Creating and designing marketing designs is difficult. It takes a lot of effort and patience in order to create professional and stunning designs, especially if you want to break out of the norm. This can be made even more challenging by a lack of resources or knowledge.

What’s the difference between an average marketing design, and a brilliant one? A good designer will tell you: It’s their ability to think like the audience. And I know you’re thinking that’s impossible—but guess what? It isn’t. Join me as I show you what makes a marketing design excellent.

The importance of great design

Everyone wants an original, inspiring, and compelling design for their marketing collateral. But it’s very difficult to achieve this. It may appear simple, but the process is challenging. There are many things to take into account when designing marketing collateral—a clever process behind it all.

Companies now need higher-quality design than ever before. It makes your brand appear more professional and trustworthy. After all, if you can’t design appealing marketing collateral, most consumers won’t take you too seriously. 60% of consumers avoid companies with unattractive logos.

Marketers know how important designs is as well. 64% of marketers claim that visual content is an essential aspect of their marketing strategy.

Design plays a role in both printed and digital marketing collateral, including:

• Social media posts
• Blogs
• Emails
• Websites
• Ebooks
• Informational postcards
• Videos
• Apps
• Sell sheets
• Promotional sheets
• Pamphlets
• Marketing mail

A clean, professional design is essential if you want to elevate your marketing strategies.

Consistency is key, but know when to break the “rules”

Consistency across fonts, colors, and other themes in your marketing designs makes your brand look more professional. It also makes it easier for people to remember you. If you’re constantly pushing out marketing designs that aren’t consistent, it can be disorienting.

Make decisions about your brand. What fonts, colors, and types of pictures do you want to use consistently? Are there any go-to designs or patterns your marketers should choose? On the opposite end, are there any choices designers should never make when it comes to your brand? Document your decisions so you can easily share it as new marketers join your team.

Don’t worry about being boring: For specific campaigns, it can be interesting to be bold and stray from your normal designs. For example, use a separate font or color for that campaign. It can create an exciting contrast that draws attention to the campaign. Keep in mind, this should only be done occasionally. But here are some tips:

1. When planning your marketing design, the first thing you need to do is set clear goals for it. You should think about the following when setting your goals: who is this marketing campaign directed at? What action do I want my audience to take when they see this campaign?
2. Next, you should do research on what other companies have done in the past with similar campaigns. This will help give you insight into how other companies have approached their marketing designs so that you can improve upon them for your own company’s designs.
3. Pick a new font, color, and image-type for the campaign, all of which will be different than what your designers would usually do.

You may find that being bold for campaigns helps you reach new audiences and draw in more customers. But overall, being consistent is the way to go.

There’s no room for mistakes

Designing marketing materials that are going to make your business stand out requires extreme attention to detail. Avoid making any mistakes that could potentially hurt your brand and cause people to be turned off by what you have to offer.

Understand this: Mistakes are going to happen. But they need to get corrected before they get published. Even worse, before they get printed. Because once your marketing collateral is printed and handed out, there’s no going back. You want to avoid that forehead-slapping moment where you notice a mistake long after the content has been published or printed.

It’s important to not only have detail-oriented designers, but also have multiple pairs of eyes on the design before it gets finalized. Upper-level marketing management should be ensuring that every single detail is accurate. In marketing, every single detail is essential to nail. No mistakes make you look better and helps you gain trust with your audience, but it also helps you avoid missing any leads. For example, if you put the wrong email address, then that marketing content failed to bring you leads.

Common mistakes to avoid

When making marketing materials, we often miss the little things that can make all the difference in our final product. Here are some details to keep an eye out for:

• Typos
• Grammatical errors
• Extremely inconsistent text styles, sizes, or fonts
• Improperly resized images (for example, the correct image size for each social media platform)
• Misaligned elements
• Posters or other handouts that have unintentional white space

Keep an eye on these small details and you’ll be well on your way to great marketing design!

Think of your audience first

Remember: The design is not for you. When you’re making a decision about what to do with your marketing campaign, don’t consider yourself first: Instead, think about whether what you’re doing will benefit the people who will be engaging with it.

If you keep your audience in mind when you’re designing, you’ll end up with a better design every time. So before you start designing anything, ask yourself: Who am I trying to reach with this? What are they interested in? How can I connect with them in a meaningful way? How can I make this experience easier for my consumers? This will help you make sure that your design speaks directly to your audience.

The more you put your audience first, the more likely they are to enjoy what they see and engage with it in a meaningful way. After all, at its heart, marketing is just a conversation between you and your audience. Be sure that conversation is friendly—and that it’s always focused on them!

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