With all the noise and clutter online, it’s a challenge to make any business stand out. But by investing in graphic design, you can do more than just make your Instagram page pleasing to the eyes.
The benefits of graphic design go beyond aesthetics. They can drive business growth by reinforcing brand identity, adding competitive advantage, ensuring content readability, and giving your business a good reputation.
1. Reinforces Brand Identity
Branding is how a company presents itself and how people perceive it. This can be seen in everything from how a business executes its customer service to its social media pages. One of the most prominent aspects of branding is visual identity. It generally consists of the following elements:
- Logo: One of the main elements that people will associate with a brand. It’s the first thing that they will see and will keep seeing when interacting with your business—printed in your packaging, posted on your website, hanging on your storefront, and more.
- Color palette: Helps set the overall tone of the message that a brand is trying to convey. Warm colors like red and yellow will have a different effect from cooler ones.
- Typography: Works similarly. A font like Helvetica sends a different message than something like Times New Roman or Comic Sans.
- Website: Is where people can learn more about a company. Think of it as a showroom. It contains the details of their products and services, contact information, and story while being presented in a certain way.
With so many companies putting themselves out there, it’s not enough to just have a fancy logo or color palette to stand out. A well-planned graphic design strategy will then help you establish your brand in several areas. When you are consistent with your visuals across various channels, people will most likely remember you. Some areas you can optimize include your website, web or mobile apps, and the icons you use for them.
Fenty Beauty is one brand that has executed this effectively. Rihanna, its founder, and CEO, started her beauty brand as a response to the lack of products that catered to all skin types and tones. Since then, Fenty has launched foundations, lipsticks, body glitters, and many more beauty products without straying from its brand.
From the website to its Instagram page, visitors can find professionally photographed models with different skin tones, a comprehensive shade finder tool, and videos of Fenty users showing how they use the products for casual, day-to-day wear. Fenty’s brand identity as the makeup for all skin tones remains consistent and it’s one that even people outside the beauty community know too.
2. Adds Competitive Advantage
Each business’s products and services may differ in ingredients, packaging, or any other factor. But they essentially exist for one main reason—to solve a problem. Graphic design gives businesses the opportunity to distinguish themselves from competitors within their niche. With it, you can curate unique visual content that emphasizes your products and how they can be effective solutions.
Take Headspace as an example. It’s a meditation app that aims to help its users relax, reduce stress, and improve their sleep. Its product offerings and their proposed benefits target a problem that’s prevalent today, which lends itself to more competition. To stand out from similar brands, Headspace makes use of its visual branding in other channels, too. Take a look at their Instagram page.
Headspace’s brand is known for its bright and whimsical designs, which complement its goal of bringing happiness. Aside from illustrations, Headspace also creates banners and graphics to promote upcoming events and blog posts. Some simply have mental health quotes or self-love reminders. Not only is Headspace reinforcing its brand identity, but they are also promoting its non-visual content through graphic design.
3. Makes Data Readable And Impactful
There are some things that are better presented visually. For instance, information that is heavy on numerical data and blocks of text will not draw that much attention when presented on its own. With effective graphic design, you can take all that information and condense it into digestible pieces.
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One common example of this is infographics. They’re used to create visually impactful content without having to omit any necessary information. Below are some key visual elements of an effective infographic:
- Color palette. Aside from adhering to your visual brand guidelines, limit your selection of colors to a minimum. Too many can make your infographic look cluttered and difficult to read.
- Text hierarchy. This is a strategic design technique that helps guide the readers to the correct flow of information—which text they should read first, which ones support the main topic, and which ones are additional information.
- Graphs and charts. Organizing your hard data this way will help make your content readable and hold your readers’ attention.
- Icons. Instead of adding more words, use icons to convey ideas to the reader with just one glance.
Zendesk was able to do this with infographics. They analyzed consumer expectations and other top SMB trends in 2020 by conducting a survey of 403 sales executives, managers, and reps. To ensure content readability, Zendesk utilized text hierarchy and vector icons to represent certain metrics to avoid crowding the page with text.
4. Indicates Credibility
Putting out well-designed content isn’t enough. You need to be consistent with your brand visuals as well. For example, if your main color palette is in the warmer spectrum, your social media pages should also reflect that. Over time, consistency and uniformity will make your brand more recognizable and help build a strong rapport with your audience. In fact, it has been shown that brands that earn customer trust get more sales, customer loyalty, and positive recommendations.
A prime example of this is Apple. Everything from their product design, user interface, and brand logo have one central theme—minimalism. Their focus is on creating products that are simple to use, but intuitive at the same time. An Apple advertisement will typically only have two elements—a photo of the product and its name—and many people will still recognize it instantly. Tied in with their seamless customer experience, having equally consistent brand visuals helped Apple build a community of loyal customers to this day.
5. Increases Audience Engagement
Brand awareness, content readability, and professionalism are all benefits of graphic design. But does it actually produce results?
The answer is a definite yes. According to a Venngage survey, original graphics, like infographics and illustrations, is the top visual content that helped marketers reach their goals in 2020. Social media posts with visual content also perform better than those without as evinced by these statistics:
- LinkedIn posts with images generally result in a 98% higher comment rate.
- Tweets with visual content are three times more likely to have engagement.
- Facebook posts with images have 2.3X more engagement.
Let Vlaid Do The Work For You
To effectively reap the benefits of graphic design, you will need all hands on deck. Attractive brand visuals must be complemented by the right talent to create effective marketing strategies out of them, and vice versa. With the help of Vlaid, you can fulfill both. You can delegate tasks to our digital creative assistants without compromising your brand identity and overall quality. Below are some responsibilities a Vlaid assistant can take on for your business:
- Track performance metrics of marketing campaigns
- Apply Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices to your website
- Create engaging visual content for social media and Google Ads
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