How To Balance Design and Marketing for Business Sucess
The times when design was just something to make a campaign prettier are gone. Digital marketing design is crucial in strategic business decision-making in today’s market. Whether that is because of the mass adoption of online systems and applications from the public or reverberations from Steve Jobs’s presentation and architecting of the iPhone, or any other of the many instances of B2B tech, D2C, and B2C consumer goods iconic marketing campaigns, design has become a force in creating differentiation for your brand.
Although the placement of artistic expression with business objectives is nothing new—we all recall Andy Warhol’s work—the way digital marketing design fits modern business strategies is still very new. Therefore, it’s unexplored, murky, and full of opportunities and pitfalls.
It doesn’t help that design doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all team structure, as we discussed in a previous blog. The role design plays also varies according to the industry and focus of the company. For instance, it’s common for B2C companies, like companies that sell soft drinks, to focus on emotional attachment, while B2B companies take perks and features into their main messaging.
Let’s try to solve this puzzle and clarify how design can help your company reach the growth you want.
How design helps companies establish brand identity
To have a great brand identity is much more than a simple logo, no matter how beautiful it may be. Your brand’s identity needs to tell your target audience all they need to know about you by looking at your website, your ads, and more.
Your audience can’t look at your brand and mistake you for someone else or not be sure that an ad or communication is coming from you, so inventiveness and consistency are crucial to enhancing communication.
Deciding on color schemes and palettes and crafting fonts, layouts, marketing assets, and other design elements are essential. And how to choose the right one? Well, here’s where marketing plays a key role: research, defining company value propositions and what they stand for, and all that, besides the vital market understanding. For instance, creating a healthcare company with red as its primary color with yellow arcs may not make much sense.
We can see such differences in established brands such as IBM, which has a minimalistic and modern approach, and Coca-Cola, which opts for more vivid and playful design elements. To further expand on this context, McKinsey’s 2023 B2B Pulse research shows that 57% of companies that acquired over 10% of market share have invested in highly personalized, omnichannel marketing initiatives, and consistent design is at the center of these pushes.
Awesomic connects creativity with business for clients by matching them to talent with the industry expertise and work experience necessary to help make strategic and creative decisions. Over 4000 companies, from startups to enterprises, trust Awesomic with their creative needs. How about you? Explore what Awesomic can offer you by registering in our app.
Design-driven UX in digital marketing
Design and user experience (UX) shape how modern customers interact with your digital marketing assets. That means landing pages, web apps, applications, and even emails. They need straightforward navigation and CTAs placed in the best possible places so customers are always clear about which action to take to move along the marketing funnel.
A PwC report shows that over ½ of U.S. customers leave a brand entirely if provided with a poor digital marketing experience, and numbers for GenZ customers go as high as 69%. Yeah, get a higher than 50% decrease in customer acquisition simply by not putting enough stock into UX design.
When visual considerations directly impact the way customers engage with your business in channels such as emails and social media ads, design needs to be involved in the strategic decision-making of your company’s initiative. The role design performs here is to advocate for the customer.
By taking a customer-centric approach to design, you can still foster creativity to overcome the obstacles of transmitting information to the right people. Ensuring your layouts, templates, and illustrations align with the messaging while creatively reaching customers is a fun challenge for most designers.
This customer-centric approach is as important for B2B as it is for B2C. McKinsey’s 2023 Pulse research for B2B companies shows that from 2009 to 2023, the amount of research done by organizations on social media has 5x’ed.
Balance marketing and design in the digital world
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Now, we understand how marketing and design must work together. But how would that work in practical terms? The answer is so simple it may shock you. Have marketing and design teams integrated and ready to give grace to each other.
One common situation is for marketers to go for aggressive testing with pop-ups or overly long landing pages. They need to gather the data and the design to accompany it. While designers will be able to deliver, having the marketing team also be open to UX design feedback and possible constrictions is necessary for sustainable growth. This doesn’t mean canceling all testing and not getting leads, but it means both teams must compromise and focus on the common objective.
Another common situation is for the marketing team to have access to a wonderful asset that doesn’t quite work for the channel they’re exploring. For instance, a social media post for LinkedIn does not bode as well for an Instagram audience. The design must adapt perfectly to the platform where the asset will be posted.
Marketing teams are not pedantic when asking for reviews and redos, so make sure to dot all your i’s and understand where they are coming from to avoid delays and friction in reworking design assets. As mentioned in our last blog post, ensure the teams’ workflows are unblocked and understood by everyone.
