The visual design of a company has always been a crucial element. When it comes to competing in an overcrowded market, visuals can be the difference between standing out and becoming irrelevant. However, designing the visuals of your company needs to be done appropriately. You can’t just slap on a bunch of colors and images to make an efficient visual identity.
As a matter of fact, you have to plan and execute it well. A good example of this activity is branding. Aside from other elements of a brand, visuals play a vital role. Moreover, you have to design your brand visual in accordance with your customers’ preferences and not your own.
Only then will you be able to trigger the desired response from your audience. Still, visuals are far more important to a company than many owners tend to believe. That is why having a great visual design can help you reach success much faster. With that in mind, here’s how much a visual design of your company impacts your customers.
Awareness
You must have heard about brand awareness by now and how essential it is. Even if you don’t have a brand already, awareness is very important for your business, especially in today’s crowded market. The essence of good awareness is the visuals. But what exactly is awareness? Simply put, awareness is the knowledge your customers have about your business or brand. Now, awareness consists of two important factors.
The first is your company’s overall dealings, such as how you treat customers, the quality of your products or services and so on. The second factor is your company’s image. This is where visuals play a vital role. In other words, an image that also consists of good visual design makes your business recognizable. No matter what your customers see, whether it’s an ad or a piece of content, they’ll be able to identify your brand and instantly recognize it and they’ll be encouraged to explore further.
Professionalism
A good visual design of your company speaks about professionalism on so many levels. However, in order to do so, your visual must not just be well-designed but also consistent across all business aspects. Whether your customers are looking at the web page or they found your well-designed business cards online, every visual must be consistent. This is especially true if you have a brand.
After that, it becomes easier to conclude that if this company has consistent visuals across various channels, they are probably just as professional in all other business aspects. No one goes through all the trouble to have a professional visual design only to lack in everything else. That said, if consumers find professionalism in your visual design they will consider that you’re professional when it comes to customer experience as well.
Consistency
Consistency is not only important for making your brand feel professional but also for making it overall more memorable and instantly recognizable. As a matter of fact, every branding and marketing effort your business makes needs to be as consistent as possible. That way, you’ll build trust and loyalty, and your customers will keep coming back knowing exactly what to expect.
If your customers notice inconsistencies in your visual identity, you risk creating confusion and maybe even losing your potential or existing customers. Here are some ways you can avoid this and ensure that your visual identity is consistent:
- Create branding guidelines – at the beginning, most companies have a very clear vision on how their logo, website, business card and other visuals should look like. However, this can get lost over time. That’s why it’s important to have a style guide clarifying exactly which fonts, colours, shapes and patterns should be used.
- Internal branding – Many brands focus their efforts only on customers and forget the importance of internal branding. Your employees and trusted partners are just as important for keeping your visual identity consistent, so don’t forget to provide them with branded items.
- Work with the same designers – Hiring the team of designer that you previously worked with will make your life much easier. They are already familiar with your brand and you won’t have to introduce them to your branding guidelines. Designers who are familiar with your vision will easily create new visuals without compromising consistency
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Relationship
One of the biggest impacts your company’s visual design has on customers is the relationship it helps build between you and them. It’s no secret that many companies leverage visuals to trigger an emotional response in their audience. For this, you need a clever color scheme for your visuals. Colors can tie directly to consumers’ emotions and encourage them to take the desired action. However, just like when portraying professionalism, your visuals must be consistent in every aspect of your business so that colors can work their magic.
Emotional branding helps create long-lasting and more personal relationships between brands and their customers. These relationships foster loyalty and engagement on a whole different level. If you ever wondered why some consumers remain loyal to a brand even though some other brand may have better offers, then this is why. Your visual design can captivate consumer interest and hold it regardless of what your competitors do to outrun you.
First impressions
The impact of a first impression is too often disregarded in the business world. The fact of the matter is that your visual design can determine whether or not a consumer will be interested to explore further in an instant. To be more precise, it only takes 50 milliseconds for a potential customer to form a first impression based on your company’s visuals alone. This is especially true when consumers land on your website pages.
Therefore, your company’s visuals can have an impact on customers in a way that only a split second can mean the difference between converting and bouncing off. That’s how powerful first impressions are in today’s crowded market. That said, remaining competitive and even relevant in the market may as well largely depend on your visuals alone. That’s why you must design those visuals well enough to be able to truly capture your customers’ interest.
A company’s visual design is arguably just as important as everything else they do. You can have flawless customer service and support as well as provide customers with an exceptional product or service quality. However, for customers to experience that for themselves, you need to capture them with visuals, to begin with.
About the Author!
Jacob Wilson is a business consultant, and an organizational psychologist, based in Brisbane. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for Bizzmark blog.
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