Let us cut to the chase here.
Why should you realise the importance of graphic design important in marketing your brand? Why should you be paying for a professional designer rather than parting away with the project to your cousin or a nephew/niece who is the Da Vinci of Paint?
As a writer, I have to shed my bias (and my integrity) and confess to you that a great picture (read graphic) truly can tell 1000 words. No matter how hard and different you think, you think with pictures while words just tag along to elevate the images in your mind.
Philosophy aside, it is the people’s mandate as well.
Online shoppers have passed the verdict that an attractive, compelling design influences their buying choices. And more than half of them refrain from returning to an online shopping platform with poor images and bad design.
A simple Google search would throw at you an ocean of such stats explaining the importance of graphic design in marketing.
In this blog post, we collect the pearls of wisdom these stats reveal. We help you realise or even make a case to your C-suite on the importance of graphic design in your marketing efforts.
First impressions matter
Advertising great David Ogilvy once remarked, “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.”
Now we don’t know if the exact adage applies for the design and aesthetics of your website, social media marketing, ads, brochure or any marketing collateral.
But what we know for sure is that first impressions matter.
When arriving on a website users take about 6s looking at the website’s main images. This includes your header image, banners or an image background etc. These elements, when designed using a lethal combination of consumer behaviour theories and professional graphic design techniques, create an everlasting impression on your visitor’s mind about your brand.
Apart from websites, there are entire social media platforms that function on visual treats. Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr are run by algorithms that are trained to reward professional, high-quality images that both are engaging for the consumer and improve the user experience of these social media platforms as well.
Also, ads that bring in money are the ones that catch the consumer’s attention using well-researched marketing and design techniques.
Visitors, readers and audience spend only 3 seconds on any content they browse on social media. An aesthetically pleasing design for your social media post or your ad earns you these seconds to influence your prospect to listen to your brand’s message.
Conveys Credibility and Professionalism
To answer the question of how graphic design can improve the credibility of a business, one must understand how any business establishes credibility.
Businesses use branding to achieve credibility. By branding, we mean they use thorough logos, consistent colour patterns, well planned informative websites etc.
Honestly, your visitor doesn’t straight away bounce off a website frowning at its lacklustre design. Content on the website is still the king.
But imagine this. Your visitor enters into your website clicking on a promising headline. As soon as they enter, a sharp red background flashes agonisingly on their eyes.
Headings, subheadings and body text coloured in black flow against the red background.
Images are blurry and the visitor sniffs that you have clipped it off another website.
There are some back-breaking research, informative numbers and stats present within the content. But the poor choice of colours and images on your website give a horrible time for your visitor.
No great content you weave can hold the visitor within your web page if images and colours are unprofessional. And anything unprofessional anywhere on the web makes the visitor mouth the words scam!
No matter which niche you are in, by designing well thought out images and graphics, you can turn your website into a shopping mall – a place where your consumers stay and spend time exploring and satiating their needs.
You can turn tons of text representing stats into a single credible infographic. You can turn your text-based call-to-action into professional-looking banners that accommodate your brand’s colours.
Graphic design fulfils its purpose by making content on your website easily consumable and increases trust in your content.
Set You Apart from Your Competitors
Marketing and branding history is tainted with the blood of brands killing their competition with creativity. History is also ridden with conspiracy theories around the logos that big brands have designed giving them free PR and memorability throughout the ages helping them stand out from their competitors.
Successful brands know fully well the importance of graphic design in marketing and branding. We also saw above the vitality of graphic design in establishing credibility.
This is why 73% of businesses invest in graphic design to shout the loudest and be heard better than their competition.
However, marketers make the mistake of using unoriginal graphics 76% of the time.
Designing professional and message bearing logos help your consumers remember and differentiate your brand from your competitor.
Boost Your Sales
One of the tangible means you can realise the importance of graphic design in your marketing campaign is when you see your display ads, Facebook ads, infographics minting money at a low budget.
Humans are visual creatures. Highly quality images and gifs are more likely to catch our attention than words screaming out sales and discounts.
Marketers have made the minds of consumers immune to salesy words by using texts that scream promotions and freebies for decades now.
Consumers recognise clickbait text headlines easily, denying ads any attention.
Nevertheless, you can still use pleasing graphics to capture attention, stir emotions and tell stories.
Canva reports that 40% of people respond better to visual information than text-only content even if the content you’ve created is amazing. Social Media Today also reveals that people spend more time-consuming image content than text.
People can’t be blamed for preferring images. The human brain is tuned to process visual information 60,000 times faster than words!
Instant gratification at its finest!
Visual elements are the top influencing factor when consumers make purchase decisions. Ad platforms offer increasingly efficient features such as image carousels to help you better tell a story in the ad. By incorporating engaging graphics in your ads and product pages you can increase your sale manifold. While not taking graphic design seriously this isn’t one of the major mistakes of online marketing it still super important to remember.
Consistency is Credibility
One of the major benefits of graphic design in marketing is that it lends consistency wherever you are on the web.
Be it your social media handle, newsletter, website, display ad, distinct colour and logo for your brand provokes your consumer to reminisce about your brand with ease.
Not only does your consumer remember your brand, but they also remember the experience you endowed on them.
Apart from a consistent colour and design strategy helping your reader remember your brand, creating visual content consistently establishes your brand as a leading authority in your niche.
When it comes to content creation, consistency is the greatest growth hack ever.
I am happy to be proved wrong.
Consistently creating visuals with great design, helps your brand communicate messages effectively. Actionable tips can be condensed within gifs and infographics.
Such visual content is easier to share for consumers.
Conclusion
The importance of graphic design in marketing is ignored because of the upskill task of creating graphic content consistently.
When going on a research spree, we found that consistency is the biggest challenge for marketers when dealing with graphic content. About 34% of marketers claim that creating visual content on a consistent basis is the most challenging task.
Contact us to help you with creating compelling visual content that can help you reap the branding, marketing and monetary benefits of graphic design.