Ensure that everyone involved understands delivery time, requirements, and time for edits easily. McKinsey’s 2024 B2B pulse survey shows over ten omnichannel interactions are made before buying. If you can’t efficiently handle the design requests for each of those, your business growth will be affected.
Let’s put egos aside. Performance will be ahead, and revenue will be incoming.
How to use and measure design for long-term success
Magna Global’s research, in partnership with LinkedIn, has revealed that B2B companies are looking for more emotion over functionality in ads and that when B2B ads are seen as “creative”, decision-makers are 40% more likely to consider purchasing from them.
Understanding these opportunities, experimenting, and measuring how the design of your campaigns affects business strategies can lead to exponential growth.
A few critical metrics, methods, and KPIs to keep in mind when measuring the results of your experiments are:
Crucial metrics and KPIs to track design performance
CTR (Click-through rate): Click-through rate is how many clicks your content is getting for each impression. The usual way to measure CTR for design is to track click events and user actions. For instance, one simple way would be to measure which buttons are getting the most clicks per user session. Does their placement, design, and color make any difference?
Engagement Rate (Engagement rate/impressions): Engagement rate will measure how many people engage with your post per impression. Engagement actions are quantifiable actions the user takes to interact with your content: comments, reactions, and reposts, for instance.
Reach (Impressions/frequency): Instead of simply looking at how many impressions you got, it’s essential to understand how many impressions were for unique users. You can get impacted by the same ad multiple times (thanks, YouTube), so it’s far more helpful to understand how many of those impressions were for singular people. This will show you how far and how deeply your design and campaigns impacted customers and potential new customers.
Key methods for design success measurement
A/B tests: It’s one of the most used testing frameworks to measure performance on websites, emails, and YouTube. Here, you’ll pit one design against the other by serving them to different users. The one with the best performance stays, the other goes. The pro tip here is to set a baseline; you should use majorly different designs and make particular changes one at a time to optimize the design. So you can understand what is driving the results.
User research: User interviews are one of the most effective user research methods; there are many others, such as surveys, focus groups, usability tests, etc. The main strength of user interviews is that you get feedback from the people your design affects the most: your customers and your target audience. For instance, you should only consider foregoing user interviews if your intent is growing beyond your current target audience with a new offering.
When design and marketing mesh perfectly
As a closing to this article, let’s look at actual cases where design and marketing worked together to achieve incredible results for B2B and B2C companies.
Microsoft - ADLaM
In one of the most powerful branding campaigns conceived, Microsoft partnered with the Barry brothers from the Fulani people to deliver their alphabet to the digital world and stop it from dying with technological advancements since the alphabet was only available on paper. They collaborated with typeface designers and experts to make the alphabet easier to read and understand. This is a powerful testament to how symbols and words can move an entire community and keep their culture alive.
.png)
Decathlon Canada - Ability Signs
Decathlon Canada decided to work with symbols and icons in a bold fashion. They went after the International Symbol of Access by changing its framing to Ability Signs. The signs showcase how, even with disabilities, people have the potential and ability to achieve incredible things. This bold move resonated with multiple customers and landed the company awards.
.png)
British Airways - “A British Original”
With over 500 executions, this campaign leveraged the much underrated OOH design by using a simple creative that’s easily readable and a smart text to boot. It talks to their customer’s pains and dreams. Truly a work of art on what simplicity can achieve.
.png)
Heineken - Ireland Pub Museum
The time for AI and 3D is already here, and the foundations for AR and VR environments are being laid. Heineken’s Pub Museum became a staple for activation of AR to deliver museum experiences and help traditional pubs from Ireland and multiple places in Europe. One key aspect of the success of this campaign is how much UGC (user-generated content) boosts brand awareness.
.png)
Yerbaé + Awesomic - Penn State Product Launch
We’ve discussed innovation, scale, the common good, and more. But not all marketing campaigns need an elaborate million-dollar setup. What about a product launch using social media and other materials for companies and startups that can’t afford the scale of the previous ads?
Awesomic supported Yerbae in their efforts to successfully launch Penn State’s Blue Razz in less than three months, aligning the brand identities of both organizations in a single product and delivering assets for digital and physical campaigns.
.png)
Unlock the business potential of your designs
We want to hear from you. Do you have a great campaign idea but can’t quite execute it? Book a demo with Awesomic, and let’s unlock the potential of design for your marketing and business initiatives.
