How Visual Design Affects Sales and Marketing

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As graphic designers, we have to communicate the brand’s message across to its consumers. There are many ways to do this – banners, postcards, stationery design, logos, mascots, brochures, and information packs are a few nameable mediums. To create an effective design, you have to understand the nuances of the sales message and use this information to create a visual design that is able to engage the viewer with the design and call to action buttons. Rather than focusing on immediate sales, it is important to focus on building a long-term strategy that would bring value and high return on investment. People tend to buy products from a trusted source so being able to build a relationship with the brand collateral is as important as bringing in immediate sales.Marketing your designs effectively is a skill that can be honed with time, patience and effort.

When creating the look and feel of a design, designers study the layout, color, schematics, content, typography, patterns and repetition. Using these design elements they create a cohesive and harmonious content that is able to guide the viewer through the information. When done right, this can raise the brand awareness and in effect bring in a valuable revenue.

Content marketing usually incorporates infographics, images, and videos. Articles with imagery and videos get more appreciations and are shared more on social media when compared to the ones with fewer images. Here is an interesting analysis of how visuals affected the marketing strategies of online marketers last year:

1. About 90% of the online marketers said that they used about 50% of visuals for promoting their business.
2. About 40% of the online marketers said that original artwork/graphics were the most engaging.
3. All marketers (about 70%)unanimously agreed to the fact that they spent only 5 hours a week making their visuals
4. About 30% said that they worked with an in-house design vs about 24% used the services of a freelance designer
5. About 36% said that they had a hard time producing consistent engaging visuals.
6. 30% had trouble creating/sourcing well-designed visuals.
7. 60% marketers agreed to the fact that visuals played a huge role in creating an impact
8. Most marketers ended up spending about 10%-20% of their annual budget on visuals
9. 35% marketers said that they would spend about a third of their annual budget on visuals the following year

The role of visuals in a website can’t be stressed enough. In today’s populated and highly visual market, websites have to be designed well to be able to stand out. When it comes to web design, first impressions matter. When a user stumbles upon your web page, you have about 59 s to make an impact on them. In order to create this form of a connection, the web page has to deliver in its appeal, usability, and overall quality. Fonts, color, spacing, symmetry and various other design elements play a huge role in creating a harmonious, well made and usable design.

Here are some statistics on first impressions.

1. About 94% of the first impressions are related to the look and feel of the design. So it is crucial to be able to have the user’s eye rest on a professional, well-made web page.
2. About 75% of users make judgments about the company, its values and their credibility based on the web page.
3. About 80% of the users will not return to a badly designed web page.

Having an engaging and highly impactful web page is useful not only to drive traffic but to help the user further explore the other pages of a website. If the participant is not happy with some aspect of the design on a webpage, he or she is more likely to not want to explore various other sections of the website.

Technology has evolved to enable us to see real-time data to measure and see what is driving traffic. We are able to analyze a visual or a graphic by analyzing the number of likes, appreciations, saves and gauge what ultimately is more appealing to a wide array of audiences.

To wrap up, here is a list of top 6 visual content marketing strategies that designers should know this year. When compared to the data that was collected last year, we can see that businesses are starting to understand the impact of visual design and its role in sales and marketing.

1. About 32% of online marketers say that visual content is the most important form of marketing for their business, blogging being the second.

2. 11% more of B2C marketers say that visual content is the most important content for digital marketing.
3. Eye tracking studies show that humans spend more time looking at an imagery than reading a text on an ad. So the weight an image carries when accompanied by text is bound to create a huge impact even after days of its first viewing.
4. Infographics have a had huge impact on B2B marketers and can increase the web traffic unto 11%
5. Facebook and Twitter posts with images see double the engagement than those without images.
6. 67% of marketers see Facebook as the most important marketing platform.

Visual design is a necessary tool for creative expression and will continue to play an important role in digital marketing. As technology continues to evolve, designers will have to keep up with the trends and analytics to create visual content that not only adheres to the needs of the market but also successfully communicate an idea and keeps the user engaged. Effective visuals can be used to communicate ideas the right way can transform your business. We hope that this article combined with the collected statistics stated above encourages you to learn more and understand the power of imagery, its impact and why it may be wise to integrate visual content into your business marketing strategy.