You want to reach your existing customers and potential new customers. You have something to say.
Well, of course you do!
Typically, your ideas start as words on paper. From there, your ideas for your brand’s messaging should take a few things into consideration:
- Target audience
- Your audience’s problem
- How your brand can solve that problem
After you’ve established these things, you have a brand message. Good job! Keep reading to learn more about why you need graphic design for your business, how it influences your audience, and how it can give them clear instructions on how to interact with your brand.
Why is Graphic Design Important?
When you come up with a thought or idea for your business and want to put it out in the world, do you post that plain black text in a white box on an ad or social post? Would your audience stop and read your text in a sea of the thousands of brand messages they get bombarded with daily?
No. That’s why you need graphic design.
Graphic design is the art of combining text and visual elements. Just as important as the text is the way in which it is presented. Copywriting is just one important part of a brand’s messaging strategy. The way content is presented can make your audience feel a certain way.
Graphic Design Best Practices
How can you use graphic design to its full potential when it comes to your brand messaging and business strategy? Here are a few ways graphic design can influence your audience:
- Use of photography. Different photographs evoke different emotions. If you run a small business that sells all natural essential oils, you would use photos of happy, healthy people to show potential new customers what their life could be like with your products. A picture is truly worth a thousand words!
- Use of icons is a great way to communicate a thought or concept without adding more words.
- Fonts and colors certainly influence the way a person feels. If someone can’t read the text on a graphic, flyer, or website, you’ll lose them.
You can put all these things in your ad or post, but it may be no better, and could be worse, than the plain old text we started with.
Wait… what?
The combination of text and visual elements needs to follow some essential rules in graphic design and usability. Graphic design is subjective, and you have to expect some variability in the way an audience is going to receive information. So be deliberate in your decisions. Text needs to be legible. There needs to be enough contrast so it can easily be read. When it comes to color and fonts, it’s best to stick with your established colors and fonts. Try to avoid “canned” elements or effects that are included with many of the design and presentation tools we all use.
Basics of Establishing a Brand
We’re not going to take a deep dive into branding in this blog but remember that building a brand is a slow and steady process of designing everything in a consistent and defined way. It doesn’t happen overnight, and there are a lot of considerations, including graphic design, to take into account.
If your message has more than one part (multiple products or service offerings), you’ll need to establish a hierarchy… as in what’s the #1 message you want them to “get” followed by the secondary thought and so on.
Now what?
One last thing. What do you want your audience to do? The point of any marketing effort is to raise awareness or make a connection, right? Guide them with a clear CTA (call to action), whether it is a button or link that takes them to a website, a landing page, opens a form, email or provides a phone number. Don’t leave your audience confused or wondering what you want them to do!
8Bend Marketing can Help Turn Your Ideas into Powerful Messages
If you’ve taken all these things into consideration, your message will be more powerful and effective. 8Bend Marketing is a StoryBrand Certified Agency with experts who can take your thoughts and ideas and turn them into that visualization you have in your head.
Graphic design is an important part of your business strategy and should not be taken lightly! Don’t leave your ideas sitting on the metaphorical shelf just because you’re not sure how to execute them.
Schedule a discovery call today!
Matt Geiger is 8Bend Marketing’s talented and strategic Graphic Designer. Matt takes clients’ big ideas from concept to real-life, whether the project is a website, informative PDF, brand identity, or product packaging.
