If there’s one field that relies heavily on visuals, it’s marketing. Marketing is about making sure that your product, service, or brand is attractive to the customers, and a key part of that is found in design. Taking a look through decades of advertising, you’ll find that marketing wasn’t just following design trends, but setting them, too.
The same holds true for modern marketing. With smartphones and websites being such a ubiquitous part of our daily lives, visual design is absolutely key in an effective marketing campaign. Marketers and businesses are constantly trying to outdo each other when it comes to the most effective and visually attractive materials. While not all businesses might have the big budgets required for huge campaigns, there are still several ways to make sure your marketing stands out from the crowd.
Link On and Off
In this new age of marketing, the gulf between digital and traditional marketing is no longer quite as large. In fact, companies are now taking omnichannel approaches, meaning that they’re aiming to capture customers both offline and online, and using techniques that link both. Offline marketing materials can often be used to supplement or even direct customers to your online sites. Direct mail marketing, for example, is a great tool that can be used to retarget old customers and engage new ones.
If you’re making use of an omnichannel approach, you need to ensure that there’s visual cohesion in online and offline materials.
Novelty is also a huge factor that might boost your results. Marketing experts Triadex Services recommend using plastic postcards, for example, which can quickly capture customers’ attention. You can also use relevant promotional materials like pens, notepads, or more to make sure the message is hammered home.
Design for Mobile
Another thing businesses should be thinking about when it comes to designing marketing campaigns is whether or not those campaigns are optimized for mobile.
There are over 2 billion smartphone users in the world today, and that number is quickly climbing. Smartphone use has become essential in daily life, so it only stands to reason that marketing should be taking advantage of that.
In an old article entitled ‘Designing with Your Customers in Mind’, we talked a little bit about what goes into designing an effective mobile site.
You should be looking at the purpose of your site, ensuring that the color scheme and font are appropriate, and testing if your website build is attractive and convenient for mobile. Even if you have a tried and tested desktop website design, you need to make sure your mobile version is just as good or even better.
Constantly updating your design and content is also good for Google analytics, and might even help boost your stats further.
Engage Visually
One of the key points for modern marketing is that you should be able to engage your customers at a glance.
When it comes to visual marketing, companies now take an approach that makes use of images, videos, websites, and other multimedia content.
When adopting a design to a medium, marketers need to ensure that that piece of media is informative, engaging, and shareable. Thus, it’s no surprise why methods like video marketing have become so popular in recent years.
Expandify Marketing Co-founder Jonathan Durante explains video’s appeal in three points: it captures attention quickly, optimizes advertising spend, and on social media platforms can be used to retarget viewers depending on viewing habits.
Video marketing is just one of many marketing tools that make use of visuals to keep customers interested, but it’s certainly one of the most effective.
