The Importance of Design to Your Digital Marketing Efforts

More than a decade ago, when talking about design in marketing, your mind may jump to paper brochures, flyers, billboards, or other forms of print marketing. During and after the pandemic, more businesses are starting to migrate to digital marketing. This accounts for almost 50% of all advertising and media spending in 2020, which will keep on increasing as time goes by. 

As the medium of communication changes, so do the design requirements. Skills such as video editing, animated post design, creating online display ads, and others, are only recently required. Not just that, innovations in the digital world are as quick as lightning, which is why upskilling is almost a daily venture for professional graphic designers. 

However, before you choose to commit to creating great designs, let us convince you with 5 reasons why a good design really does matter to your digital marketing efforts. 

Appeal to Most of the Population

Fun fact – 65% of the population are visual learners! This means that they learn and remember best when the information is communicated visually. A good, proportional, and concise design with a good color palette can pique their interest and allow them to better grasp the information. Contrastingly, a messy, unclear, and bland design may appall them and block their desire to learn more about the information offered. Therefore, to make sure your business does not lose 65% of the population or more, give extra attention to how you package your content through design. 

Improve Your Audience Engagement Levels 

Facebook posts that include a graphic receive 2.3 times more engagement, which is important because more than 80% of businesses award their most effective marketing platform to Facebook. However, keep in mind that this is only true if the graphics you use are relevant, visually appealing, and artistically make sense. 

Liking, commenting, sharing, and saving your posts are indications that the audience is engaged and they find your posts valuable enough to react to them. Other important factors of audience engagement on social media are the posts’ captions, main messages, and relevance. Packaging your posts with good design is just the tip of the iceberg, very important but not the be-all or end-all of your posts’ engagement levels.

Good Design Creates Lasting Impression

Believe it or not, your audience can tell if your business has put in great effort in content production. When all your content is creative, different, and does stand out, they are more likely to validate your industry expertise and trust the information you put out. This will build rapport over time, and even if your audience may not be needing your products and services at this moment, they are more likely to remember your brand in the future. 

Audience Will Feel Understood 

If you have paired your designs and captions with message relevance, then you should see one of these two results – increased or decreased audience engagement levels. Audience targeting is the deciding factor between the two possible outcomes. This is because no one brand can induce every single audience with feelings of relatedness. Each brand has its own unique message, values, and persona that will attract similar audiences. 

You can induce calm, joy, frustration, energy, strength, and other feelings or emotions through design. If you have successfully targeted your audience pool, they will feel understood and can capture your message perfectly via your designs or content packaging. 

Content design aside, this is why it is important to also target the right audience, as great content will only reap a little benefit when presented to the wrong audience. 

Visuals Surpass Language Barriers 

“A picture is worth a thousand words,” would you agree? 

If you are a small business catering to different audience groups with multiple languages, creating a single universal graphic or post design that can be understood by your diverse audience may have just granted you flying colors on your next budget report. 

A crucial thing to keep in mind is to know the limits and boundaries of your design. This means that if a translation is needed, you may need to allocate a budget. Not all graphics can be understood without any translation, but if you have the skills and creativity to design one, that’s a job well done!

So, what do I do? 

Hopefully, we have convinced you that content design does matter to your branding and audience engagement levels. Creating a design concept or story flow is the number one task you may need to do. However, the process does not stop there, as now it’s time to put your concept into action, which requires technical skills. 

Therefore, if you need any assistance with content marketing Auckland, reputation management Auckland, and SEO New Zealand, feel free to contact Digital Squad, a digital marketing company Auckland.