How To Effectively Integrate Design Into Your Marketing Collateral

What defines your company and your brand? Are you selling your services in an effective way? Integrating branding design into your marketing collateral and website is essential to communicate your company’s story to potential customers and clients. If currently, you aren’t doing this, you’re not communicating your brand effectively and missing out on new business. Because integrating branding design into your marketing collateral is of the utmost importance, it is something your company needs to take seriously.

Thankfully, if you adhere to good design principles, you can tell your story effectively and drive conversions for your company. Your digital marketing, website design, and print marketing collateral designs should all carry a consistent message and presentation style.

Here are some tips that can help you take your company’s communication and marketing efforts to another level.

Integrating Branding Design into Your Marketing Campaign

Design is extremely important for a marketing campaign. A good design can do wonders for a business; a poor design can crush sales. You should always remember the purpose of a design plan is: to drive conversions. If your design isn’t helping to accomplish this goal, it isn’t a good design no matter how artistic or creative it is. As Steve Jobs once said “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Potential customers should find a design engaging. It should reinforce the company’s brand and message. Ultimately design should help to turn undecided visitors into customers and transforming them into passionate brand advocates. Again, if your design isn’t delivering, it needs to be reevaluated.

The Importance of Implementing a Style Guide

When it comes to websites and printed resources, having a consistent branding style is important. Creativity is great, but the core language and presentation should be the same throughout.

A style guide is the primary visual DNA of your company’s branding, though it can also reference grammar, tone, word usage and point of view. It’s a document that describes, defines and presents examples of what your brand looks like in various visual media such as print, Internet, and broadcast.

If you don’t have a style guide, you should have one professionally created. A style guide can keep your presentation and message consistent across all of your marketing collateral designs.

To prove why you shouldn’t let your style guide go by the wayside, take a look at 21 stunning and detailed examples of style guides that are sure to encourage and inspired you to begin compiling your own.

Keep it Simple and Make Sure Text is Readable

Design shouldn’t be so complicated. The last thing you want is for your audience to feel confused or overwhelmed. Simple designs get conversions and forge connections; convoluted or confusing designs can cause people to lose focus.

A great design isn’t noticeable. It sits in the background, helps people to navigate a web page, and sells your brand without being distracting. If you are going out of your way to add too many new features or cluttering up too much space, it will come back to bite you. Simplicity is no more important than when it comes to your presentation of text.

Ultimately, it is effective text that will drive conversions more than anything else. This is why it is imperative that text is legible and easy to understand. People should be able to easily read the text, and should be encouraged and enticed to read more by an easy-on-the-eyes layout. This means that concise, well-written copy is central for effective design.

Tell Your Company’s Story

We tend to think of stories as things that might begin with “Once upon a time,” presenting us with the “Good Guys and Bad Guys dynamic”, ultimately taking us on a journey which will be resolved, if we’re lucky, with a happy ending.

But how does a Power Point presentation fit into this overall scheme? Or a website promoting a particular product or benefit? Or a marketing campaign that aims to associate your brand with a certain set of images and feelings?

You want visitors who come to your website and readers of your advertisements to get a cohesive impression of your brand. They should know who you are, what you offer, and how you can help them. If your site’s message is instead a jumble of multiple themes or different styles, visitors will lose focus.

Embedding Your Brand into the Design

While you don’t want your entire design to come off as a desperate sales pitch, you do want to place a well thought out branding experience in certain spots so that the design makes a lot of sense.

Embedding your brand into a case study, advertisement, a video spot, or a testimonial not only showcases your services and experiences but also creates brand trust and an emotional connection. HubSpot has a great article and different examples of how emotion is used in advertising and marketing.

Using Design to Answer Objections and Distinguish Your Brand

Your design should answer the common objections that people might have. A company should anticipate objections and be proactive through their marketing collateral design about answering them.

The better you understand the needs and concerns of your target market, the better equipped you will be to do this. The biggest objection many people will have is that they haven’t made up their mind about whether your company is better than the competition. When possible, your design should emphasize things that distinguish your company from competitors. To do this, you can use visual representations to show the differences between your company and the competition.

For instance, your website could have a table that contrasts your company in one column and your competition in the next column. In other contexts, charts or graphs could effectively show your company’s strengths. Conveying your message with a visual is an excellent way to complement the text you use.

Other Resources to Review

If you would like to see some different designs, check out Dribble, a web-based community of designers and “a place to show and tell, promote, discover, and explore design.” Also, take a look at the websites of Intercom and Apple. They are good examples of companies that are consistent in having a good-looking design.

If you need some more inspiration, Land-Book has some great landing page examples, and Swiped is a good place to view tons of different marketing strategies and ideas. Both are good websites for designers and marketing managers to learn more about design from other like-minded professionals.

Integrate Design Effectively Into Your Marketing Collateral

A great design can make an enormous difference. Remember – “less is more” is almost always an excellent rule of thumb. Keep your design and text simple and you will drive more conversions. Have a focused message and tell a consistent story about your company. Answer objections proactively, use calls-to-actions and be responsive to different devices. Follow these tips in order to refine your design and effectively integrate it into your marketing collateral.

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