When developing marketing collateral to promote your business, it is not enough to create content that will communicate your brand’s message accurately—you also need to ensure that they are presented in a creative and visually-appealing way for them to actually be effective. Here are some of the most useful design tips that will help you create awesome marketing materials.
Use compelling colors that reflect your brand.
According to studies, colors play a significant role in brand recognition. With this, when choosing colors to use during the development of marketing collateral, make sure that they are not only compelling, but they also reflect your brand’s personality.
With this, you can start by looking at your logo and official brand colors. You can use them as a guide when selecting the color palette for your marketing collateral.
However, if you’re still finding it difficult to find the right color combination to use, you may want to check out online resources that feature color combo libraries, color combination testers, or a random color scheme generator to gain some inspiration.
Make sure that the texts are readable.
How would your target market understand your message if they can’t read the content? Therefore, contrast is another factor that you should take into consideration when designing marketing materials for your business.
This aspect is especially important to check if your collateral involves a bunch of texts, graphics, and a background color. For instance, when your background color is very light, a dark-colored text is more appropriate (and vice versa). Moreover, adding a border around the text can also improve speed and ease of reading.
Photo credit: adobe.com
Don’t use too many font types in a single document.
Although design tools and software can give you access to hundreds of different font types, it is advisable to just limit your use to 1 to 2 fonts. No matter how much you like them, never put them all together in a single document. Trust me, it would appear chaotic.
Just choose one or two font types that will best represent your brand personality. Furthermore, it is highly recommended that you use these consistently in all your marketing collateral to improve brand recognition.
Choose the appropriate font size.
When designing your marketing collateral, make sure that you adjust the font size of your text in such a way that your target market will not find it difficult to read. If you’re creating something that will be printed into a roadside signage, for instance, use a font size that is huge enough for people to read with ease even from a distance. Moreover, it is also recommended to apply varying font sizes within a single document to emphasize certain parts.
Bonus Tip:
You may also want to experiment with different effects for more emphasis. See how the text looks if it is in italic or bold.
Use white space to make the design look dynamic.
Once you manage to utilize white space to your advantage, the overall document will appear more dynamic. White space can be considered as the structural support of the various elements of your marketing collateral.
For instance, if the space between the heading and the body itself becomes too narrow, the strength is lessened. However, by properly using white space, you will be able to drive the audience’s attention to these elements.
If you think that your marketing collateral doesn’t have enough white space, don’t hesitate to remove other elements. Alternatively, you can also try to move objects around the document to change the center of attention.
Use icons or simple images that are relevant to your content.
To spice up your marketing collateral, you should consider adding icons or simple pictures in your document. A purely text-based content will be extremely boring and will fail to attract your target market.
Strike the right balance between texts and images/ icons. By using relevant objects, you will not only be able to grab the attention of your audience but will also help them understand your message much better.
Always consider your target market & channels for distributions.
Always remember that social media channels have different types of users, and the same users frequently turn various platforms depending on the kind of information that they need.
For instance, Facebook is the ideal social networking site if you want to promote events and make announcements. Hence, you can publish posters of your events and new promos through this site. Another good thing about Facebook is that it is effective for reaching an extremely broad audience because of its massive and diverse user base.
On the other hand, LinkedIn is more suitable for posting infographics and other types of marketing collateral with bits of interesting facts and figures. The reason behind this is that this is the networking site for professionals and business-minded folks—people turn to this platform to find information that could help them stay ahead of the curve and learn more about their industry. So here, value and information are more important than beauty or aesthetics.
As for Instagram, text-heavy images for advertisement and informative purposes are inappropriate. What are perfect to post on this social networking site are inspirational quotes that are relevant to your industry.
“To be able to come up with well-designed and effective marketing collateral, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, who your target audience is, and where will you distribute your creative content”.
Final Thoughts
The tips shared in this article are just some of the most basic, yet effective practices that you should keep in mind when designing brochures, banners, infographics, or any other type of visuals that you will use for marketing your business. However, if you lack the creativity and skills necessary to develop attractive marketing collateral, you can always hire a cost-effective designer to accomplish this task for you.
Infinit3solutions has a team of professionals who have years of experience in the field of graphic and web design. What sets our team apart from others is that our designers have a background in digital marketing and are updated with the latest industry trends and tools.
Learn more about our design services by dropping us a message today!
