10 Ways Design Can Transform Your Marketing | MP 62

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What can help you drive the success of your business? What are the most significant elements within your content marketing strategy? How can design greatly impact SEO?

In this podcast episode, Sam Carvalho speaks about the 10 ways design can transform your marketing.

Podcast Sponsor

TherapyNotes! It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and telehealth a whole lot easier. Check it out and you will quickly see why it’s the highest-rated EHR on TrustPilot with over 1000 verified customer reviews and an average customer rating of 4.9/5 stars.

You’ll notice the difference from the first day you sign up for a trial. They offer live phone support 7 days a week.

So when you have questions, you can quickly reach someone who can help, you are never wasting your time looking for answers.
If you are coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. TherapyNotes will import your clients’ demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away.

To get 3 free months of TherapyNotes,  no strings attached including their very reliable telehealth platform click on www.therapynotes.com and enter the promo code: Joe

In This Podcast

Summary

  • 10 tips

1. Clarify your ideal customer

Crafting a detailed persona of your ideal customer is an important step in your content marketing strategy. A well-envisioned persona can help determine which topics, ideas, and keywords should be incorporated into your content.

Include things like age, gender, location, job title, interests, beliefs, pain points, social platforms, where they hang out, etc.

2. Build brand awareness

Excellent design elements can significantly improve your brand awareness and help you tell your brand’s story, as long as you create cohesiveness across all channels and platforms.

Your font should be consistent across your website and other marketing materials.

If your image is a significant part of your brand, you should have a great professional headshot that is used consistently across social media. Plus, your logo and brand colors should always look the same.

A brand style guide can help you maintain this consistency.

3. Stand out from the crowd

Content marketing is a competitive field. With such a huge volume of content being created every day, originality becomes crucial to your success.

Not only can unique designs engage your audience, but they can also drive backlinks and improve your SEO.

If you publish original infographics, charts, and visuals that people find useful, chances are they will use them on their sites and link back to you as the contributor.

4. Provide more value

Focusing on client success and providing value can increase both brand loyalty and client retention. Using visual design elements throughout your content will increase the value you provide.

Research shows that people can follow visual instructions 3x easier than written instructions. This means producing a video tutorial or an original infographic to convey information is much more useful than a written guide.

5. Efficiently repurpose content

There are tons of content types. But, creating 100% original content for every platform and channel is extremely inefficient.

Using powerful design tools, you can easily repurpose one piece of content into multiple other formats.

For example, let’s assume you have a valuable white paper that includes a lot of relevant research about anxiety. you can quickly reformat it:

  • Create an infographic around the most NB points
  • Shoot a video or record a podcast around the content
  • Write a blog post summarising the findings
  • Send out a newsletter with an overview and link to it
  • Publish social posts sharing tidbits from the paper
  • Develop an online course based on the teachings from the white paper
  • In all of these examples, very little content needs to be added, updated, or changed. The bulk effort is selecting out the appropriate pieces of content and then redesigning another content type around them.

Resurfacing and updating old content can also benefit your business by drawing in new audience members.

6. Increase customer impressions

If your content is hard on the eyes, no one wants to hang around long enough to tell if it provides valuable information. In contrast, innovative web designs can be used to provide a unique customer experience that leaves a lasting impression.

High-quality imagery is an important element of any great design. Web pages and articles without any images get 94% fewer views than articles with at least one visual.

Incorporating videos and interactive content into your website design can quickly boost impressions. 4x more people prefer watching a video review than reading a written product review.

7. Creating lasting impressions

Studies show that people can recall 65% of the visual content that they see even up to three days later. In comparison, after three days, people will only remember about 10% of the written content they’ve read.

This means people are more likely to remember the design elements of your content than the actual written information you’ve shared.

Focus on designing key takeaways into a graph, chart, or image rather than just in written form.

8. Trigger great engagement

Well-designed content with high-quality visuals experiences higher engagement. Including powerful, original images will boost reader engagement and social shares.

  • Facebook posts with images have 37% higher engagement
  • Tweets with a visual element are retweeted 1.5x more
  • Across all social media, infographics average 3x more shares
  • 65% of people prefer emails with images
  • Designing key images such as your article’s featured images and thumbnails is worthwhile if you want to increase both awareness and engagement.

