Designs play a vital role in marketing your business.
How you visually present your business before prospects is crucial to attract and retain the right audience, and propel growth.
Whether your prospects consciously pay attention to designs or not, the visual elements tremendously contribute to the buying process of your prospects.
Designs must not just make your business look good, but also efficiently contribute to increase the bottom line of your business.
We at Brandelight call them meaningful designs.
Meaningful designs are those designs that:
Did you know that mere 50 milliseconds is all it takes for people to judge a website?
Not one, but three studies have proven that website design must make a good first impression within 50 milliseconds.
In such a short time span people form an opinion about your business.
So how is an impression defined?
Basically, an impression is defined as an “emotional state or feeling” that is evoked in the minds of your target audience either by your marketing collaterals or digital marketing assets.
Meaningful designs aid in creating positive first impressions, which in turn produces pleasant emotion.
Pleasant emotion instantly breeds a pleasant association with your business.
Because consumers consider both emotional(holistic) and rational(analytic) judgment while buying a product or using a service.
Meaningful designs helps in forming the emotional judgment of your product/service.
For instance, if your website design is clutter-free and well laid out, you will appear credible and trustworthy to your prospects.
If your website features bold colour choices and imagery, your business would come across fun, energetic, and exciting.
To seem informative and useful, you need to design your website in a way that is easy to navigate and find information.
Meaningful designs are produced with such in-depth understanding of the impact it creates on your prospects.
Meaningful designs set you apart from your competitors
The market is crowded. For prospects to remember your business and be loyal, you really need to cut through the noise.
Or else, your business will be forgotten like a ship passing in the night.
Meaningful designs can help you tackle this challenge effectively. It will enable you to grab attention, establish a strong connection, and stay ahead of your competitors in the marketplace.
Meaningful designs will leverage the full potential of whitespace, typography, colours, imagery, and interactive designs.
For example, whitespace is not only essential to create a clutter-free look, it also allows your target audience to focus on a single point, conveying the Unique Value Proposition of your business.
This approach will let you to hold the attention of your target audience after you have successfully grabbed their interest.
Likewise, typography dictates how people react to your message. Using big, bold and daring fonts can pep up the look and messaging of your business. With the right choice of typography, your target market will easily grasp what you think is important.
When it comes to colours, the feeling they evoke on a majority of people must be considered. Warm colours like red, orange, yellow, and their variations are used to create energetic, passionate, happy, and positive feelings.
Cool colours like purple, blue, green and their variations can be used to create exquisite, reliable, trustworthy, and authoritative emotions in people.
Imagery is a key, yet sometimes overlooked, aspect of design. You need to pick images that are authentic and related to your business. Images must be relevant to the message you want to tell. It is always better to avoid stock images that are staged. For example, many Indian companies use stock images of foreigners while showcasing their team. It’s a blatant giveaway of lazy designing.
Meaningful designs establish better connections with the target market
You want your target audience to reach out to you after seeing your website or other digital marketing tools.
For that, your design must be conversion focused.
Meaningful designs are created after an in depth understanding of the target persona to ensure better conversions.
That is, you need to do target audience segmentation, which includes age, location, income, gender, marital status, education, and psychographics such as personality, lifestyles, opinions, values, and interests.
By creating your buyer persona, you will be able to establish a better connection with the target audience. Since your target audience will closely relate to your marketing messages and campaigns, they will prefer using your product or service.
Let’s say, your target market is millennials. Then, you need to get creative. You can try unconventional shapes, offbeat fonts, unusual images, and bold colours. When you add a dash of coolness and quirkiness to your designs, it might work well with millennials as they would able to relate better with your business.
Similarly, if you are selling a premium product, you might want to create a feeling of sophistication and exclusiveness by using dark colours and elegant patterns, and taking a minimalistic approach.
Meaningful designs will take the buyer’s preferences and behavior into consideration and thereby help you engage more effectively with your target market.
Because understanding the target market will let you create customised designs that reflect the prospects’ aspirations and perspectives.
Meaningful designs boost credibility, build authority and improve bottom line
Think of design as the face your business shows the world.
When prospects first encounter your marketing collaterals, they subconsciously ask a lot of questions:
- Who is this?
- What are they selling?
- Would this be reliable?
- Would they be professional?
- Would they offer what I am seeking?
- Are these guys the right choice?
Meaningful designs will sincerely address those questions in an aesthetically appealing manner.
Meaningful designs make your business look credible by communicating your values, reflecting your brand ethos, and showcasing who you are, what you do, and why you do it.
According to a research conducted by author Dr. Brent Coker from the university of Melbourne, it was revealed that visually pleasing websites are considered as more trustworthy.
The author went on say, “As aesthetically oriented humans, we’re psychologically hardwired to trust beautiful people, and the same goes for websites. Our offline behaviour and inclinations translate to our online existence.”
He also added, “The biggest source of frustration is the inability to find relevant information on a website. The best way to stop defection to other websites, and increase loyalty, is to be interesting. Being pretty, but with nothing to say, is not enough.
Meaningful designs strike a balance between aesthetics and functionality. That is, meaningful designs ensure your marketing asset is not only pleasing to the eyes, but also ensures to offer information in an easy manner.
When your prospects easily get what they seek in a visually attractive platform, they will begin to trust your business.
That’s why, it’s of vital importance to take care of the professional appearance as well as the logical structure of the information flow and navigation of a website, which has to be user-friendly.
Now that you know what meaningful designs are, do you think businesses should care about them? Feel free to share your thoughts with us. And if you had found this post valuable, don’t hesitate to share it with your friends and colleagues.
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