The brand design allows you to showcase business intelligence to your audiences. It establishes a critical element in any well-rounded business strategy and helps your products stand out from the competition.
The web expanse is cluttered with innumerable brand identities, each with its own way of presentation. But in this colorful ecosystem, it is often difficult to find an original, better yet meaningful identity worthy of your time. As an online brand owner, it is your duty to make sure that your digital footprint comes above the cut of outstanding design elements and features. Something that compels users to stop, examine, and explore your website for the attention it deserves. After all, your goal is to get noticed.
According to Forrester, the ROI for investing in design is 301%. IBM, as an example, increased its portfolio profitability by $18.6 million through design-driven work.
In this article, I take the opportunity to share with you some compelling reasons why you must invest in outstanding design — gathered from research and my own experience.
Adding visual content can break the scroll
Text-heavy feeds and disorganized content have severely affected social media consumption. Many users fall victim to posts that are boring, unhelpful, and poorly presented. As a result, a vast majority choose to scroll endlessly on social platforms. The main reason most of these features get lost in the crush is that the content fails to grasp their attention. This is where you must prepare a design-oriented strategy to break those skating users and effectively pull them towards your product.
Using Infographics, charts, memes, GIFs, and other forms of high-quality imagery can make a huge difference. This type of content holds the power to stop users in their visual tracks and make them absorb your post. Something as plain and simple as a quotation or a catchy punchline set on an appealing background can break this infamous scroll. And if what you offer is enticing enough, they will eventually grace you with a visit to your page.
Good design makes your brand visible
Adding the right design elements can instantly make your brand visible. Careful use of typography, suitable color palettes, consistent theme, positioning of elements, and good copy can create a robust look and feel for your brand. A good balance between these factors will enable greater exposure and improve your reach so that your customers can comfortably associate themselves with your products and services.
Once you have fine-tuned the design standards of your brand, it will naturally stand out and attract customers. Just consider how quickly the bright red letters of ‘KFC’ are capable of putting you in mind for French fries and their signature Zinger burger. This is how much power branding carries when you use the right principles to present it.
As a product designer myself, I have invested a great deal in creating the right template for my brand. It took several hundred hours of research, mockups, and graphical resources to build mine. But it was all worth it because I created something consistent, memorable, and visually appealing that my customers could recognize at a glance.
High-quality graphics increase shareability
Good quality graphics help propel your brand and make valuable statements. They complement several key aspects of your digital marketing strategy by building engaging, rich, and well-organized content. And this is backed by recent statistics. Twitter, for example, showed that tweets that had images with them were 94% more likely to receive retweets than those without them. A study conducted on Google+ also showed similar results, where researchers found that posts with images were shared three times more than posts with plain text.
Another study by HubSpot revealed that 65% of users liked emails that were mostly made up of images, while only 35% prefer their emails to be text-heavy.
But most importantly, they give you the opportunity to apply your brand voice and send the message directly to your audiences. You can also use humorous, quirky taglines for hot topics to boost this type of content and reinforce your brand identity. For example, a ‘Did You Know post of fascinating facts about your target niche can establish your authority as a thought leader. However, it is imperative that you incorporate good graphics that conform to your business design. This will help inform your audience, not just about the facts that you’re sharing, but also the emphasis that you are laying on them.
Focus on sensation transference
Sensational transference is basically an artificial human element that can set your brand apart. It is the phenomenon designers use to imbue certain attributes that amplify the visual perception of the brand. Its uses are remarkable in marketing, and many industry giants have used it to generate a superior perception of their products.
The idea was originally developed by Louis Cheskin, a clinical psychologist, who used it to effectively change consumer perceptions about certain products. While it may not work for every product, you should leverage it if it works for yours. Cheskin demonstrated his theory by changing the color of Imperial Margarine from white to yellow to convince the taste testers they were actually sampling a superior product.
From changing colors to revamping physical appearances, there are numerous examples of how leading brands have built artificial perceptions that have given brands a better outlook in the market. Its applications are abundant in online marketing. With the right design mechanics and good insight about your target customer, you too can benefit from it. A good color balance and logo shaping, for example, can establish your business as a smart and authoritative brand than a confusing and cluttered one.
Originality is your virtue
Originality always triumphs. Although many of today’s marketers pay little attention to this, in the long haul they do admit that their performance has begun to falter. Stock photos are one of the most widely used options when creating a brand design, and most of this imagery is stark and basic. While it gives marketers a fast and affordable start in building their brand, their competitive edge eventually wanes over time.
Being a professional product designer myself, I have always found original ideas to be an excellent way of demonstrating your brand dominance in the competition. According to a recent survey, over 30% of marketers use original graphics for their businesses, and around 41% reported that this is the most engaging form of a visual feature in their brand. Many of these businesses have their own in-house designers, produce original ideas and innovate their designs through them.
Trust me, if you’re neglecting visuals, hiring inexperienced designers, or primarily using stock imagery, then you’ll likely fall behind in the race.
You are what you design
Your brand design can speak volumes for your business and your business goals. Good visual presentation can easily pull your potential customer out of mindless scrolling or quick, cursory browsing and deeply engage them with your products. No matter how complex or sophisticated a concept you’re selling, utilizing good aesthetics, high-standard imagery, and captivating visual communication can effectively convert your target audience.
You need to make sure your information is offered in a manner that is helpful, specific, intuitive, and memorable. The right design can easily bridge the chasm between the presentation of data and purposeful absorption.
If you’re seeking a well-organized and powerful brand design to enhance your content, boost engagement, and increase exposure, investing in design is a highly profitable solution. It all falls down to using time-proven visual principles, shaping your audience’s perception, and crafting eye-catching and meaningful pieces. Once you have a strong connection with your customer, the rest of the journey can be quite smooth.