Offering affordable and high-quality products or services is not enough to grow your business. Though the quality of your products or services is critical to the success of your business, it is useless if no one recognizes or even knows about your brand. In this article we discuss How to Build Strong Brand Awareness Through Graphic Design
For your business to generate sales, you need to be found by your potential customers first. This is where brand awareness comes in.
Table of Contents
What is Brand Awareness and Why Is It Important?
Brand awareness is about how much your potential customers are familiar with your products or services as well as with the distinctive qualities of your brand, and your image in general. The more people are aware of your brand, the more you can be able to do business with your potential customers.
When compared to lesser known brands, popular brands have a better edge at being picked by potential customers. For instance, if you were to quickly pick between footwear brand X and Nike, both offer high quality and trendy products, chances are, you will pick the latter even if the previous is offered at a much cheaper price for the same quality and style of footwear.
The same concept applies to other customers. People normally opt for brands that they are already familiar with. If your brand awareness is not as strong as your competitors, you will likely be left behind.
Whether you are launching a new brand or you are trying to market your brand’s new products or services, brand awareness plays a critical role in the success of your campaign. Though brand awareness is not a metric that can be precisely measured and determined, it does carry value to your marketing goals and overall business success.
Brand awareness helps your customer differentiate your brand from the rest and it also helps them decide as to whether they will choose your brand over your competitions or not. It also encourages repeat purchases, fosters trust, creates association, and builds brand equity. Needless to say, this can lead to better customer loyalty, increase in sales, and business growth.
Improving Brand Awareness Through Graphic Design
There are different effective ways to improve brand awareness.
- Content marketing
- Search engine optimization
- Leveraging the power of social media to reach a more targeted market
- Offering free content or freebies
- Paid advertisement
- Compelling website content
- Referral programs
- Partnering with local shops
- Podcasts
- Remarketing campaigns
- Influencer marketing
These are just some of the handful of ways to improve brand awareness. Although all these strategies can help build brand awareness if done right, it turns out that the quickest way to make people get familiar with your brand is through their vision.
Humans are naturally visual beings and so are your customers. The human brain can respond to and process visual data 60,000 times faster and better than any other type of data. Moreover, about 90 percent of the information that is transmitted to the human brain is visual in nature. That is why it is easier for people to remember things that they see than they feel or taste.
Going back to brand awareness, customers tend to remember brands that offer pleasing visuals than those who do not. This is why graphic design is important for building brand awareness. Graphic design is about creating visual content like pictures, images, infographics, and a combination of typography and photos to communicate messages.
But how can you build brand awareness with graphic design? Below are a few tips to use graphic design to build and improve your brand’s awareness.
1. Create a Business Logo
For some start-ups and small businesses, creating a business logo is no longer necessary. They believe that as long as they have high-quality products and promising target market, they are good to go. This is very wrong. The truth is, creating a business logo is one of the most important things that you need to consider when starting a business. It is an integral part of making your business grow and become successful.
Try to think about your favorite brands and visualize their business logo. It is easier to remember, right? If you see a blue-colored small case “f”, a cute bird, or a camera icon, what can you remember? Probably, you will automatically think of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, respectively, right? This is how the logo works.
A business logo is a recognizable graphic design element that serves as a quick visual representation of your business. It can be a trademark, a symbol, an image, a name, or a combination of any of these.
More than just a mere random mark, a business logo is the foundation of your brand identity, a building block of your business, and a vital tool in your product marketing.
The business logo is important because:
- It allows people to recognize your brand easily.
- It separates you from the rest and makes you stand out.
- It helps your brand grab attention.
- It helps your brand become memorable.
- It conveys your level of professionalism.
- It helps foster customer loyalty.
- It makes a strong first impression.
- It helps boost brand awareness.
Your business logo is not your brand. Rather, it represents your brand, your distinct characteristics, your core values, your mission, and your business’ personality in general. Matters as important as your business logo should, therefore, be given a deeper thought and time to make it work for your business. The font, size, color, graphics, and shape should be carefully thought of.
A skillfully and meticulously designed logo design can help you communicate with your customers in a way that words can’t. It allows them to remember your brand even if they can’t recall your business name.
2. Use Graphic Design for Promotional Materials
Many people believe that promotional stickers, brochures, flyers, and leaflets are now considered a thing of the past. The fact is, all these promotional materials can still be as effective as they were decades ago.
The trick to making them work is to focus on your graphic design.
Yes, graphic design will give you an edge. Unlike in the past, there are now different ways to make your design more vivid and appealing. You can make use of these materials to spread the news and convey your message and your brand’s core values to your customers.
3. Use Appealing Product Labeling and Packaging
Using labeling and packaging is more than just making your product presentable. It also allows you to transmit information, to grab attention, to encourage potential customers to buy your products and to make your customers remember your brand. So, even if your customers forget about the name of your brand or product, they can still remember you through your labeling and packaging.
To make labeling and packaging work as effectively as possible, you need to integrate appealing and eye-friendly visuals or graphic design so you can attract attention at the point-of-purchase and beyond.
4. Paid Online Advertising
If you are looking for ways to make your brand known in a shorter period of time, engaging in paid online advertising is the best option. Though paid online advertising will cost you more than doing the long route of improving brand awareness like SEO and content marketing, this technique often gives you promising results more quickly.
You can further boost your paid online advertising campaigns by adding some memorable and catchy graphic design. That is, instead of simply using text ads, invest more in images and videos as they attract more attention.
It is also easier for you to relay the message you want to convey. Using graphic design also allows you to describe your brand or illustrate why your product is needed at one look. This is something you can’t easily achieve when using mere text ads.
5. Harness the Power of Social Media
The increasing popularity of social media and the growing number of users make this platform a promising marketing avenue. If you have not tried it yet, it is still not too late to start harnessing the power of social media to build brand awareness and improve your brand’s presence. But here’s the catch- most, if not all, of your competitors are also using this platform to promote their brands.
The challenge now is how you can stand out despite the stiff competition. The best solution to this is to use graphic design. Through graphic design, you can make your social media posts more appealing and interesting as compared to simply using text posts.
A combination of great graphics and engaging texts is also a good way to go.
Images and appealing graphic designs are easier to share and repost. The more users share your posts, the wider each post’s reach would be.
Good graphic design can greatly help build brand awareness. You need to remember, though, that you have to use easy-to-recognize visuals and to be consistent on the look you have created for your brand so it would be easier and faster for your customers to recognize and remember your brand.
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Author Bio
Ankit Patel is a Marketing/Project Manager at XongoLab Technologies LLP, a leading mobile app development company. As a hobby, he loves to write about new & upcoming technology, business, and marketing. His write-ups have been published on popular platforms like TechTarget, SmallBizDaily, JaxEnter, Social-Hire, TorqueMag, and more.