9. Drive sales subconsciously

95% of purchase decision-making takes place in the subconscious mind. Using design elements that trigger emotions such as strong color choices and powerful images can encourage the subconscious to make decisions in your favor.

Red is a bold color tied to passion and power. Studies have shown that using this color for Call to Action buttons can increase your conversions by 34%.

As always, less is more. Coupling your color choices with clean layouts and limited options also helps with decision fatigue and can drive more sales.

10. Improve search engine rankings

Great design of your overall site and of your content will improve your search engine rankings, which in turn will lead to more clients.

Design can greatly impact three areas of SEO:

  1. User experience: how easy is content to find and consume? Is the site clunky? Are page elements interfering with content? This can all determine your bounce rate
  2. Readability: Since most website visitors scan a page rather than read every word, is your content laid out in an easy-to-digest fashion? Your content should be broken up with subheadings, short paragraphs, images, semantic keywords, and bulleted lists
  3. Speed: If your website is too slow from design elements, you can kiss your traffic goodbye. They will bounce fast.

Useful Links:

Meet Sam Carvalho

Samantha Carvalho DesignSam Carvalho is a graphic designer living in Cape Town, South Africa, with over five years of experience in both design and marketing, with a special interest and experience in the start-up environment.

She has been working with Practice of the Practice since 2016 and has helped over 70 therapist entrepreneurs take their practices to the next level by enhancing their visual branding. She loves working with a variety of clients on design-intensive tasks and is always up for a challenge!

Follow Sam on Instagram to see some of her work. To work with Sam, head on over to www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding.

Thanks For Listening!

Feel free to leave a comment below or share this podcast on social media by clicking on one of the social media links below! Alternatively, leave a review on iTunes and subscribe!

Podcast Transcription

[SAM CARVALHO]
Is managing your practice stressing you out? Try Therapy Notes. It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and tele-health a whole lot easier. Check it out and you will quickly see why it’s the highest rated EHR on Trustpilot with over a thousand verified customer views and an average customer rating of 4.9 out of five stars. You’ll notice the difference from the first day you sign up for a trial. They offer live phone support seven days a week so when you have questions, you can quickly reach out to someone who can help. You are never wasting your time looking for answers. If you’re coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. Therapy Notes will import your clients’ demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away. Use the promo code [JOE] to get three free months of trying out Therapy Notes for free, no strings attached, including their very reliable tele-health platform. Make 2021 best year yet with Therapy Notes.

Welcome to the Marketing a Practice podcast with me, Sam Carvalho where you’ll discover everything you need to know about marketing and branding your business. To find out more about how I can help you brand new business visit www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding. And if you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram at Samantha Carvalho Design.

Thanks so much for joining me today on the Marketing a Practice podcast. Today, I wanted to talk about 10 ways that design can transform your marketing. We know by now that a strong content marketing strategy is the foundation of your business success. What’s more is incorporating great design elements into your strategy can help you ensure it drives the success of your business. The most apparent design element within your content strategy is the design of the content itself, as well as your website experience. Whether it’s a video article or eBook, every type of content requires some design elements. The most significant element is the visual content you incorporate such as photos, infographics, et cetera. However, you also need to consider other design elements, such as a page layout, font selections, color combinations, heading dimensions, delivery, and use of your logos.

So here are 10 ways that excellent design can translate into increased traffic engagement and sales for your company. First and foremost is clarifying your ideal customer. Crafting a detailed persona of your ideal customer is an important step in your content marketing strategy. A well envisioned persona can help determine which topics, ideas and keywords should be incorporated into your content. So this is the starting point when it comes to any sort of branding or marketing strategy, clarifying exactly who you’re marketing to. So you want to put together as detailed the persona as possible by including things like age, gender, location, job title, interests, beliefs, pain points, social platforms, where they hang out and so on. You really want to include as much detail as possible.

Once you’ve clarified who you’re going to marketing to you, next you want to build brand awareness. So excellent design elements can significantly improve your brand awareness and help you tell your brand story as long as you create cohesiveness across all channels and platforms. For example, your fonts should be consistent across your website and across all other marketing materials. And again, this is where a brand style guide can help maintain that consistency by outlining exactly what your brand elements are in the form of your color scheme and your fonts and things like that. If your image is a significant part of your brand, like with most counselors, you should have a great professional headshot that is used consistently across social media.

