Overview
When most people think of “design”, they think of the visual aspect of the process, but design thinking and strategy play an important part in boosting campaign interaction and metrics.
Our design process always includes a healthy dose of discovery (competitor research, gathering KPIs, etc.) before we start on anything visual. Besides, “content is king” in design, so making sure we’re assisting our clients in crafting appropriate messaging and content is key.
In this piece, we give insight into the design process for creating successful campaigns:
- Know what your audience is looking for
- Use your brand voice (and what that means)
- Create a conversion-optimized landing page
- Include attractive imagery
- Fine-tune and test your call-to-action
- Come back and refresh
Know your audience
Even though it isn’t visual design, identifying and learning about the audience is an integral part of the design process. What persona(s) are you targeting, and what are their pain points? Their needs? Their desires? Personalization is valuable because by creating unique campaigns that are focused on specific sets of users, you’ll be able to generate more high-quality conversions. Once you determine which persona(s) you’re targeting, you can craft the rest of the messaging around the specific pain points and problems those users are trying to solve.
When crafting a value proposition, the goal is to communicate important and high-level value in as few words as possible. What can you say that will allow your user to both understand their problem and want your product within 5 seconds?
How does your brand speak?
If you have a fleshed-out brand guidelines document, it should tell you how to speak to your audience. Is your voice friendly, warm, and educational? Does it avoid jargon and buzzwords while still using words that your audience will know?
By crafting content that aligns with how you want to be perceived, it allows you to communicate your message more effectively. However, if this concept sounds foreign to you, it may be time to think about diving deeper into your company’s own brand identity. Brand is the base upon which everything else should be built, in order to deliver your product(s) as effectively as possible.
Create a conversion-optimized landing page
If you are currently running an ad campaign, you may be using a page on your current website. Unfortunately, a conversion-optimized page may have structural differences that make it hard to implement on your main site. For example, industry best practices recommend removing external links wherever possible (except for homepage and privacy policy links) in order to keep the page as focused as possible on the single conversion point.
When we build pages for clients, we generally recommend a page builder platform like Instapage or Unbounce, especially if it’s for a campaign that needs to be able to launch ASAP while not sacrificing quality. It allows for quicker timelines to ramp up an initial campaign launch and also has built-in A/B testing capabilities.
Include attractive imagery
Walls of text are intimidating, so it’s important to break up text content with visual elements whenever possible. However, stock photos can be dull sometimes and don’t feel personalized in the same way that illustration or custom photography does.
If you have access to a stock imagery account, try purchasing vector illustrations, but having a designer edit them to align with preexisting brand imagery. This elevates your design and creates a more custom feel to imagery without the time and resources it takes to go all-out.
It’s also extremely important that any graphics are created once content has been finalized, as it can be used to clarify your content!
Fine-tune and test your call-to-action
We always support the data-driven approach, but it’s especially important for designing CTAs. A more specific call-to-action that directly communicates the next step is more effective in a lot of cases.
However, it’s important to research what others are doing in your industry, and to A/B test whenever possible to see how users respond. Based on conversion metrics, use a call-to-action that has proven effective for your audience, and come up with an alternate version that you think might work better to test against.
It’s important to proactively improve and refine your messaging with as the market fluctuates, so you can stay on top of your game (and on top of your competition!)
Come back and refresh
While it’s good to have evergreen campaigns that promote core offerings, conversion rates often dwindle over time, simply because the content becomes stale. So, it’s important to periodically revisit your current campaigns, test new imagery, and tweak messaging if necessary. If you’re not changing, you’re not growing. Using a data-driven approach means that you should constantly be seeing how you can iterate and test against what is currently running in order to get more metrics.
Here at Digital Reach, we’re focused on growth, since our goal is to keep our clients competitive and ahead of the curve. That’s why we focus on researching industry best practices as they evolve, and integrate them into our service offerings.
