When we are putting together your social media strategy brand consistency and understanding of how you want to convey your brand is of upmost importance.

Design and brand led (graphical, real life photography or otherwise) content pieces will help educate your consumers and showcase your offering exactly at first glance and in the first instance – consumers buy with their eyes. The other area to consider is how quickly our social feeds update; content is added to our platforms every second so allow your brand to have time to live on someone’s feed for more than that, consider the approach on how best to do so.

Here is why you do need to make good design part of your content marketing efforts and some tips to getting it right.

Good design communicates a strong brand

Good design speaks volumes about a company’s professionalism, quality, and leadership in it’s market. Using great design consistently on all your materials and throughout your website is good branding. You can write all the smart things in the world, but if you look like a mess, you’ve lost your audience before they start reading.

This doesn’t require a large budget. It requires consistency. Work with an agency to establish your company’s look and feel and stick to it. Don’t stray from your message promote consistency. Remember, your audience doesn’t spend day in and day out with your brand. That’s just you.

Your difficult-to-navigate website will scare people away

Yup, it’s true – if you’re barreling ahead with a killer content marketing effort and driving all of those prospects to a website that makes people scratch their heads about what you do, how to find your core services, or how to navigate logically to the resources they need, you’ve lost the game. This is where good design is mandatory, not just a nice-to-have.

It is important to find yourself a talented team to design and develop your website and make the user experience logical, smooth, and easy. We take design and psychology of the customer very seriously. Understanding how they would feel as a customer experiencing the journey in its entirety.

Good design engages readers

Companies spend money on book jackets, magazine covers, and fancy packaging for smart phones and tablets for a reason. Because first impressions draw people in. The engagement is the whole experience. Something as simple as an interesting featured image in your blog post is a chance to draw readers in along with – or maybe in spite of – your headline. A unique email header might be just the thing to get recipients click through.

Once that reader’s actually in your content, well-executed design should work in concert with the content to help keep them engaged and move them through the piece. This is where organic reach via social media is still applicable, maintaining engaging and well designed pieces to keep readers alert and engaged with your brand.

Effective design does all these things for your content … and looks good, too.

Good design gets your point across quickly and effective

Good design is a powerful tool that can get a point across more effectively than words alone. Many of us – some say 65%-80% – are visual learners, and prefer images to words to take in information. There is no one best type of content. So offer your audience a variety of content that is visual: infographics, well-crafted video, even graphics or charts within your blog posts. Then use those images to stand out in your social feeds. The more interesting your visual, the more likely your social post is to stand out in the crazy sea of content that floats by every day.

If you’re not quite ready to be a design-led company, at least make design an integral part of your content marketing efforts. It shouldn’t be an afterthought, it should be something that you’re always thinking about.