The benefits of marketing campaigns and why design is important

While marketing campaigns in the form of PPC search ads are keyword-reliant and don’t require imagery, design is essential for any other campaign. Design accentuates your campaign messaging and helps it stand out from the norm.

Recently we’ve been working on various marketing campaigns for clients, not least an upcoming Black Friday sale for MacFinder. This got me and fellow designer Richard thinking; do businesses truly know the benefits of marketing campaigns and do they understand the need for professional design? Hopefully, I’m about to enlighten you on both.

Boost sales

Let’s start with the obvious one and I’m not talking about the sales of the Boost chocolate bar from the shop down the road from the office (although thanks to certain colleagues those sales are pretty high). Of course, I’m talking about improving the sales numbers of existing products. This commonly comes from seasonal campaigns, such as Black Friday and Christmas.

Promotions and offers entice existing and new customers onto your website. With sale campaigns usually evolving around a discount, this itself acts as the incentive, making users feel positive about getting a good deal.

Depending on the marketing strategy your business implements, the frequency of offers can work in your favour. A sale every other week is unlikely to see a significant increase in sales. However, targetted, less frequent campaigns are likely to attract customers due to the scarcity factor, they’re starting to think “Is that product going to be on offer again?”. Scarcity increases buying interests and other considerations, such as limiting the number of individual items available at the sale price, emphasising a time constraint for the sale or promoting a previously sold-out product.

While campaigns can increase the number of sales, they can also see an improved ROI (return on investment) and this is more prudent with targeted campaigns. For example, with a Back To Uni sale, you would only target customers of a set demographic, which means your marketing expenses are reduced as you’re not spending on advertising to those less likely to purchase.

Customer loyalty

By rewarding an existing customer base or offering free products with a sale purchase to all customers, you can help build customer loyalty. Customers who feel appreciated and valued by a business are likely to return for future purchases. This could also spark additional customers as those with a good impression of a company are more likely to recommend them to others or leave a positive review, which can impact the buying decisions of prospective customers.

Brand awareness

If you’re a startup or have now decided to bring your business online, a marketing campaign can help establish your online presence. Similarly, businesses with existing websites can use campaigns to raise brand awareness.

Through ads and campaign assets that are brand-focused, you can help your business stand out from your competitors and also help create a memorable, familiar brand. This familiarity can work in your favour as when a prospective customer recognises your brand, they’re more likely to choose you over an unknown competitor.

Campaigns can be used to make customers familiar with the visual elements of your brand and once you’ve done this, recognition can become instantaneous; just look at Nike and Apple and their simplified, yet globally recognised logos. This doesn’t happen overnight, brand awareness campaigns have to be strategically worked on if you want the familiarity of your company to grow.

Marketing campaigns & design

Aside from PPC and SEO written content campaigns, any other digital marketing campaign needs good design to be successful. Social media, email marketing, website imagery and campaign pages are all aspects that need design consideration.

Without sufficient design, campaigns will struggle. The design of a campaign can help it stand out against competitors on social media, engage with the customer in their inbox and grab users’ attention on your own website.

It’s often a good idea to use multiple channels for campaigns, allowing you to reach more of your customers. With that in mind, it’s important the design considers not only the target demographic but also who else might see the imagery.

From a styling perspective, campaigns need to be designed so that they appear on brand and also relate to the theme of the campaign. For example, if you’re running a Christmas sale, you want the design and content to retain the brand voice and overall style but also make use of Christmas-related elements. Even these campaign elements can be used to reinforce your branding.

With a campaign, the design itself can make or break it. The design can be used to apply a theme or style to the campaign and also direct the user’s attention to relevant content and calls to action. Compare these two examples for MacFinder’s Black Friday campaign. On the left is a design that doesn’t consider the brand or theme of the campaign and on the right is a Black Friday design previously used.

As with any branded material, it is beneficial for it to be professionally designed. This ensures it is kept on brand, is visually appealing and suits both the demographic and theme.

And that concludes our look at the benefits of marketing campaigns. Campaigns can be an investment in the growth, brand awareness and success of your business. While there is an expenditure involved in the planning, design and setup, the benefits are numerous and can be very rewarding for your business.