And I would go so far as to say that if you can have a photo shoot done where you’re obviously in the same environment, but that produces a number of different headshots with a similar look and feel that’s a great way to maintain a consistency, but still have some variation. So you obviously have your main headshot that you use on most points, but then you have a few other options as well that you can share on social media or include in other marketing material. Plus your logo and brand colors should always look the same.

So second to clarifying your ideal customer is making sure that you build brand awareness and maintain consistency. For example, imagine a brand with young, hip funny ads on Facebook but mature, formal and purely educational content on their blog. It would be pretty difficult to decipher what they stand for and who they’re trying to target. So you want to make sure that you maintain the same look and feel, same user experience and the same personality across all channels.

Third, you want to stand out from the crowd and this is another way that design can impact your marketing. Content marketing is a competitive field. With such a huge volume of content being created every day, originality becomes crucial to your success. Not only can unique designs engage your audience, but they can also drive backlinks and improve your SEO. For example, if you publish an original infographic or charts or visual that people find useful, chances are they will use them on their sites and link back to you as the contributor. So obviously creating original content all the time is a big plus, but it’s definitely something that should be prioritized. I would say at least once month, putting some original design content out there that is useful, that provides value and that can stand to have people share it on their platforms and link back to you.

Fourth, you want to provide more value through your marketing. And again, this is where design can help. Focus on client success and providing value can increase both brand loyalty and client retention. Using visual design elements throughout your content will increase the value that you provide. For example, research shows that people can follow visual instructions three times easier than that of written instructions. This means that producing a video tutorial or an original infographic to convey information is much more useful than a written guide. And I know that that can seem scary because you aren’t always comfortable in front of a camera, but I would say that in this day and age, the sooner you become more comfortable in front of video, the better. It really is fast becoming the best way to engage with your customers and to increase engagement and to increase the likelihood of your ideal client getting in touch with you.

Number five and in line with that is to efficiently repurpose content because as I was saying earlier, it’s difficult to create original content all the time. So as we know, there are tons of content types, but creating a hundred percent original content for every platform and channel is extremely difficult and inefficient. It’s not a good use of your time. So using powerful design tools, you can easily repurpose one piece of content into multiple other formats. And again, this is something you can do yourself, but that would be a lot easier to outsource or you can just hire a VA to help you with. So for example, let’s assume you have a valuable paper that includes a lot of relevant research about anxiety. Here are just a few ways you can quickly reformat it.

You can create an infographic around the most important points. You can shoot a video or record a podcast around the content. You can write a blog post summarizing the findings, you can send out a newsletter with an overview and link to the full paper. You can publish social posts, sharing tidbits from the paper, and you can develop an online course based on teachings from the paper. So in all of these examples, very little content needs to be added, updated, or changed. The bulk of it is selecting out the appropriate pieces of content and then redesigning another content type around them. So imagine if this is something that you do once a month. You take a couple of hours to create content from the same piece of content, but in a variety of different formats. That literally gives you content to share across all your channels for the remainder of the month. And this is where you could even create different themes for different formats. And that could be part of your content strategy. So really is, there are a number of options to repurpose content and to make it easier on you.

Another way is to resurface and updates all content, which can also benefit your business by joining in new audience members. Because remember something that you shared a year ago could still be valuable in attracting an ideal client today. And that’s where programs such as Meet Edgar or Hootsuite come in handy, where you can have a library of content that is constantly shared on your social platforms. A few notes on this, however, is to A, have a lot of content to share so that your audience isn’t noticing repetitions. So for example, build up enough of a content library so that things that you’re repeating every second or third month. And again, you want to make sure that that content stays up to date. So kind of keep an eye on the posts where you can, and if you see something that is no longer relevant, or that needs to be updated, you can jump on that because there’s nothing worse than having somebody see a super outdated post on your platform. That’s definitely going to put them off following you or further engaging with you.

So number six is to increase customer impressions. If your content is hard on the eyes, no one wants to hang around long enough to tell if it provides valuable information. In contrast, innovative web designs can be used to provide a unique customer experience that leaves a lasting impression. High quality imagery is an important element of any great design. Web pages and articles without any images get 94% fewer views than articles with at least one visual. That’s a crazy stat. So the five or 10 minutes extra that it takes you to include an image in your article is going to make a world of difference. Again, incorporating videos and interactive content into your website design can quickly boost impressions. Four times more people prefer watching a video review rather than reading a written product review. So again, video is the next best thing I would say, get comfortable with it as soon as possible and start making use of the many benefits that it offers.

