How marketing and design work together in business

Marketing and design both play a crucial role in terms of promoting a business. Research shows that 65% of people can recall visual content up to three days after viewing it, while only 10% remember written content after the same amount of time. So adding design to your marketing helps you capture peoples’ attention and makes you more memorable.

This guide will explain how marketing and design work together to promote your business. We’ll cover the following:

• Using marketing and design to promote your business
• How to make marketing and design work together

To help you understand how marketing and design work together, let’s start by looking at what the two components bring to the table.

When it comes to promoting a business, marketing is all about effectively communicating with the right people (your target audience). Your goal is to reach as many target customers as possible and create messages that resonate with them, so they buy from you. 

The role of marketing is to build interest in your brand through compelling copy, engaging content, inspiring conversations, and a relatable brand tone. When done well, marketing can demonstrate why your business has the right solution for your audience’s needs. Still, adding design will help you create successful marketing campaigns that truly capture your audience.

Design encompasses everything from the graphics you use on your website to the shape, colour, and usability of your product. Good design helps attract attention to your marketing materials and makes your solution stand out as a winner to your audience. 

When designing anything for your business, you do so with the end-user in mind. Design is all about understanding what your customer wants from your company and solution. Your goal is to create an enjoyable user journey from their first visit to your website to their experience with your product or service. 

Marketing and design are two different jobs that share the same goal: to capture and keep customers’ interest. Here’s how the two can work together:

Your brand involves everything from your logo and colour palette to how you communicate with your customers on your website and social media. Combining compelling copy with great visual elements can help you create a unique and memorable brand that your customers love. 

For example, there’s a psychology behind how people perceive different colours. Red can increase appetite, yellow or orange can spark excitement, royal blue inspires trust, and pink can represent compassion. Using gold, silver, or black is excellent for conveying your product or service as high-end and luxurious. Skilled marketers know how to use this design method in their branding to help bring out the feeling they want. 

In addition to your colours, your communication style is a vital part of your brand. Some companies use more conversational and friendly language, while others communicate in a more corporate tone. Consider your sector when choosing your tone of voice. If you need inspiration, take a look at what language your competitors use.

When your marketing and design align with each other, you can push your content further and increase the visibility of your marketing campaigns. 

These days, every sector has lots of companies competing for attention, so you must do everything you can to stand out. Creating clear, compelling marketing messages and designing them with your logo and brand colours is a great way to do this. 

When thinking about your design, try to visualise your marketing through your target audience’s eyes. This way, you can better determine what message and images would catch their attention and avoid using elements your audience won’t find appealing. 

Remember that your branding must appear consistently across all your marketing materials. Staying consistent helps increase brand awareness, so customers recognise you at first glance. 

Adding great design to your marketing efforts does more than simply help you create an appealing and memorable look. If you succeed in choosing the right design for your marketing, you can influence more conversions and ultimately turn more prospects into paying customers. 

Adding eye-catching headlines and call-to-action (CTA) buttons to your marketing ads and website can help guide customers to take the action you want them to. This process is called ‘attention-driven design’ and involves optimising the use of design elements to drive focus to your conversion goal. Examples of conversion goals include buying a product, signing up for a webinar, or booking a meeting with you.

According to research, you only have a few seconds to capture peoples’ interest, and their attention span is narrowing. So, you need to make sure your message is clear and that all your design elements lead your audience to your CTA. 

The only way to create effective marketing and design campaigns is time and dedication. But as a business owner, you need to juggle many different tasks at once, and marketing and design could easily end up on the back burner. That’s why you need efficient systems in place to speed up tasks that otherwise take up a lot of your time. 

One task that can be particularly stressful and time-consuming when you’re self-employed is financial management. Without a good system in place, you might spend hours on tasks that could take a few seconds. As a result, other vital tasks like marketing and design will suffer. 

That’s why thousands of business owners use the Countingup app to streamline their financial admin and free up time for other business tasks. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.