Graphic Design's Impact on Branding and Customer Retention
Customer retention helps your brand grow year over year. If you constantly lose customers, it’s hard to scale your business up. The goal should be to keep the loyal fans you have while adding new ones along the way.
Regular clients also help spread the word about your business via word-of-mouth marketing. You’ll gain referrals to help you grow with any additional effort on your part. Design has a huge impact on every aspect of your business, including the way people perceive your brand.
How Does Graphic Design Attract Customers?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 254,100 graphic designers in the United States. Graphic design work is in high demand in nearly every industry because every company needs a logo, images for the web and advertising help.
Graphic design takes complex information and presents it in a way that's easy for the general public to understand. It can attract people when it's visually pleasing. It can set a mood, tell a story or showcase your strengths as a business.
Here are the things you should do to improve branding and customer retention via graphic design.
1. Establish a Brand Attitude
Start by adding a style guide so all the graphic elements on your site and promotional material have a similar look. You’ll want to use the same colour palette, similar language, consistent typography and an overall look that matches your brand voice.
Do you want to come across as funny? Perhaps you sell cemetery plots, so you want a more serious tone? Figure out who you are as a brand, so your graphic designer can help send the message via their designs.
Your brand attitude impacts everything from colour choice to which words and images you use.
2. Limit Information
You probably have a lot to say about your brand. However, it’s vital you only feed your audience bits and pieces of information so as not to overwhelm them. For example, if you place a sign in front of your brick-and-mortar store, people have a short window to notice and read what's on the sign. They might even be in a car driving past, which results in an even shorter attention span.
Figure out what the goal of the message is. Point the user to the objective with everything on a graphic design piece. Cut anything else.
3. Gather a Design Team
When you have the same people working on your designs, you create brand consistency. Your customers know what to expect out of you and see you as reliable and trustworthy. Avoid constantly hiring new people who don’t fully understand the image of your brand.
It’s better to start with more people than you need, so you have backups when someone is ill or leaves for another position. Make sure everyone on the team has the same work ethic and attitude.
4. Get Employees Involved
Your staff is one of your most powerful assets in showing customers who you are as a company. Utilize their help in reaching out to long-time customers. Teach them about the voice and tone of your brand and why you’ve chosen that. Educate on the history of the company and how it impacts what you do for your customers.
Give out promotional items such as tee shirts, computer carrying bags and umbrellas. Make sure your workers are so excited about your business that they want to tell others what you do.
5. Highlight the Brand Name
With more than 32 million small businesses in the United States, your name is a vital component to finding and keeping patrons. What does your name say about who you are and what you do?
Think about how the name looks on a sign or with the logo? A professional graphic designer can play around with different fonts, sizing, colors and compositions to present the best image possible.
6. Make a Strong First Impression
The human brain processes visual elements much faster than text alone. Excellent graphic design can help users retain information about your products and services. Users view content with images more frequently than content without.
7. Beat Your Competitors
Excellent design helps you stand out from the crowd. You can establish how you’re different through colour choice and bold images.
Start by looking at what others in your industry do. You don’t want your design so far outside the norm that it isn’t recognizable as the type of business it is. On the other hand, you do want to use colours others don’t and unique images.
Coming up with the perfect graphics requires a lot of trial and error, testing and choosing the visuals your customers respond best to.
8. Use Colour to Improve Awareness
Colour can help improve brand recognition. If you use the same colours consistently in every interaction, consumers start to associate those shades with your brand.
Think about mega-corporations like McDonald’s. When you think of a fast-food restaurant, you think of golden arches in a specific hue.
Coca-Cola is known for their red and white or silver colour palette.
Keeping Your Best Customers
While customer retention is good for your business, don’t stress when you lose a few here and there. Your best customers are beneficial to your business, bringing in revenue and referrals. Some customers take up a lot of your time and are never fully satisfied. Be okay with losing the ones you don’t click with. Over time, you’ll have a nice loyal following and can grow your business rapidly.
Eleanor is the founder and managing editor of Designerly Magazine. She’s also a web design consultant with a focus on customer experience. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dogs, Bear and Lucy