We’re sure you’ve heard the terms mass marketing and targeted marketing. Even if you haven’t they’re pretty self-explanatory. The success of both of these strategies hinges on a very crucial aspect. And that is the type of graphic design you choose.
Successful marketing doesn’t mean you go ahead and use every avenue there is to advertise yourself. It’s much more restrained than that.
Successful marketing happens when you choose the right types of graphic designs instead of all types of graphic design. It’s a quality-over-quantity argument and quality wins over quantity any day.
In this blog, we will help you methodically choose the right types of graphic design for your marketing campaigns. Trust us, if you follow these steps and the advice we present, you’ll be well on your way to creating marketing campaigns that actually work where you’re guaranteed to get good ROIs.
But first, let’s begin by looking at the different types of graphic design you can use in your marketing.
There are so many types of graphic design out there that you can use. But here’s a list of the most popular categories and some of their subcategories.
These are just the tip of the iceberg. And depending on your marketing strategy or campaign the need to use these types of graphic design can vary.
Here are some good questions to ask:
Is it a global campaign or a localized campaign? Global campaigns can benefit better from digital advertising and localized campaigns can benefit from print advertising.
How long do you want to run your campaign? The duration of the campaign will also determine if it’s best to go with digital graphic design or printed graphic design. For example, if you’re running a long-term campaign you can compare costs to see which is more cost-effective to run long-term.
This is a good question to ask yourself. If you’re launching a product then there are several design types that you can rely on throughout the launching journey. On the other hand, if it’s a service you’re offering, depending on the type of service, you can benefit from both digital and print design marketing forms.
Now let’s look at the standard procedure for choosing the right types of graphic design that work well for you.
In this segment, we hope to present steps for you to begin identifying the right types of graphic design suitable for your marketing campaigns.
These steps are not presented in chronological order and should be used in conjunction with each other to finalize the types of graphic design.
Identifying your core goals will help you choose the right types of graphic design to use in your marketing. Here are 3 common goals:
Your offerings won’t make much of a difference if your customer base doesn’t know your brand exists.
One top way to ensure brand awareness is by consistently sticking to your brand’s visual identity. The more your target audience sees and associates with your brand’s various elements the more they become aware of your brand.
The McDonald’s Golden Arches logo is a good example of this as it is a symbol etched in people’s brains.
They have consistently strewn it across all their marketing material so that just a slight glimpse of the arch will cause people to know what it is.
So good visual identity designs are great for creating brand awareness.
Lead generation is an important part of the marketing funnel. It’s the process of accumulating a list of potential customers.
You can generate leads by using marketing channels like email, social media, and digital ads. This provides an avenue to use email designs, landing page forms, social media graphics, and different types of digital ad graphics.
Here’s an exemplary landing page form design by KIMP for example:
If you’re currently in the process of acquiring leads then some good lead magnets like this would also do the trick.
Website traffic is an important marketing goal because the more traffic you get the more conversions that can happen.
A few ways to increase website traffic would be to use paid ads on Google and social media platforms. Attractive ad designs with compelling CTAs on these platforms can increase the click rate and thereby your website traffic.
Here’s a Facebook ad from McDonald’s for example. Simple and to the point!
Another important step in choosing the right kinds of designs involves understanding your target audience.
Understanding your target audience is crucial for selecting the right types of graphic design. It’s because they influence every subsequent step in your marketing efforts.
As a part of understanding your audience, segregate them into categories like gender, age, generation, and geographical location. What designs you need to create will be clear when you have these individually figured out.
For example, it helps to know which gender primarily benefits from your products or services. While matters of gender remain a controversial topic to navigate, one thing is clear – different genders lean towards different preferences.
For instance, if the majority of your audience is female, then platforms like Pinterest are a great place to run marketing. According to Sprout Social, 76.2% of Pinterest users are female.
This is probably why IKEA is crushing it on Pinterest. When users search for home ideas IKEA offers alluring product images that solve 2 problems for consumers – finding inspiration and where to buy those particular items.