Number seven is creating lasting impressions. Studies show that people can recall 65% of the visual content that they see even up to three days later. In comparison, after three days, people will only remember about 10% of the written content that they read. This means that people are more likely to remember the design elements of your content than the actual written information you’ve shared. Therefore focus on designing key takeaways into a graph, chart or image rather than just in written form. So I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself where you’ve come across an article that you’re interested in, but you really don’t have the time right now to engage fully with the content you’ve picked through and there you’ve seen an infographic that summarizes the article in a great visual way, and you’ve been able to engage with it in a few minutes and basically get to take a look at the article and maybe saved it to read more later. But that is something that’s going to stick with you rather than having to go through to the article and just seeing a bunch of text. And that’s going to result in you dancing and never actually fully engaging with that content.

Number eight is to trigger great engagement. Well-designed content with high quality visuals experience higher engagement. Including powerful original images will boost reader engagement and social shares. Here are some interesting stats about how well designed social media posts influence user engagement. Facebook posts with images have 37% higher engagement. Tweets with a visual elements are retweeted 1.5 times more. Across all social media infographics average three times more shares. And 65% of people prefer emails with images. Designing key images, such as your article speech image and thumbnails are worthwhile if you want to increase both awareness and engagement. So again, just another instance of how design impacts marketing and how just including one visual can make a world of difference.

Number nine is to drive sales subconsciously. 95% of purchase decision-making takes place in the subconscious mind. Using design elements that trigger emotions such as strong color choice and powerful images can encourage the subconscious to make decisions in your favor. For example, we know that red is a bold color tied to passion and power. Studies have shown that using this color for calls to action buttons can increase your conversions by 34%. But as always less is more. So coupling your color choices with clean layouts and limited options also helps with decision making and can drive more sales.

And finally, I know I’ve given you a lot of information, but number 10 is to improve search engine rankings. So a great design of your overall site and of your content will improve your search engine rankings, which in turn will lead to more clients. Design can greatly impact three areas of SEO. First is your user experience. So how easy is content to find and consume? Is your site clunky? Are page elements interfering with content? This can all determine your bounce rates, which ultimately determines user experience. The second element is readability. So since mostly site visits scan a page rather than read every word, is your content laid out in an easy to digest fashion. Your content should be broken up with subheadings, short paragraphs, images, semantic keywords, and bulleted lists. And finally design can greatly impact SEO through speed. So if your website is too slow from heavy design elements, you can kiss your traffic goodbye. They will bounce fast.

And again, there’s some stats around this that are mind blowing. So if your website takes one to three seconds to load the probability of bounce increases by 32%. If it takes one to five seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 90%. If it takes one to six seconds, the probability of bouncing increases by 106%. And if it takes one to 10 seconds, the probability of balance increases by 123%. So as much as we said that it’s important to include imagery and videos in your website, you really want to make sure that they’re formatted in the correct way to take up as little space as possible. You need to ensure that your website can handle that amount of design, because you really don’t want it to result in a delay in learning your website.

So those are 10 ways that design can transform your marketing. So it can help you clarify your ideal customer, it can help build brand awareness, it can help you stand out from the crowd, provide more value, efficiently repurpose content, increase customer impressions, create lasting impressions, trigger great engagement, drive sales subconsciously, and improve search engine rankings. As always, all of this information will be available in the show notes. I hope that you found it valuable and that you will spend some time improving the design of your marketing, because it really will make difference. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. I’ll see you in the next episode.

Once again, thank you so much to Therapy Notes for sponsoring this show. It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and tele-health a whole lot easier. And if you’re coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. Therapy Notes will input your client’s demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away. Use the promo code, [JOE], that’s [J O E] to get two free months to try out Therapy Notes for free.

Thanks for listening to the Marketing a Practice podcast. If you need help with branding your business, whether it be a new logo, rebrand, or you simply want some print flyer designed head on over to www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding. And if you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram at Samantha Carvalho Design. Finally, please subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on iTunes if you like what you’ve heard. Talk to you soon.

Marketing a Practice podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice podcast network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic, Imperfect Thriving, or Faith in Practice, go to practiceofthepractice.com/network.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a to professional, you should find one.