How Great Design Can Seriously Upgrade Your Content Marketing

There’s no denying it. Design is one of the most significant aspects of a successful content marketing strategy.

You can use design elements like videos, illustrations, infographics, photographs, charts and data visualization tools to convey exactly what a brand stands for. At the same time, you’ll simplify the way that customers relate to the content you create.

There are huge benefits to remaining consistent in your design across all platforms. This will assist you in using your content to build your clients’ brands. It will foster engagement between these brands and their target audience. And in the long run, it will improve conversion rates.

The Key Aspects of a Great Content Marketing Strategy

Any brand’s content strategy should start with the brand itself and its KPIs. This will give content planning some direction and structure to the final results.

These are the most essential elements for a content marketing strategy:

• A clear goal for content creation and the media that will be used to market a brand and its products

• Customer personas that represent the core traits of a brand’s target audience, based on the data they have collected from past user research

• An audit of current content that provides insights into how to improve and enhance under-performing content

• A step-by-step blueprint that enables you to bring your clients’ potential customers closer to the content you create

• A clear idea of the content distribution channels you will be designing content for

• A content posting calendar that structures the timelines of content broadcasts

5 Tips for Upgrading Content Marketing with Design

Many content creators use minimal design elements as they are concerned about making their content overly cluttered or overwhelming. However, brands that engage their designers throughout the content strategy development process can use designers’ insights to better convey complex concepts and improve engagement rates.

Regardless of the type of content you are creating, using the right design elements can vastly improve the content’s ability to engage target audiences. Videos, photos, GIFs, infographics and illustrations can all create a cohesive brand identity across marketing channels.

Here are 5 key ways that excellent design can improve content marketing outcomes and enable brands to achieve their long term goals.

1. Create Flawless Video Marketing Media

According to a recent study, 70% of marketers now use video media in their content marketing strategies. 82% of them believe that video marketing is a successful medium.

You can ensure that your marketing videos hit the spot by making sure that they are relevant to your audience. They must also include a clear call to action that encourages viewers to take action immediately. Plus, you must promote the videos across as many channels as possible, including popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Filmmakers should take care to stay ahead of the latest trends in video content creation. This will ensure that their videos will reach and connect with as many people as possible.

2. Use Design to Build Brand Awareness

Consistency is the key to creating a seamless transition between touchpoints using strategically selected design elements that improve the way customers perceive a brand. Inconsistent use of design elements in content and across touchpoints can make communicating a brand’s identity much harder to achieve.

Designers can use brand color palettes and specific fonts consistently across all communication and marketing materials. This creates a consistent brand image and builds brand awareness among important target markets. In doing so, many customers and leads may eventually begin to associate a brand with its specific design style, even if they have never shopped with the brand before.

3. Add Value with Design Elements

According to research conducted by Brain Rules, customers can recall more than 70% of the visual content they see almost 48 hours after the fact, compared to a mere 15% of text-based content. This means that a brand’s most important information is best conveyed in a visual way to ensure that customers and leads remember it long after they have seen it.

In 2020, Nadya Khoja from Venngage spoke to more than 200 marketers to gauge how they used visual content the year before and how they planned to do so in 2020. According to the responses, more than 40% of the marketers interviewed preferred visual content marketing in the form of infographics, videos and other visuals. These media produced better engagement rates and more conversions overall.

4. Use Design to Set a Brand Apart

A 2018 study by the Content Marketing Institute found that more than 85% of B2C marketers, and a whopping 91% of B2B businesses, view content marketing as one of the most important strategies for customer acquisition.

In today’s increasingly saturated and competitive markets, businesses that want to succeed need to work alongside their design professionals to create unique visual identities and media that help to set them apart from their rivals.

Creating well-designed marketing content will encourage your audience to like, share, comment and engage with your clients’ brands. This helps them to build robust brand identities and improve their ROIs.

Unique and memorable design can drive content success to new heights and increase engagement with potential customers—not to mention ensuring that brands can claim their fair share of whichever markets they operate in.

5. Re-purpose Successful Content with Smart Design Choices

There are dozens of content types that brands can use to organize their content marketing strategies. It’s not necessarily possible to use every one of these types in a single piece of content. But using a range of different design elements can assist you in repurposing content for different platforms.

For example, as a design professional, you may initially be hired to create a marketing infographic about touchless technology for a brand. You could then film a video about the touchless tech infographic to engage more audiences. From there, you can create visual social media posts inspired by the same piece of content to further extend its reach. At some stage, printed media that accompanies the product or other marketing collateral based on the original design may be required too.

Once you have hit on a successful piece of content, you can use a variety of design tools and formats to repurpose it. You can improve its reach, encourage social media shares, foster more engagement among target audiences, and even update it as time progresses and customers’ needs and demands evolve.

Great Design Leads To Increased Sales

Intelligent use of design can supercharge content marketing strategies and improve content’s ability to engage target audiences for longer.

Visitors to your clients’ websites will also become more actively involved with their content if you incorporate engaging design elements into the mix.

Well designed marketing materials tend to get more shares on social media, bring more leads to brands’ websites and profiles, and lead to more conversions in the long run.

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Meet the Author, Carmen Docampo

With a background in photo editing and as a hobby photographer, Carmen writes for various photography outlets. She spends her free time enjoying the outdoors and discovering new hiking trails.

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