Marketing Design: The Best Way to Influence and Energize Your Prospects

The practice of marketing takes place across many different mediums and formats; however, at the end of the day, there’s an essential visual aspect inherent in every act of marketing. SEO and keyword placement rely on visual design as much as infographics and videos – albeit in very different ways. Thus, the importance of marketing design cannot be understated when you begin to plan your overall marketing strategy.

What Exactly Is Marketing Design?

Marketing design is the application and use of certain aesthetic values to achieve a particular objective. These values often include:

• Distinctive fonts (such as Google’s self-made Roboto font)
• Readily identifiable color schemes
• Logos
• Product packaging – both physical and digital
• Slogans
• General branding

As one might expect, the ultimate objective of marketing design is to support the marketing goals of an organization. Accordingly, the objectives of marketing design are typical:

• Brand promotion
• Direct consumer outreach
• Public relations
• Lead generation
• Drive sales

Like the classic definition of design, marketing design is more or less an umbrella term that covers a number of different mediums and theories.

Examples of marketing design can be seen on social media, posters, print advertisements, television commercials, and – as you might expect in 2017 – websites. Marketing design can even be seen in the layouts of certain smartphone applications and video games.

The implementation of marketing design is not the sole domain of your normal design team, nor is it a responsibility that can only be managed by your company’s marketing staff. In truth, marketing design represents one of the most critical junctures between the talents of these two teams.

What Marketing Design Accomplishes

Marketing design, in essence, is a practice that “brings form and function together to motivate a person to take action, reduce their anxiety towards the action and provide a clear, easy path to conversion”. In other words, the best marketing design works to convince (or assure) your customer that they are making the right decision by doing business with your company. Regardless of the industry you may work in this is true; you ultimately want your marketing to make the customer feel comfortable and confident that their problem will be solved and resolved.

Examples of Effective Marketing Design

The actual application of design in marketing is equal parts psychology and classic design principles. Concepts like clarity, flow, and user experience are just as important as more aesthetic components, such as font choice and color scheme.

The Design School by Canva offers a plethora of exceptional marketing design examples for both flyers and emails – but remember, marketing design affects each and every aspect of your brand’s marketing materials. Marketing design plays a role in banner ads, social media posts, YouTube videos, and any other media you may use over to support marketing campaigns.

As with many things related to marketing, it is always in your best interest to test (and test, and test) your marketing designs to see what’s working best. Split tests work for much more than just email marketing design. In fact, many companies split test colors, layouts, button positions, page titles, and more.