design to Attract New Customers
Design is a powerful tool to attract new customers and penetrate new markets.
A human-centric business uses marketing designing techniques such as user research to identify pain points that aren’t being currently met.
Design can also help you penetrate the foreign market with different technical standards. When the basics of your design processes are good, you can tailor the product to accommodate the need of a new market.
Alongside new businesses, it is also important to retain your current client base. With the human-centric design, you keep your customers happy and away from the competition.
An effective marketing design process helps you develop strategies that enhance the user experience. This way, your current client base feels their brand loyalty has been rewarded.
The user needs can change and hence the marketing design process helps you spot new trends and discover additional needs & new markets.
How to Maximize the Success of your Marketing Design Process
The reason people avoid talking about design is that it’s tough for most organizations to gather their thoughts and define a set procedure.
There are a wide range of factors that come into play.
First is the customer response. You must have noticed that a lot of factors depend on how a user responds to your solutions. So when you start your marketing design process, make sure you have a controlled audience group to help you test new ideas.
You need to consider additional factors while evaluating your marketing design process:
- Cost – What is the cost of testing new features? Is it feasible for you to conduct a thorough process?
- Timeline – Are you following a strict timeline? Are the deadlines being met? If not, why? Is it because of unrealistic expectations or lack of proper planning?
- Communication – Are you able to communicate your thoughts across the team? Designing involves a lot of different departments working together. A good communication process will help you avoid miscommunication.
The more specific your target is, the more benefits you can reap out of your project.
The Benefits of Marketing Design Process
Evidence suggests that businesses that implement the marketing design process are better off than those that ignore it.
A good design process can bring in a wide range of commercial benefits:
- An improved customer service
- A good marketing position compared to the competitors
- greater chance of customer loyalty
- Ability to create additional features and serve new customers
- Helps identify a unique selling point
Wrapping Up
Marketing design is the process of bringing your ideas to fruition. It can help you create competitive strategies and strengthen your marketing approach. Effective design makes your customer buy from you and not your competitors. A well-designed marketing design process helps you stand apart in the crowd.
Customers today are willing to pay more for well-designed products that offer them greater usability and functionality. Design can also help you cut costs that were usually spent on inefficient tasks.
