Once you understand how integrating great design uniformly within every aspect of your content marketing takes time and effort, but the investment is well worth it since it will benefit your business.
Read the first part , if you haven’t already.
Design is a decisive aspect of content marketing. Investing in excellent design elements can help underline your priority about your work and your ideal customer. Consistent design across platforms and content types will build brand awareness and allow you to re-purpose content easily. Unique and creative designs allow you to rank higher in search engines, break the clutter, increase customer impressions and boost engagement. Quality design is also a proven way to add value to your audience and drive conversions through subconscious triggers.
In continuation to our series let’s go further in exploring how effectively using graphic design can assist you in improving your digital marketing strategy.
Providing more value
A good content marketing strategy focuses on how to provide value to your customers and audience. Focusing on customer success and providing value can increase both brand loyalty and customer retention, which results in more sales over time. Using visual design elements throughout your content helps increase the value you provide.
Research shows that people can follow visual instructions three times easier than written instructions.
This means producing a video tutorial or an original info-graphic to convey product features or instructions can prove to be much more effective than just a text-based guide.
Interactive website designs and chat-bots can also provide more value to your customers and result in increased conversions. Instead of delivering content on a simple blog interface, they use creative, smooth design.
Systematically re-purposing content
There are volume of content types. Though you won’t use them all, any strategy should include at least a few types. However, creating totally unrelated content for every platform and channel can be a blunder.
Using powerful design tools, you can always re-purpose one piece of key content into multiple other formats. For example, let’s assume you have a valuable white paper that includes a lot of relevant industry research. Here are just a few ways you can quickly reformat it:
Create an info-graphic of the most interesting research
Shoot a video or record a podcast on the content in the paper
Pull out information on one company within the industry and turn it into a case study
Write a new blog post summarizing the findings of the paper
Send out a newsletter with an overview of the paper (and a link to it)
Publish social posts sharing tidbits from the paper
Develop an online course based on teachings from the white paper
In all of the above examples, very little content needs to be added, updated, or changed. The major effort is in selecting out the appropriate pieces of content and then redesigning other content types around them.
Reviving and updating old content can also benefit your business by drawing in new audience members.
In this case, you’re not changing the content type but simply taking an old article or content piece and refreshing it to the occasion. This can be achieved by updating the stats within it or adding new, valuable design elements such as new high-quality visuals.
Increasing customer impressions
If your content is visually challenging, no one wants to devote the essential time to check out if it provides valuable information. On the other hand, innovative web designs can be used to provide a unique customer experience that leaves a lasting impression.
Using high-quality images is an essential element of any great design. Web pages and articles without any images get 94% less views than articles with at least one visual.
Adding videos and interactive content into your website design can quickly boost impressions. After all, 4 times more people prefer watching a video review than reading a written product review.
Even for standard non-visual content types such as podcasts or interactive elements, well-designed marketing materials can help reach more people and drive more impressions.
Creating lasting impact
Research shows that people can recall 65% of the visual content that they see even after three days. In comparison, after three days, people will remember only about 10% of the written content they’ve read.
This could mean people are more inclined to remember the design elements of your content than the actual written information you’ve shared.
Interesting visual aspects become critically important for fostering positive lasting impressions.
If communicating key pieces of information is a part of your strategy, such as how you increase your web visitors, make sure you format that info in a visual way.
Focus on designing key takeaways into a graph, chart, or image rather than just statistical data in written form.
If you’ve been considering to get started with content production activities for growing your business, then consider hiring us.
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