The times when design was just something to make a campaign prettier are gone. Digital marketing design is crucial in strategic business decision-making in today’s market. Whether that is because of the mass adoption of online systems and applications from the public or reverberations from Steve Jobs’s presentation and architecting of the iPhone, or any other of the many instances of B2B tech, D2C, and B2C consumer goods iconic marketing campaigns, design has become a force in creating differentiation for your brand.
Although the placement of artistic expression with business objectives is nothing new—we all recall Andy Warhol’s work—the way digital marketing design fits modern business strategies is still very new. Therefore, it’s unexplored, murky, and full of opportunities and pitfalls.
It doesn’t help that design doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all team structure, as we discussed in a previous blog. The role design plays also varies according to the industry and focus of the company. For instance, it’s common for B2C companies, like companies that sell soft drinks, to focus on emotional attachment, while B2B companies take perks and features into their main messaging.
Let’s try to solve this puzzle and clarify how design can help your company reach the growth you want.
How design helps companies establish brand identity
To have a great brand identity is much more than a simple logo, no matter how beautiful it may be. Your brand’s identity needs to tell your target audience all they need to know about you by looking at your website, your ads, and more.
Your audience can’t look at your brand and mistake you for someone else or not be sure that an ad or communication is coming from you, so inventiveness and consistency are crucial to enhancing communication.
Deciding on color schemes and palettes and crafting fonts, layouts, marketing assets, and other design elements are essential. And how to choose the right one? Well, here’s where marketing plays a key role: research, defining company value propositions and what they stand for, and all that, besides the vital market understanding. For instance, creating a healthcare company with red as its primary color with yellow arcs may not make much sense.
We can see such differences in established brands such as IBM, which has a minimalistic and modern approach, and Coca-Cola, which opts for more vivid and playful design elements. To further expand on this context, McKinsey’s 2023 B2B Pulse research shows that 57% of companies that acquired over 10% of market share have invested in highly personalized, omnichannel marketing initiatives, and consistent design is at the center of these pushes.
Awesomic connects creativity with business for clients by matching them to talent with the industry expertise and work experience necessary to help make strategic and creative decisions. Over 4000 companies, from startups to enterprises, trust Awesomic with their creative needs. How about you? Explore what Awesomic can offer you by registering in our app.
Design-driven UX in digital marketing
Design and user experience (UX) shape how modern customers interact with your digital marketing assets. That means landing pages, web apps, applications, and even emails. They need straightforward navigation and CTAs placed in the best possible places so customers are always clear about which action to take to move along the marketing funnel.
A PwC report shows that over ½ of U.S. customers leave a brand entirely if provided with a poor digital marketing experience, and numbers for GenZ customers go as high as 69%. Yeah, get a higher than 50% decrease in customer acquisition simply by not putting enough stock into UX design.
When visual considerations directly impact the way customers engage with your business in channels such as emails and social media ads, design needs to be involved in the strategic decision-making of your company’s initiative. The role design performs here is to advocate for the customer.
By taking a customer-centric approach to design, you can still foster creativity to overcome the obstacles of transmitting information to the right people. Ensuring your layouts, templates, and illustrations align with the messaging while creatively reaching customers is a fun challenge for most designers.
This customer-centric approach is as important for B2B as it is for B2C. McKinsey’s 2023 Pulse research for B2B companies shows that from 2009 to 2023, the amount of research done by organizations on social media has 5x’ed.
Balance marketing and design in the digital world
Now, we understand how marketing and design must work together. But how would that work in practical terms? The answer is so simple it may shock you. Have marketing and design teams integrated and ready to give grace to each other.
One common situation is for marketers to go for aggressive testing with pop-ups or overly long landing pages. They need to gather the data and the design to accompany it. While designers will be able to deliver, having the marketing team also be open to UX design feedback and possible constrictions is necessary for sustainable growth. This doesn’t mean canceling all testing and not getting leads, but it means both teams must compromise and focus on the common objective.
Another common situation is for the marketing team to have access to a wonderful asset that doesn’t quite work for the channel they’re exploring. For instance, a social media post for LinkedIn does not bode as well for an Instagram audience. The design must adapt perfectly to the platform where the asset will be posted.
Marketing teams are not pedantic when asking for reviews and redos, so make sure to dot all your i’s and understand where they are coming from to avoid delays and friction in reworking design assets. As mentioned in our last blog post, ensure the teams’ workflows are unblocked and understood by everyone.
