Your customers are barraged every day by a huge amount of content that’s vying for their attention — billboards, social media ads, posts and flyers. In a world where there’s so much content to be distracted by, how do you capture your audience’s attention?
Unique, branded graphics are one of the best ways to stand out from the competition and build brand awareness.
However, creating these graphics and finding out how to use them can be tricky.
These six tips and tricks help you create and deploy killer graphics that spread awareness of your business and build a stronger brand:
1. Stay Consistent with Your Branding
It’s always a good idea to return to your brand essentials when creating new graphics. Ask yourself what visual elements are central to your branding — what already makes design elements like your logo stand out?
Responsive Web Design: 7 Advantages on Why You Should Opt It ForThis can help you keep your graphics in line with the most recognizable aspects of your business’s visual identity — its colors, fonts, shapes and use of texture, for example.
A consistent appearance can help you use your new graphics to build stronger branding, potentially making customers more likely to develop deeper associations between those aesthetics and your company.
2. Keep It Simple
When creating new graphics, aiming for simplicity is often the best strategy.
Tips for Increasing Your Kansas City Brand’s Visibility OnlineA too-complex design may be less effective at communicating whatever message you’re trying to get across. It can also be worse at building brand awareness.
In a simpler custom graphic, the elements shared across the rest of your branding materials may be more likely to stand out. Your use of a particular font or color combination is easier to spot when your overall design is less busy.
Simplicity in a custom design can help ensure your new graphics fit into your overall brand strategy — increasing the chance that customers associate the graphics with your company and, over time, building brand recognition.
Setting Up and Running a Media Heavy WebsiteFor this reason, many graphic designers recommend sticking with limited color palettes and using just a few fonts — or even one or two if you can get away with it. If you want to ensure readability, using a text color that contrasts well with your background hue can help.
3. Boost Your Social Media Profiles
Custom graphics are a great way to create attention-grabbing content for social media or make your social media profiles look a little more interesting.
Social media platforms, in general, tend to prioritize visual content. If you only have text, you may find your posts don’t reach as large of an audience as they could.
Best Designed Games for 2017Many brands get around this by using cheaply available visuals — like stock images. If you have your own custom graphics, however, you can improve your content’s reach while building brand recognition.
Social media graphics can also seriously help you tell your brand’s story and communicate complex messages. Storytelling is an essential marketing skill for any SMB owner, and learning to use graphics to tell a story on social media is a great way to develop that ability.
4. Find Unique Locations for Your Graphics
One of the biggest benefits of custom graphics is that they can help you create unique physical advertising.
For example, many businesses with vehicle fleets apply decals or full auto wraps directly to their vehicles — providing passive marketing whenever one of these cars is out in the world or on the road.
You might also take advantage of a physical storefront and place signs with your custom graphics in highly visible store windows. Physical signage in high-traffic areas can provide similar benefits, as can flyers, newsletters, in-store standees and stickers.
5. Upgrade Your Packaging
A new logo or set of brand graphics is a great way to spruce up your product packaging. If you sell physical goods, you can incorporate your graphics into your packaging in various ways.
For example, you can print your logo directly on a product box, or order custom packaging materials — like packing paper — with your logos or graphics printed on them. This approach can result in product packages that look more professional and visually appealing while also helping you build brand recognition.
Your new graphics may also be a great fit for a digital product, site or app. Incorporating your new graphics into your user interface (UI), for example, can help remind your customers about your brand while they use your product.
6. Make Your Content More Valuable
You can also use custom graphics to boost your content marketing strategy. Many businesses take advantage of visuals to add some extra visual appeal to written content. Others use graphics to create infographics and other highly visual types of content. These can be more entertaining than text-based content while still providing value to customers.
You can either design new graphics that will accompany your content or build new content that takes advantage of custom graphics. Infographics, for example, provide information to customers by using visuals to make presented data as easy to understand as possible.
Once the content is ready for publication, you can also use the graphics to promote your social media posts or website.
Using Custom Graphics to Grow Your Brand
Custom graphics are one of the best ways to help your brand stay out in a world that’s full of distractions. If you want to capture your audience’s attention and build a stronger brand, creating graphics is a great place to start.
These graphics will work best when they’re in line with your other branding materials and used creatively. Packaging, storefront displays and auto wraps are all ways you can use these graphics to advertise out in the world.
