5 Best Marketing Design Tips for 2022
As firms look for new opportunities or continue to move on from COVID, now is a great time to revisit your marketing design and look for improvements to ensure your communications look their best for customers and prospects.
Check out these tips for some much-needed marketing inspiration and upgrades. We will show you everything from how to develop your personal brand, how to implement it, and of course generate sales through it.
1. Update your branding
Branding should never stand still as customers’ perspectives and ideas about how businesses appeal to them continue to change, especially with the recent upheavals in all areas of life.
From looking greener or bluer to represent the popular environmental colors to cleaning up your branding to make it less aggressive or calmer, take the time to consider your competitive landscape and where you sit within it, updating your visual and written branding to fit.
As part of that, you can:
Update fonts and colors
To keep up with design trends like the latest styles and variations in typography to add a modern look to your site and content.
Colors, as mentioned, are trending toward the greener, calmer look to suggest that businesses are more in tune with the real world and less overly-technical all-digital constructs, no matter how automated or traditional their business gets.
As part of 2020s styling, continue to remove tints, graduated colors, and other effects that look out of place on modern sites (unless they are a major part of your business).
Improve web design
With site layouts going back to simpler looks to focus on what is important to the customer, and keeping frills down to a minimum.
Take a look at any news sites with armadas of pop-ups, animated adverts, and automatically playing videos, and head for the exact opposite to suggest your business is calm and in control.
2. Ensuring consistency across your brand
After you develop a personal brand you need to ensure it flows across websites, social media and video, published content, and other areas. Check that the same imagery and design motifs from the front of your website appear in email content, social media, and any white papers, brochures, or other content.
As a tip, block out some time at the start of each year or marketing cycle, check older content for consistency, and update where needed.
Also, take the time to check individual email addresses, phone numbers and other points of contact are current. Standardizing on something like contact@yourbiz.com is an easy way to limit older documents from becoming useless.
3. Check your user experience
Your content and marketing might look great from inside the business, but checking that it satisfies your customers and prospects is key. Use feedback forms, ask for insights from your customers and get friends, business colleagues, and third parties to inspect the site to see if it has a real impact.
To maximize that impact, ensure that it delivers the key business benefits, services and messages clearly and up-front. Remove older content links from the front page and ensure any statistics or quotes remain relevant (no one cares if you were “store of the year” in 2017), update them where possible.
4. Move from content strategy to content design
Branding is moving on, so is the strategy behind it. In fact, what used to be considered a content strategy is now being rethought of as content design, as envisaged by Facebook.
This comes about as content is often less about long-form documents and more about a strong user experience with a range of content including video, infographics, and much more.
There is still a strategy behind all the work, but what is more important is that the design is built into these elements from the very start, rather than pasting text into old templates, simply dropping new words into websites, and so on.
Taking a content design approach means building the whole experience as a team, whether that’s the error messages in a technical product or the flyers and website for a pizza chain. It means working with user experience experts, designers, and product people to ensure that any message is a joined-up one.
5. Apply quick fixes for boring or failing brands
Content design is fine if you have the time, budget, and people, but many of us lack those luxuries and just want to polish up the presentation of our product quickly.
If you have problems with your brand and no time or budget to fix it, these quick tips can help.
Add a “+” to your services to add value
From batteries to shampoo and digital products, many businesses use upsells and cross-sells and it is proven to work. Additional well-trodden approaches include precious metal tiers (gold, platinum), and all you need to do is crank out news and press releases launching your “new” brand, even if the improvements are only modest or cosmetic to have an immediate impact.
Borrow a good color scheme and tweak it
There are plenty of proven websites, brochures, or other marketing designs out there, and nothing to stop anyone from taking the overall theme and tweaking it enough to make it your own to deliver something stylish, possibly timeless, and highly attractive to prospects or customers.
Relaunch the brand/product with a new look
If your product or service is not having an impact on the market, then most likely few people know it exists or are interested. At this point, feel free to go with the design and marketing overhaul, creating a whole new look that might help boost interest and create a new platform to relaunch it from.
Get on social media like TikTok
Many businesses say they don’t have time for social media, but new services like TikTok are helping many companies gain a fresh lease of life (“74% of TikTok users say that TikTok has inspired them to find out more about a product or brand online.”) using design-focused marketing content.
Even an engaging Twitter account that covers your market and industry can deliver impact with good design helping tweets stand out from the crowd and make them more shareable.
Conclusion
Whatever your market or ambition, marketing design can play a key part in your next steps to success or help to boost awareness. Follow these tips or look for how other firms have found success in your field with marketing design.
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