What You Need to Know About Graphic Design for Today’s Small Business

From branding, stationery, illustrations, and website design to packaging, and promotional materials, graphic design is a vital factor your business just can’t ignore.

Understanding graphic design for business is vital for today’s business owner. It’s crucial your potential prospects gain trust and credibility from your company.

Graphic designers are visual communication problem solvers as they can make your marketing message visually easier to understand and consume.

By creating important graphics that are a part of a broader visual communication like website content, advertising campaigns, or print media, good graphic designers are able to deliver the desired message of a company and captivate an audience to take action on their offer, products, or services.
Now let’s take a look at specific examples.

Graphic Design for Business Examples

The Design Council studied 63 portfolios of companies that traded on the FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) over a single decade.

The key takeaway from the study is that companies who put an emphasis on design did way better than the ones that didn’t – they outperformed key stock market indices by 200% and not only that, growing companies are nearly six times more likely to view design as being integral to their business. 

So when you think of graphic design for business, think of it as the bread and butter of your business and less the cherry on the cake. It’s essential for every type of advertising possible. Content marketing, check. Print media, check. email marketing, check. Search marketing, you get the point.

How Graphic Design for Business Can Help Your Marketing Efforts

1. Establishes trust in the marketplace

Trust is something that builds over time so making a great first impression is very important. You have to create a visually creative appeal to make that first impression, however, you have to work towards maintaining the customer relationship, and establishing trust early on is key in order to work on retaining a customer for the long haul. And we can achieve this with good graphic design.

Founded in 2005, AppSec specializes in providing strategic security services to help clients maximize their security and risk management investments.

They needed a modern, compelling rebrand that would demonstrate to customers that they were a “problem-solving” business, making security and compliance understandable and achievable.

The new brand imagery included a new logo, brochures, sales sheets, stationery, trade show materials, and a brand new website design that would give AppSec the professional consistent look that helped them become more visually approachable for new business opportunities and partnerships in a variety of new verticals.

2. Increases Sales

Marketing-focused graphic design helps consumers understand what you’re offering. And the better you can help an audience understand what it is you are selling, the more sales you can make as a result.

Marketing plus focused graphic design equals grabbing the attention of people and getting them to read a little further. It can help consumers keep you on the top of their minds and really crave your product. It conveys a certain feeling. It encourages consumers to take the next step in the sales process.

Let’s take Honest Tea, for example. They knew their packaging gave off a bad impression of their product and wanted to change the way people perceived their brand. So they redesigned the packaging to show the tea was both delicious and healthy.

And it was a huge success.

The next year, Honest Tea’s sales hit a steep 64% increase in sales. Now, that’s impressive.

 

3. Conveys Your Message

By now, you know that visual communication performs way better than plain old text and has a greater impact of just words alone. It’s true, good graphic design increases the chances of people interacting with your message, however, it’s the actual brand message that makes the design useful.

In 1986, a 3M-sponsored study at the University of Minnesota School of Management found that presenters who use visual aids are 43% more effective in persuading audience members to take a desired course of action.

After all, visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text alone and 40 percent of learners respond better to visual information than text alone.

It’s the intersection of powerful words that resonates with a person and the creative design that drives the message home with specific colors and fonts that evoke emotions in consumers.

Key Points

Let’s break down the key elements we’ve learned in this post:

• Designing quality assets for business needs to be thoroughly objective with clearly defined goals, objectives, and measurable results.
• Successful marketers understand that color can be used to influence consumers’ emotions and perceptions of products and services and actually view color as an essential element of marketing.
• Graphic designers are visual communication problem solvers as they can make your marketing message visually easier to understand and consume.
• Growing companies are nearly six times more likely to view design as being integral to their business.

Conclusion

If you could take one simple thing from this article, it’s this. Business Design is about creating and capturing value.

As many businesses are still trying to “get” design, smart companies completely understand its importance. They know design solves many of the problems we covered in this article and there is no other way to better communicate your message than strong visualization that connects with your customer.

With so many marketing channels for organic and paid content and a plethora of businesses competing for attention, the demand for graphic designers with strong business design skills will continue to rise. As the visual shift in business continues, many businesses will be left behind. Don’t be one of them.

So I leave you with this simple question:

What are you doing to better the visual design of your business? Are you taking action and prioritizing your branding and design?

If you are looking to improve your logo or need professional and “on-brand” graphic design services for your business, Neon Flamingo offers unbeatable visual content creation services for our customers.

Sources:

https://www.canva.com/learn/design-at-work/
https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/study-of-human-reactions-than-color-and-its-effects-on-advertising-IJAR-1-107.pdf
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1iA_4npTVvYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&dq=visual+graphic+designer&ots=5_pVpNnYsL&sig=eQ2fayiBnEWrHo91Z2YMTaCLFwk#v=onepage&q=visual%20graphic%20designer&f=false
https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/00251740610673332
https://humannhealth.com/effect-of-different-colors-on-human-mind-and-body/243/2/