You’ve got an excellent product or service. You’ve got a fun new marketing idea. You’ve got catchy copy. Now you’ve got to sell it! You’ve got to get it in front of your audience with strong visual marketing content. This is where design comes into play.
If you don’t have a design background, it can feel daunting and frustrating to create visual graphics and marketing materials. Instead of pushing pixels around aimlessly on the screen, I’m bringing you 3 quick tips you can follow to create designs for your marketing that attract and convert your target audience.
1. Stick to your brand guidelines
If you worked with a logo or brand designer in the past, chances are they created a brand guideline document for you that outlines your brand colors and fonts. The purpose of this document is to enable you to use the exact same colors, fonts, and any other relevant design elements across every single piece of marketing content you create.
As you’re designing your marketing pieces, reference your guidelines. Copy-paste your color codes to ensure you’re matching your colors exactly. Follow the font styling instructions provided. If you’re using software like Canva to create your graphics, you can even set up your own brand kit so it’s easy to apply your colors and fonts to everything you design.
Why do brand guidelines matter for visual marketing content?
This visual consistency is incredibly important, because when your audience sees the same visual elements (colors, fonts, etc.) over and over again, they start to associate them with your business. This ultimately builds powerful brand recognition, where people start to recognize your business simply by seeing your colors together or by seeing a sentence written in your font. And this builds trust in your business, because it makes your brand look professional, organized, and legit.
What if I don’t have brand guidelines, or my guidelines are too limiting?
Don’t despair! If your brand guidelines don’t give you enough flexibility for the visuals you need to create, it never hurts to reach back out to your designer and ask if they can expand your color palette, add another font for you to use, or even create some custom branded icons and patterns.
One major limitation I often see businesses struggle with is not enough dark and/or light colors in their palette to work with for backgrounds. If you’re feeling hung up here, plug your color hex codes into this free Tint & Shade Generator. The generator automatically generates dark and light shades of your colors, so you can be sure that they will match your existing color palette perfectly.
If you don’t have brand guidelines at all, a brand designer can absolutely set you up with visual consistency. Or if you’d rather DIY for now, create a palette of 2-3 colors. Plug them into the generator to create a couple lighter and darker shades within the same palette. Select 1-2 fonts. Write these colors and fonts down, and store them somewhere that’s easy for you to reference and use on everything you create going forward until you’re ready to work with a designer.
2. Less is more
Another common pitfall I often see with visual marketing content is attempting to stuff way too much information into a small space. Whether it’s a social media graphic or a brochure, it can feel uncomfortable to leave blank space on a design. But rest assured that this blank space actually allows people to focus in on the primary message in your content. On the flip side, filling every single blank space can feel overwhelming for people and can distract them from taking action instead.
For example, if you’re creating a graphic for social media, remember that you can spread content out over several graphics and create a carousel post. This helps you share more info without cramming it all onto one graphic. And, remember that you can expand on details in the text below your graphic; fine details can go in that text, while your graphic focuses on the important, hard-hitting message.
Ultimately, working with a content strategist helps ensure that you’re creating conversion-oriented messaging in the most succinct way possible. Then, fitting that content into a visual design can come naturally.
3. Skip the stock photos
If you have high-quality, real photos of your products, team, or location, using these photos in your marketing content is an excellent way to form a personal connection with your audience. It shows them the real product, real human being, real space that they’re interacting with, and that goes a long way towards building trust and credibility for your business.
If you don’t have professional brand photos, I want you to know that you can create visually compelling marketing graphics without them! I encourage you to skip the stock photos and focus on other ways to grab your audience’s attention.
What’s wrong with stock photos?
Good marketing builds trust with your audience. And when you’re showing your audience photos of products that aren’t yours, or people who aren’t you, your team, or your customers, there’s a disconnect. Even with generic office supplies or random scenes from nature, these probably don’t have anything to do with that hard-hitting, core marketing message you’re trying to get across. And that means they’re distracting from your message instead of helping people convert.
How can I design strong graphics without photos?
If you don’t have a library of original brand photos, I recommend using colors, shapes, and patterns to boost visual interest in your graphics. Experiment with large text for important messages, blocks of color to call attention to words, and even creating icons or patterns using the elements of your logo. I guarantee that these solutions will feel much more on-brand for your business than stock photos!
All in all, don’t overthink it
When it comes to designing marketing content, it’s easy to get sucked in and suddenly sink hours and hours into trying to perfect every little detail. Trust me, as a designer and business owner myself, I’ve been there! Remember, don’t get so focused on the aesthetics that you lose your core marketing message or create confusion for your audience.
Now, go forth and use your visual brand confidently to build that trust and convert your audience into well-aligned customers and clients!
