3 Tips from Creative That Will Level Up Your Marketing

Great marketing design captures attention like a moth to a flame. It becomes an experience that resonates with your audience while highlighting how your product or service makes their life easier, better, and more enjoyable. In just a few seconds – that’s usually all you’ll get – you can leave a lasting impression on a prospective customer.
Benefits of Great Marketing Design for Brands
Your brand’s creative helps to identify, form, create, and influence unique and positive associations and differentiate it from its competition, creating meaning, value, and preference in the consumer’s mind. Great design evokes emotional reactions and connects a brand and its customers.
Great marketing creative is a way to connect your brand and your customers, building trust and confidence in your audience. It is essential to creating traction for almost any campaign. Here are some benefits of ensuring your marketing creative clearly represents your brand and your products or services.
Communicates Your Brand
Every piece of marketing creative communicates your brand to your audience. It can also ease the hesitation consumers sometimes have when converting. Your creative can address their fears and concerns about your product or service. Visual content effectively engages customers and communicates important features about your product or service. Ideally, your creative will show your aesthetic in less than a second. It doesn’t take long for consumers to decide to like, dislike, be impressed, or want nothing to do with your brand in an instant.
Increases Conversion
Great marketing design can motivate people to take action by offering a clear, easy path to conversion. You have to determine how to turn a call to action (CTA) into a sale and how to create a brand experience. The design is responsible for creating an emotional reaction from your customers. This happens when the design belays customers’ fears or concerns about the product or service you’re advertising.
Raises Visibility
Your marketing creative will only get traction if it rises above competing signals from other brands and catches and holds the attention of the right prospect. Your campaign’s goals and target audience will inform the design required. Whether simple and minimalistic or bright and flashy, the look and feel of your design carries your message. Whatever the style, great design memorably speaks to your audience and helps your campaign get noticed.
Reinforces Messaging
Most importantly, great design that expresses your brand emphasizes your messaging. This underscores the importance of design in branding while also highlighting how design can drive home a message and evoke a response. Carefully selected images paired with the right copy can convince potential customers to choose your product or service.
Design Psychology and Consumer Behavior
Captivating imagery and compelling messaging can grab your audience’s attention and persuade them to take action, whether purchasing your product or filling out a form. Design psychology plays a bigger role in buying decision-making than many people realize. Marketing design considers the target audience and their motivation and employs design elements that resonate with them on a deeper level. Including design psychology in the design process helps ensure that customers make the correct connections between your marketing creative and what your brand represents. These three key design elements have a potent effect on buying decisions: color, fonts, and shapes.
Psychology of Color
Color affects how we perceive the world so strongly that people recognize colors before they do shapes or letters. There is a well-documented connection between color and specific responses in our brains. However, color perception can be subjective. The mix of colors in a design has a psychological effect on us. Creating harmony with colors makes the design more appealing and less distracting and helps draw attention to specific brand messaging and emotions.
Psychology of Fonts
Fonts also have a psychological effect on people. Our brains respond emotionally to the shape of different letters. A recent study found that documents designed with better fronts can be read faster and lead to increased cognitive focus on the content. This understanding is crucial when it comes to the legibility of marketing materials.
Psychology of Shapes
A less obvious (except to designers) yet important element is the psychology of shapes in logo design. This critical element plays an important role in people’s decisions about your business and products. Each type of shape – abstract, geometric, and organic – is associated with different qualities and concepts. They are a visual language that influences how we feel about what we see.
3 Design Tips Designers Want You to Know
Design is more than aesthetics; it’s about creating experiences that resonate and inspire. Here are three essential design tips to help your marketing connect with your audience.
Clear Direction and Feedback
“Any feedback that helps to keep communication open and the process efficient. Any feedback that helps to get the creative in line with the brief and deliver a more accurate and successful solution.” – Steve Crowley, Digital Advertising Designer
Marketing is all about communication. That means designers, copywriters, marketers, and clients need to be on the same page. It’s not always easy. Ideally, everyone would be working from a detailed creative brief. But we all know that communication is complex. Detailed direction upfront and clear feedback give writers and designers invaluable insight when crafting your message.
Importance of Brand Guides
“The best way to create consistency is to adhere to a brand guideline and to take inventory of their current or recent campaigns or marketing materials. It’s also helpful to work within pods on the same various brands.” – Kayla Kasheer, Senior Graphic Designer.
Brand guidelines define the overall look and feel of your brand. They help you build a brand identity that your audience can recognize across all platforms. They outline everything from your color palette and typography to your tone and mission statement. They provide all the guidance needed to communicate the right message for every marketing piece for your business. Well-fleshed-out brand guidelines go a long way in ensuring your creative not only speaks to your audience but also drives conversion.
Importance of Color Theory
We all know Tiffany blue, Target red, and Post-It yellow – these colors are synonymous with the brands they represent. Brand colors shape your brand’s first impression and how people perceive your business. Up to 80% of product first impressions are solely based on color. Color theory is used to inform choices for brand colors. It provides a window into the messages inherent in colors and how they make people feel.
Color theory plays a huge role in design, especially when it comes to developing a new branding project, and is a very strategic and nuanced process. You are not only thinking about what emotions you want to instill in your audience, but you are also considering the visual balance and flexibility of the palette and how it ladders up to the brand strategy. — Kayla Kasheer, Senior Graphic Designer
These three tips can help you enhance the visual appeal of your creative while also generating more engagement and compelling content. Remember, great design is about more than just looking good—it’s about communicating your message clearly and connecting with your audience on a deeper level. With clear communication, a fleshed-out creative brief, and thoughtfully chosen brand colors, you can stand out from the competition and connect with your audience.