Using Graphic Design & Branding To Market Your Next Business Venture
Deciding to start a new business – or expand an existing one – can mean creating a whole new visual identity and starting a whole new marketing undertaking. Graphic design and branding are key elements in making your marketing solid and effective. It can mean building a brand from scratch, developing a brand component for a new market segment, or updating your brand to keep up with consumer and marketing times.
The first step toward marketing success for a new, existing, or expanding business is understanding what marketing is. Marketing is everything you do to make your target market aware of your business and its products and services. That means your website, landing pages, social media, blog, newsletters, emails, and print products. Making all those marketing elements work together means reaching every member of your target market right where they are. For example, the shoppers who find you on social media aren’t necessarily the same ones who will find you in your retail stores. That means reaching each of those segments requires marketing diversification coupled with consistency and cohesion.
Social Media: marketing via social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The best way to leverage the power and affordability of social media is to choose the social sites your ideal consumers frequent most often and create a consistent presence on those sites. Graphic design and branding take center stage on social sites because consumers respond more often to images and graphics than to text-only social media posts. Choose images that create consumer appeal, are attention-grabbing, and tie your social media profiles and campaigns together with consistent images and lookalike profiles.
Email Marketing: email marketing includes your email signature, email newsletter, and – because of that signature – every single email you send out. Create an image-based email signature that’s clickable, links to your purchase portals, and tells your story in a single email image. Email marketing has an advantage over many other areas of marketing because its recipients have expressed an interest in your business by opting into your newsletter. Use a newsletter subscribe button in your outgoing emails to tie it to your email newsletter that offers value, subscriber-only VIP privileges like discounts and perks, and uses segments, autoresponders, and drip campaigns to reach your target market with regular, relevant, consistent content.
Print Marketing: printed marketing products run a huge gamut from business cards that fit in your hand to huge banners that cover your walls to whole-wall branded murals in your office. Print marketing is never going out of style. In fact, it naturally adapts itself to all other areas of marketing. It can grow with your business and its visual identity because its affordability and flexible design options make it easy to add and subtract marketing elements as needed like your URL, social media icons, event hosts, etc. Print marketing also makes it easy to share your business in a tangible way and to put something in your target market’s hand that makes it easy for them to make valuable referrals for you.
Get your business venture started – or restarted – on the right foot right away with a solid print marketing campaign that ties into your social media, website, blog, and email newsletter to create a consistent, cohesive corporate or small business presence.
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