Graphic design complements your business’ sales & marketing efforts. It visually represents your business and what you have to offer to your audience as benefit and value.

When you get a request for more information, what do you send them? The cheap brochures you printed out last Friday at Kinkos, or two-year-old postcards you never sent out? Maybe a flyer from last year’s tradeshow? It is always important to keep your visual marketing material current and also that they speak about the quality of your services or products through the content, design and paper selection. Well-designed sales collateral adds credibility. It allows you to better explain your brand, product or service and provides your sales team with various tools to close a sale. If this is not enough to persuade you, here is list of proven reasons design is a good business decision:

Design Sells

If you’re better with numbers than visual cues, then, we’re sure we’ll be able to convince youto introduce some design into your business, because in short, design is fiscally beneficial.

In 2007, The Design Council released a study of 63 portfolios of companies that traded on the FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) over the course of a decade. The study discovered that the companies that put an emphasis on design did way better than the ones that didn’t by 200%. Investing in design may cost a bit now, but in the future, these studies suggest that you’ll likely be glad you did so.

Strong Web Design = Strong Consumer Trust

Nowadays, most businesses have an online presence. In fact, a business’ website is often people’s first encounter with a business at all. This means that the impression your website leaves to the user is more important than ever. And how do we leave a good impression? Good user experience, which is given through a good user interface and this derives from design.

A study by Derek Halpern, titled Trust and Mistrust of Online Health Sites, determined that badly designed websites are often not read, trusted or visited for any length of time. “Poor interface design was particularly associated with rapid rejection and mistrust of a website,” the study states, “In cases where the participants did not like some aspect of the design the site was often not explored further than the homepage and was not considered suitable for revisiting at a later date…”

94% of the reason the participants rejected a site was for design related issues, while only 6% was for content-related issues. So, your content could be as relevant as it could come, but a poor website design can make or break the deal. In terms of design, the study found that you should be looking out for: Busy layouts, lack of navigation aids, boring web design, pop up advertisements, slow introductions to a site (splash pages, slow-loading flash introductions, etc), small print, too much text etc.

Good Design Keeps Your Brand Memorable

Design is way more than just the outward appearance of a business, brand or product. However, many businesses believe that only good customer service and a good product is enough… It certainly helps, but beyond that, we have the visual look and personality, graphic design. From the logo right down to the choice of colors, the way to a memorable brand is created is through intentional and carefully chosen design decisions.

Studies have shown that visual appeal can be assessed within about 50 milliseconds. This boils down to the fact that designers have to make sure to leave a good impression within that time frame. Like this, think of your business’ design as a handshake. Do they smile or frown, do they say “hi,” “hello” or “good day,” is the handshake firm and businesslike, or warm and friendly? Decisions and impressions about people can be made in just these few moments. This is exactly graphic design’s objective, it communicates who you are and what you do in a quick and visually effective way.

Design Is More Than How It Looks

Many businesses take design as the way a product, communication, image etc. looks. However, an effective design will consider how it looks as secondary to how it works. Like this, designers purpose is more than just making something look visually attractive, their real job is that of communicators.

The best examples of graphic designs are those that have a powerful visual and messaging relationship, they complement each other. Typography, colors, images, hierarchy and more are the tools and resources a graphic designer uses to convey your brand and message.

Make design part of your overall brand and business decisions

If you’re still not convinced, we can tell you that design gives you a competitive edge, drives powerful marketing results and allows you to differentiate yourself from everyone else. Make design one of your tools for business success.

MAKE GRAPHIC DESIGN PART OF YOUR BRAND AND BUSINESS SUCCESS