Digital Marketing is dependent on attracting the attention of the target audience successfully. As there is a trail of endless content waiting for anybody who surfs over the net, visuals are the most notable differentiation to add an appeal required to engage any visitor. Matured application of graphic design in your content can always get your objectives fulfilled for you.
Your content marketing strategy is the master plan for your end-to-end marketing tactics. It helps you plan, create and publish content that aligns with the overall business strategy, audience and that produces results. Whatever be your objectives or goals for your content marketing like revenue growth, sales drive, traffic volume, SEO ranking or anything else, graphic design is instrumental for all.
Read this article to know about how to create content basis your audience queries, for an effective content marketing strategy.
The most visible design element within your content strategy is the design of the content itself, as well as your website experience. Whatever content structure you choose, design needs to be a principal consideration. Poor design hampers the user experience and dissolves your content into anonymity.
Be it a video or an article or an e-book, all types of content requires some design elements. The most notable element is the visual content you incorporate, such as photos, info-graphics, memes, illustrations and videos.
Yet, you also need to consider other design elements such as page layout, font selections, color combinations, heading dimensions, delivery and your use of logos.
Within your overall content strategy, there should be an all round design strategy.
This will be necessary to create and document design manuals and standards for people to use when creating and publishing content.
You need to realize that you might not get all of your design elements right the first time. Which makes it essential for the design ideas to be planned and tested before taking them live using a splash page/ test page.
A smart combination of testing, evaluations and updates into your design strategy will help you achieve the results you’re looking for. If it flops within the test phase, you haven’t wasted time or sent it to the mass market, saving you from the hassles of damage control.
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 in many ways as listed in the rest of the article.
Earmarking your ideal customer
Developing a detailed persona of your ideal customer is an important step in your content marketing strategy, since 80% of marketers say content created for a persona is more effective.
This persona needs to enlist and help understand your team exactly for whom the content is being created for. If your content isn’t resonating with your ideal audience, engagement and conversions will suffer.
A well-envisioned persona is useful in determining the topics, ideas and keywords that need to be incorporated into your content. But in order to build an effective persona, lot of details need to be gathered and compiled, including:
Audience demographics such as age, gender, ethnicity, income, location and job title
Hobbies, interests, beliefs, habits
Challenges they commonly face or pain points causing them to search for your product
What problem does your product or service solve?
Where does your ideal customer hang out? Which social platforms do they use? What blogs do they read?
What content formats do they prefer?
Charting all this information into a visual persona helps communicate a lot of data quickly and easily while promoting a deeper understanding of your ideal customer. When referencing your consumer persona, you can avoid the hassles of sifting through piles of text to get core information.
Here’s an example of a great persona design:
Raising brand awareness
Quality design elements can significantly improve your brand awareness and help you tell your brand’s story, as long as you maintain a cohesiveness across all channels and platforms. For example, your font should be consistent throughout your website and other written content such as white papers and case studies.
If your photo is a distinctive part of your brand, you should have a good professional head-shot that is used consistently across social media. You should also use the same picture in the bio section of every guest appearance.
In addition, your logo and brand colors should always be the same and your sales funnel should have consistent design elements throughout.
Creating your unique identity
Content marketing is fiercely competitive, with 91% of B2B (Business-to-business) companies pursuing it and 86% of B2C marketers considering it as a key strategy to reach customers.
Originality becomes crucial to your success with such a huge volume of content being created every day. Only 30% of marketers create their own visuals, giving unique and creative design elements a strong chance to stand out.
In addition to audience engagement, unique designs can also drive back-links and improve your SEO. If you publish original info-graphics, charts and visuals that people find useful, you increase your chances of other people using them on their own sites and link back to you as the contributor.