Let’s talk about another example. Let’s say that you’re target audience is aged between 18 and 29 years, it helps to know what social media platforms they’re most active on.
Here’s a collection of stats from Oberlo that showcases this:
According to these stats, you should strengthen your graphic design game for the most popular platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. These platforms all call for diverse post formats like single-image posts, carousels, short-form videos, and long-form videos.
But let’s say your audience is geographically much closer to you. That should involve a lot of local marketing strategies. And some of the best local marketing strategies include outdoor advertising also commonly known as OOH (Out of home) advertising. These can include things like billboards, flyers, posters, signage, etc.
Here’s a good billboard example that reflects its location:
So you see, your target audience plays a massive role in choosing which types of graphic design can achieve your marketing or campaign goals.
By studying competitors, you can identify industry standards, design trends, successful strategies, and gaps in the market. This insight helps you reinforce if you’ve chosen the right types of graphic design that resonate with your target audience. It will also help you think of what you can do differently to gain a competitive edge.
Some things to intentionally research are competitors’ websites, landing page designs, social media posts, and other marketing materials. Note their color schemes, typography, imagery, and overall design approach. Look at what works well and what doesn’t to inform your design strategy.
Based on your research you can come up with a good brand identity and brand guidelines that work well for you.
One good example is when McDonald’s rebranded McCafe to a sleek new style with a new logo and new packaging to keep up with competitors like Starbucks.
Here’s the new packaging:
Remember, the goal is to gather information, not to imitate. Think of it as learning from their successes and mistakes to create something uniquely yours. This approach ensures your designs are distinctive and true to your brand.
Up until this point the 3 steps we’ve discussed need to be visited over and over again to fully finalize the right types of graphic design for your marketing. Now say that you’ve narrowed the types down. There’s still a very important step that you need to follow, and that is the next and final step on our list.
Once everything is designed, ready, and live you still need to test those designs and gather feedback from your audience to understand their impact and effectiveness.
And one very important test you need to conduct is A/B testing.
A/B testing is a super important test conducted to figure out the best design types for your marketing.
It’s a simple concept but it can get slightly confusing with big words. So allow us to explain it in the simplest terms possible.
Imagine you have two different designs and you’re not sure which one your audience will like more. With A/B testing, you show one design to half of your audience and the other design to the rest. Then, you see which one gets better responses.
Some metrics to compare include conversion rates, active users, average session duration, events per session, and goal completion among other metrics.
It’s like a popularity contest for designs! This way, you’re not just guessing – you’re using real data to pick the winner. Similarly, A/B testing helps you continuously improve your designs, making sure your marketing really hits the mark.
This sort of testing not only helps you improve your designs but it also helps you pick which types of graphic design your audience prefers. It’s all about their cup of tea.
Some good A/B testing tools to use are VWO by Wingify, Adobe Target, AB Tasty, and Apptimize by Airship.
So there you have it, four steps to choosing the right types of graphic design for your marketing. Now, let’s move on to the conclusion.
If you’re a resourceful marketer chances are you’re going to wonder why you need to choose between design types. Why not do it all to make a big bang? The reason is simple.
As we mentioned in the opening of this blog it’s a matter of quality over quantity. When you narrow down on the best-performing types of graphic design you can focus all your resources, namely manpower and money to perfect those areas.
And then consequently after conducting A/B tests you and your design team can focus more on the quality of the right designs. It’ll keep you from needlessly creating underperforming graphic design types.
Using the right types of graphic design will ensure proper brand awareness, and a good lead generation and definitely drive those sales. So it’s important to invest in designers who take care of the design part for you so that your research doesn’t go to waste.
As usual, we would highly recommend unlimited graphic design services because they do all of these common types of graphic design for a flat fee.
By leveraging these services, you can ensure high-quality, consistent, and effective designs that elevate your marketing efforts and maximize your ROIs.