Ensure that everyone involved understands delivery time, requirements, and time for edits easily. McKinsey’s 2024 B2B pulse survey shows over ten omnichannel interactions are made before buying. If you can’t efficiently handle the design requests for each of those, your business growth will be affected.
Let’s put egos aside. Performance will be ahead, and revenue will be incoming.
How to use and measure design for long-term success
Magna Global’s research, in partnership with LinkedIn, has revealed that B2B companies are looking for more emotion over functionality in ads and that when B2B ads are seen as “creative”, decision-makers are 40% more likely to consider purchasing from them.
Understanding these opportunities, experimenting, and measuring how the design of your campaigns affects business strategies can lead to exponential growth.
A few critical metrics, methods, and KPIs to keep in mind when measuring the results of your experiments are:
Crucial metrics and KPIs to track design performance
CTR (Click-through rate): Click-through rate is how many clicks your content is getting for each impression. The usual way to measure CTR for design is to track click events and user actions. For instance, one simple way would be to measure which buttons are getting the most clicks per user session. Does their placement, design, and color make any difference?
Engagement Rate (Engagement rate/impressions): Engagement rate will measure how many people engage with your post per impression. Engagement actions are quantifiable actions the user takes to interact with your content: comments, reactions, and reposts, for instance.
Reach (Impressions/frequency): Instead of simply looking at how many impressions you got, it’s essential to understand how many impressions were for unique users. You can get impacted by the same ad multiple times (thanks, YouTube), so it’s far more helpful to understand how many of those impressions were for singular people. This will show you how far and how deeply your design and campaigns impacted customers and potential new customers.
Key methods for design success measurement
A/B tests: It’s one of the most used testing frameworks to measure performance on websites, emails, and YouTube. Here, you’ll pit one design against the other by serving them to different users. The one with the best performance stays, the other goes. The pro tip here is to set a baseline; you should use majorly different designs and make particular changes one at a time to optimize the design. So you can understand what is driving the results.
User research: User interviews are one of the most effective user research methods; there are many others, such as surveys, focus groups, usability tests, etc. The main strength of user interviews is that you get feedback from the people your design affects the most: your customers and your target audience. For instance, you should only consider foregoing user interviews if your intent is growing beyond your current target audience with a new offering.
When design and marketing mesh perfectly
As a closing to this article, let’s look at actual cases where design and marketing worked together to achieve incredible results for B2B and B2C companies.
Microsoft - ADLaM
In one of the most powerful branding campaigns conceived, Microsoft partnered with the Barry brothers from the Fulani people to deliver their alphabet to the digital world and stop it from dying with technological advancements since the alphabet was only available on paper. They collaborated with typeface designers and experts to make the alphabet easier to read and understand. This is a powerful testament to how symbols and words can move an entire community and keep their culture alive.
Decathlon Canada - Ability Signs
Decathlon Canada decided to work with symbols and icons in a bold fashion. They went after the International Symbol of Access by changing its framing to Ability Signs. The signs showcase how, even with disabilities, people have the potential and ability to achieve incredible things. This bold move resonated with multiple customers and landed the company awards.
British Airways - “A British Original”
With over 500 executions, this campaign leveraged the much underrated OOH design by using a simple creative that’s easily readable and a smart text to boot. It talks to their customer’s pains and dreams. Truly a work of art on what simplicity can achieve.
Heineken - Ireland Pub Museum
The time for AI and 3D is already here, and the foundations for AR and VR environments are being laid. Heineken’s Pub Museum became a staple for activation of AR to deliver museum experiences and help traditional pubs from Ireland and multiple places in Europe. One key aspect of the success of this campaign is how much UGC (user-generated content) boosts brand awareness.
Yerbaé + Awesomic - Penn State Product Launch
We’ve discussed innovation, scale, the common good, and more. But not all marketing campaigns need an elaborate million-dollar setup. What about a product launch using social media and other materials for companies and startups that can’t afford the scale of the previous ads?
Awesomic supported Yerbae in their efforts to successfully launch Penn State’s Blue Razz in less than three months, aligning the brand identities of both organizations in a single product and delivering assets for digital and physical campaigns.
Unlock the business potential of your designs
We want to hear from you. Do you have a great campaign idea but can’t quite execute it? Book a demo with Awesomic, and let’s unlock the potential of design for your marketing and business initiatives.
