Graphic design, while practiced by many, is often misunderstood especially in the business and marketing worlds. That’s because a lot of people believe it simply refers to visual marketing, particularly through images. But that’s only a small part of the, quite broad, concept.
It’s unfortunate too because graphic design is an instrumental component of creating captivating digital marketing campaigns. What’s more, it’s integral to creating all kinds of materials including social media content, blogs, and news articles, websites, and even company branding.
The next question is what kind of benefits practicing graphic design can bring marketing teams? What rewards can you reap by doing so?
Earns You More Attention
When you see vibrant graphics it seizes your attention even if only for a moment. That’s precisely what graphic design can offer your marketing content and materials. It deals with not just the images, photos, or artistic elements, but also fonts, backgrounds, fixtures — like dividers or borders — and much more. The prevailing idea behind graphic design is that you need to have some parallels or themes behind all of the imagery you use. Doing so, not only gives a stronger message, and a more rewarding experience but ties everything together nicely, not unlike a coherent content marketing strategy.
If a user was given just 15 minutes to look at the content, they would much rather read satisfyingly designed material than something plain. People like well-designed content a whole lot more, and that earns it more attention. More attention and more eyes on your marketing is better for campaign performance, sales, and beyond.
Helps You Communicate Better
It is often said that, in marketing, you are always trying to tell a story to your audience. The materials, whether adverts or blogs or something in between, are how you communicate and share that tale. As an extension of that idea, graphic design helps you improve that line of communication and allows you to express the message much more freely. What’s more, visuals are an excellent way to overcome language or cultural barriers. So, when you’re creating materials for a worldwide audience, as opposed to a localized area, the design specs permeate through the many different versions. Sometimes, you don’t even need to create separate materials per region because the design can be easily interpreted or understood.
Thanks to research by iScribbler, we know that visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text, and it also takes people twice as long to process and recognize words. By extension, graphic design definitely helps you, as a marketer, communicate much better with your audience(s).
Makes Your Brand Desirable
Stepping away from graphic design for a moment to focus on general design, consider Apple’s tech products. They are some of the most attractively designed, delightful to use, and high-end products in the field. A lot of it is because they are presented that way, and are designed to be that way through the visuals, exterior elements, and underpinnings. Even Apple’s logo changed from a rainbow-hued apple to a much more sophisticated and seamless silver. That is great design, and it’s also an excellent example of how to conduct a graphic design strategy.
Like general design, graphic design can make your brand more desirable. It’s true of all materials from books and print ads to product packaging and even plastic rewards or gift cards. In fact, 19% of consumers say a gift card’s image or design frequently sways their decision to purchase one card brand over another. They will actively choose one card because the design is more captivating and intuitive. Wow!
Gives the Material Feeling
Words can be very colorful when they are used eloquently, but not everyone resonates with text, especially in business and marketing. Visuals, on the other hand, like photos, art, and other graphics, provoke strong emotional responses. In this way, they give marketing content a feeling and create a much more memorable experience for the audience. It complements text content well too, to build up that experience to immeasurable heights.
Imagine a beautiful, high-resolution photo of a strawberry, for example. You can see the deep red of the fruit’s surface with a clear view of the seeds, imperfections, and absolute ripeness. You can almost taste something like that just by looking at the image. But what if you were to pair it with descriptive text to swirl those thoughts and feelings around a bit? It would effectively lock some of those ideas, and the experience, into the audience’s mind. It’s subtle, yet effective, and that’s precisely how successful marketing works. You pair up all of the elements or components to create a multi-level design experience, and that’s something that can only be achieved through graphic design.
Adds Value
Websites are not rare, nor are many marketing materials, blogs, social content, and so on. So, if you really want to make your mark with today’s audiences, you need to stand out. Having mediocre content, or a passable website is not going to add any value in the long run.
Graphic design can help all of those things stand out, especially a website. And in a world where there are so many website builders with brands and business owners all using very similar templates, it’s really not all that difficult to stand out, but it is difficult to stand out for the right reasons.
You will have to pay more for graphic design experts, and invest more time in creating materials and properties, but that all comes back as pure value. Your customers and your audience are going to react to the design creating both goodwill and word-of-mouth marketing channels.
According to the Design Management Institute (DMI), for ten years between 2004 and 2014, design-driven companies outperformed the S&P Index by 228%. Graphic design adds astronomical value to digital marketing materials and properties.
A Proper Union: Graphic Design and Marketing
While there are many benefits to utilizing, understanding, and following graphic design principles in both marketing and business, many people are already using it regularly. That’s because graphic design isn’t just about visuals like photos or artistic content, it’s about everything related to the visual side of design, especially digital materials. It’s in the fonts, the colors, the imagery, and everything in between.
Understanding graphic design makes your work stronger, more evocative, more eye-catching, and often more successful. The statistics are there to prove it too!
This article was originally published on SocPub.