How to Effectively Integrate Design Into Your Marketing Collateral | Ep. #182

Published Jan 29, 2017, 11:00 AM

In Episode #182, Eric and Neil discuss how you can effectively integrate design into your marketing collateral. Tune in to discover just how important design is in your marketing campaign and why you need to be more careful in picking the right design.

Time Stamped Show Notes:
  • 00:27 – Today’s topic: How to Effectively Integrate Design Into Your Marketing Collateral
  • 01:00 – “Design shouldn’t just be used to make things look pretty, it should have a purpose. The purpose should be to help emphasize the message you’re trying to make and drive sales and conversion.”
  • 01:15 – Having a styling guide will help you to be consistent
    • 01:47 – Check Dribbble to get ideas from different portfolios
    • 01:58 – Intercom is consistent in having a good-looking design
  • 02:26 – “Make your designs very simplistic. Designs that are too overwhelming tend to not convert well”
  • 02:35 – Make sure the text is legible and dark in color for easier reading
    • 02:49 – “Text impacts conversion more than anything else”
  • 02:58 – “Make the design fall with the message you’re trying to create”
  • 03:38 – Use call-to-actions throughout the design
  • 03:53 – Make sure you are also answering objections
  • 04:46 – “Your landing page should be one cohesive story”
  • 05:05 – When you’re designing a page, your website should be responsive
    • 05:25 – Make sure that it works on different browsers and devices
  • 05:38 – Land-book has good examples of different landing pages
  • 06:05 – Swiped has different ideas worth checking out
  • 06:13 – Great design should be invisible and should be sitting in the background
  • 06:31 – “Make sure the design elements you use on different device types are more relevant”
  • 07:27 – That’s it for today’s episode!
3 Key Points:
  1. A simple and great design is invisible and therefore, converts into sales.
  2. Make sure the design is not hurting or taking away from the message.
  3. The design should be tailored specifically to each device for the users to have that unique experience.

