This month, we’re excited to be co-producing our blog with brand strategist and graphic design expert, Daniel J.Moore, Founder of Iron Dragon Design.
Whether it be a social media post, an infographic, a flyer or a brochure, your graphic design can portray your business in so many ways. Your business’ graphic design allows you to represent your brand and connect with new customers from all over the globe. So why would it not be important? At Octima, we believe that your graphic design can tell people all about your business before even reading what it is that your company does.
The importance of social media marketing
Social media marketing is essential in today’s business landscape, given the overwhelming presence of people on various platforms. Over 62% of the world’s population is active on social media, (according to smartinsights), creating an unparalleled opportunity to connect with a vast and diverse audience, allowing brands to build and strengthen relationships with their target customers. Social media marketing not only enhances brand visibility and recognition but also enables businesses to humanise their brand, showcasing the personality behind the products or services.
So, what is the first thing we see when we go on social media? Images? Videos? For businesses it is commonly a branded graphic that you will see alongside a social media post. This is why capturing the attention of your audience is crucial for successful marketing. One powerful tool that can make a significant impact on your social media strategy is the use of strong graphics. In this blog post, we’ll explore the various benefits of incorporating compelling visuals into your social media marketing posts.
Graphic design not only plays a pivotal role in shaping the success of your social media campaigns, but it contributes heavily to your brand’s recognition, engagement, and ultimately sets the tone for new potential clients to judge on a first impressions basis.
Who are Iron Dragon Design?
Iron Dragon Design provides brand identity services to businesses aiming to be different. They help adventurous businesses uncover what makes their brand truly different and how to use that to attract better clients. Services include brand identity workshops to discover the essence of the brand such as values, vision and mission, plus visual identity, and graphic design to keep your brand looking sharp.
Workshops and strategy sessions are delivered to be engaging and illuminating – specifically targeted at your business to focus on your exact requirements. By helping you discover what makes your brand unique, Iron Dragon Design hope to help give you the courage to compete while building a brand with a strong purpose that attracts the clients you want to work with – and deters time wasters.
Establishing visual identity and brand recognition
Brand identity covers the essence of the brand, delving into its core elements such as brand story, communication style, and personality, including values, vision, and mission. A subset to brand identity is visual identity, which is essentially everything that gives a brand its unique look and feel. Establishing a strong visual identity is crucial as it visually communicates the brand’s message and emotions through graphics. To be effective when creating a strong visual identity, a graphic should meet these six criteria’s: distinct, memorable, flexible, cohesive, scalable, and applicable. This ensures it is unique and recognisable to leave a lasting impression, maintains consistency and works across various formats, accommodates growth, and is easy for designers to apply.
Connect your brand with your audience
To maximise the connection between your brand and audience, it is crucial for the graphic designer (whether that be internally or externally) to understand your businesses and ideal target customer. Looking at your company’s missions, values and vision, character and voice will help you identify this. Paying attention to colour schemes, fonts, imagery, and typefaces are all essential in enticing the right attention from the right people. For example, if your audience is older, you’ll want to avoid using bold colours and instead consider neutral, softer tones, with simple typefaces, this will show the personality, values, and essence of your brand.
Building a connection with your audience can simply be built from general consistency. Having an audience that visually sees cohesive content, reinforces your brand in their minds, allowing them to recognise your company in the future.
Graphics can be powerful storytelling tools. Through visuals, you can convey narratives, share experiences, and highlight the journey of your company. Storytelling creates a connection by allowing your audience to relate to the human side of your brand; a unique visual identity has the power to establish credibility, create connection and differentiate you.
Remember that these recommendations provide a starting point in showing your personality, values and essence of your brand. It’s crucial to test and adjust based on your specific audience feedback and engagement metrics. Regularly assess the performance of your social media content to ensure it resonates effectively with your target audience and be open to refining your design choices based on real-world data.
Stand out amongst your competitors
Understanding design principles and elements
Understanding your brand’s brief is necessary when creating a graphic that targets the right people, however understanding key basic principles not only contributes to a visually pleasing design but can ultimately stand you out amongst your competitors.
On social media, where people quickly scroll through content, graphic designs must grab attention and convey important information promptly. With users spending only seconds on each post, visuals need to stand out in the constant flow of information. Striking graphics are crucial for swiftly and effectively getting key messages across. Therefore, understanding basic design principles like contrast, tone, balance, or white space will not only ensure information is conveyed concisely, but will easily capture the attention of your customers, if done correctly.
Understanding basic design elements such as colours, shapes, typography, and imagery are vital in expressing your brand’s message and eliciting emotions. Dan expresses that colours are a huge emotional component, expressing that red for example exudes passion and excitement. It is recommended that you have a style guide and brand guideline to not only ensure that the appearance and messaging of your graphic designs are consistent, but to enhance the balance of creativity and usability for visually appealing and functional designs.
Does it matter where you create your graphic?
Relying solely on online templates has its limitations. Without branded or unique social media graphic design, connecting with your audience and effectively conveying your messages becomes challenging. When designing for your business, it is important to understand the available tools and choose the right one. Canva can be a great place to start for beginners. Once you have selected a tool, maximise its potential through practising, experimenting and staying up to date about its features. Numerous graphic design apps allow you to customise templates, providing excellent opportunities for your brand to distinguish itself. However, relying on these templates might risk making your business appear like others, or worse, your competitors.
Conclusion
In essence, a good graphic design for social media goes beyond aesthetics; it is a strategic tool for building and nurturing connections with your target audience. The key is adopting a strategic approach and understanding your goals to ease the design process. While there are no real shortcuts in this journey, taking courses and continuous learning enhances your abilities.
However if all is too much for you, or you simply do not have the time, contact Octima or Daniel J.Moore, Founder of Iron Dragon Design who can support you in the process.
