Design meets Tech – The Art of Digital Marketing

The term digital marketing is defined as the marketing of products or services using digital technologies. While this takes place primarily on the internet, including mobile devices, the scope also includes display advertising and any other digital medium. This field has been growing in leaps and bounds and what it truly means to be a digital marketer has evolved with this growth. As a top digital marketing company, we wanted to discuss how Design meets Tech – The Art of Digital Marketing.

The industry continues to move towards a level of hyper-focused, hyper-connectivity unlike anything we have seen before and to excel in this environment it is becoming more important to combine concepts, ideas, and talents to effectively market products and services.

How does Design meet Tech in Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is an evolution of traditional marketing. Traditional marketing attempts to tell a consumer what to think to then encourage the purchase of goods or services from a provider. The Pepsi campaign, “The Choice of a New Generation,” from the 1980s is a classic example. While that is how marketing online used to work, that is no longer the case. The reality of the online world is that consumers have become more empowered, taking control of their choices and actions.

The effectiveness of digital marketing will be in relation to how well activities are based on the digital consumer. The marketer needs to understand what the customer wants and thinks, then focus on creating interactions with the consumer at various points.

Rather than starting with a product and working forward, it has become a case of starting with the customer and working backward.

Due to this, the idea of what marketing involves has changed. Technology obviously plays a big part in the digital world, but design ability does as well. There are considerations for web design and graphical design when thinking about marketing online as it is such a visual medium for interaction.

The job of a designer has always been to create something that engages an audience leading to conversion, which is exactly what a digital marketer is looking to do on social media sites, websites, inbound and outbound promotion, and display advertising.

That is where the convergence takes place; using technology to gain a better understanding of consumers and then using great design to engage them for the purpose of creating conversions.

Benefits of Good Design in Digital Marketing

While digital marketing can still be effective without including good design, by not focusing on the design element a business will be missing out on conversions. There are simply too many benefits of focusing on design:

• Ability to maximize media impressions – Marketing tools allow us to analyze the types of content that get the most media impressions in a particular niche. Blogs are no longer the end-all-be-all content choice for consumers. Videos, memes, infographics, or standard graphics are very popular and great ways to engage when designed well.
• Creating emotional connections – Great design can use powerful narratives to connect visually and emotionally with consumers’ wants, needs, wishes, and aspirations.
• Visual showcase – Certain industries, such as hospitality, benefit greatly from both good web and graphical design as they look to showcase everything from locations to elegant dishes to hotel rooms in their best light to encourage bookings and visits.
• Worth 1000 words – The phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” couldn’t be truer in today’s digital age. While people can read, the desire to read compared to digest content in other methods has steadily decreased. That has led to a rise in the use of imagery online to convey information. Consider that blogs and social media posts need engaging images that help evoke a call-to-action. Web pages need images to convey the purpose of the page.
• Improves SEO – As videos and images have become a more used content medium, their inclusion and use in SEO has increased. In many cases, a business can obtain a top ranking with a video or image in a crowded keyword field which leads to more site visits. Images, videos, and memes are also much more likely to be shared or go viral than other non-visual content types.

Common Marketing Design Mistakes

• Not including images with social media posts
• Creating content such as blogs and not including a custom image to increase engagement
• Using images or design unrelated to content, topic, or purpose instead of focusing on functionality
• Relying on stock images to represent a business or brand
• Not optimizing images for SEO and specific platforms
• Focusing on the design from the artistic standpoint rather than the end goal of the project

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that design and tech should work together for successful digital marketing. With the focus on the customer and working backward, it has become much more important to utilize a designer’s skills to increase engagement and interest at a glance. The art of digital marketing is combining marketing knowledge and practices with technology and design in this increasingly visual field to maximize connectivity and conversions.

Recently, Lounge Lizard was ranked as a Top Web Design Agency Worldwide by DesignRush

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