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Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All right, guys, before we start, we got a special message from our sponsor. If you want to rank higher on Google, you gotta look at your page speed time. The faster website loads, the better off you are with Google's Core Vital update. That makes it super super important to optimize your site for low time. And one easy way to do it is use the host that Eric and I use, dream Hosts. So just go to dream host or Google it, find it, check it out, and it's a great way to improve your low time Llill and welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sue and I'm Neil Patel, and today we're going to talk about how you can effectively integrate design into your marketing collateral. Neil, what does that mean when you're using marketing campaigns, whether it's landing pages, PowerPoint presentations, even your website, right, everything requires design. Now, the real question is is how do you integrate design into your marketing campaigns. Should you just redesign stuff so you design it so it's pretty. Where should you put pictures, texts, buttons, et cetera, so that way you get the maximum amount of conversions. Design shouldn't just be used to make things look pretty. It should have a purpose. The purpose should be to help emphasize the message you're trying to make and drive sales and conversions cool. So the first thing you can do when it comes to putting design into it, I would recommend having a style guide. You know, oftentimes when you see that there's inconsistencies with a brand, whether it's inside of a PDF or on the website, it's because there's no style guide that's present. So you know, I would recommend I don't know if Neil you have a post on quick Sprout, but I do recommend checking out you know, specific style guide examples. If you don't have one, now go to your designer and get it set up. That's the first part you want to have consistent see when it comes to your brand, otherwise it just falls apart. The other thing I would say is, you know, if you're looking to get designs going in the early days. I also recommend taking a look at Dribble. We've talked about this a couple of times, so that's d R I triple B l E. Take a look at the portfolios there and you can come up with ideas. But you can see the best brands out there. Let's use Intercom dot Io as an example. They have, you know, their designs are good looking, but they're consistent across the board, and that's what it takes to look good. Even Google they're pretty consistent when it comes to their designs too, So try to draw in from these other examples and then figure out how you can integrate that into your stuff, because I can tell you, you know, even even today, in some cases when we're doing like lead magnets and that new stuff, the design starts to you know, be inconsistent sometimes and we need to brail that back in and we need to get people to follow the style guide. Few tips. Make your designs very simplistic. Designs that are too overwhelming tend not to convert well. Second thing, make sure the text is very legible dark in color like black, so that way it's easy to read. Obviously, you don't want to use black text on black background, But you get the point. If people can't read the text, you're not going to get conversions. I found that text impacts conversions more than anything else, not just the font itself, but the word do as well. The next thing that you want to do is make the designs flow with the message you're trying to create. For example, if you're trying to create a sales page and you make the design really blocky and you're making each section a separate part, well, a sales page typically is one long story. If you're designing each section with a different theme, then you're breaking away from the story and the flow of it as being one story versus many different stories, right, So you want to make sure the design doesn't hurt the message you're getting across. For example, if you're doing one story, you should have one theme for that page, not many different themes on that page. The other thing you want to do is use CTAs a call to actions throughout the design. You also want to start using testimonials and case studies of course throughout the designs, or it could be user reviews. If you're in the consumer world and you want to make sure more importantly than anything else, you're answering objections. So objections could be why isn't there free shipping and you can end up putting that out. You can put texts, but you can also use an image saying that, hey, we want free shipping for e commerce site. So with then with your landing pages, you want to make sure the image also says free shipping, not just the words or emphasize it makes it stand out. You'll also notice that with companies. Let's say if you're a software as a service company, someone may end up saying why should we sign up for you? Versus X, Y and Z competitor? So from a design angle, you could design a table that breaks down your company versus the competition and show like using checks and x's features you offer versus what features the competition doesn't offer. So those are all examples of how you can use design to help push out your message. And always keep this in mind. I know we talked about storytelling here as well as in past podcasts, but your landing page should be one cohesive story. If it's not. If your presentation, landing page, your site, etc. Is not one cohesive story and it's multiple stories, your conversions will tank great and a couple other rapid fire things from my side. When you are designing a page, for example, people still forget this even though we're in twenty seventeen. Now your site has to be responsive, right. We're in a mobile first world now, so you know, with all these new updates that Google's coming out with, you have the interstitial stuff, you have the HGVPS, and the responsive is still something that people forget about, right, So it should be mobile optimized and you use something to test to make sure that it works well on all different browsers, tablets, all different devices, and the things that Neil's talking about right now in terms of having a cohesive story. If you're thinking about hey, like, I don't know what's like a good example of that, Well, if you go to land dash book dot com so that's land hyphen book dot com. You can see a lot of different examples there. You can see people up voting, downvoting different landing pages and overall websites out there. And then if you're talking about copy, for example, you want to see copy dot flows copy that tends to convert well, that's layered on with good design. Just go to swiped that's s W I P D dot COO and you can get a lot of different you know, ideas around copy. The other thing I will say is if you look at Apple, their design is always invisible, right, great design is invisible. It shouldn't be taking your attention away, right. It should be like it should be sitting in the background. When I look at my you know, I'm just looking at my keyboard, my mouse, right now, my monitor. It's just it's beautiful, but I don't think about it all the time. And that's what good design looks like. And it should also be fast Neil anything else to add. Make sure the design elements you use on different device types are more relevant, right. So for example, my betty Tim Sykes has different mobile offers for his marketing messages and the design is different. For example, he teaches people how to trade stocks, so this is a bit aggressive. But one of his elements on his mobile site is how rich are you ready to be? And it has a little bar that's not rich, and it goes all the way up to very rich and has a dollar sign which is a slider And on a mobile phone, you put your thumb on the slider and you drag it all the way to very rich. Right, and then opten appears. I'm not saying it's the best or it's a terrible way of doing opten, But the point I'm trying to make is his marketing material, the design, the element he's using is Taylor specifically for mobile. In essence, he's creating a different experience depending on the device type that you're on. If you went to sit on a desktop, you wouldn't see that. All right, that's it for today's episode of Marketing School. Let us know what you think. We'll see you tomorrow. This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of, and don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.