Could your company benefit from a marketing technique that has become one of the most effective ways to build some brand awareness beyond your existing customer base?

‘Killer content’ – content that recipients value enough to learn from, keep and pass on to others they know – is a core element of marketing today.

One of the most popular forms of this valued content is currently the ‘infographic’. With some thought and design skill it’s a technique that any company can use as an intelligent way to gain attention.

So what is an ‘infographic and why are they increasing?’

Just as it sounds, an infographic is a communication item where the use of words and images have been used to distill and convey data, information and concepts in a way that enables rapid understanding by the viewer.

This accounts for their popularity – when time is a precious commodity, convenience is highly valued and we appreciate those who distil information to save us effort.

They also play to our natural capabilities. There’s nothing new about presenting information via pictures; it’s mankind’s fundamental way to communicate – just as relevant to people today ‘conversing’ by drawing pictures when they don’t share a verbal language as it was with ancient civilisations that left us cave paintings and hieroglyphics.

We process pictures far more rapidly than words and 65% of us are said to learn visually more than through sound or kinesthetic means, with 50% of our brains working on visual functions at any time.

Information – an expanding business asset

Something has changed recently, though. Our senses are under strain taking the daily overload of information the world is producing, processing and sharing at an unprecedented rate. Technology advances have made processing of data not only faster and cheaper but enabled multiple sources of information to be merged, mined for patterns or trends and interpreted for insights – a business trend often described as ‘Big Data’. This is only useful if as workers and individuals we can extract learning to help decision-making and improve our lives.

Organisations of all types are producing huge volumes of information for their audiences because:

• There is more of interest to convey to their customers
• Information gathered by their business, or about their customers is seen as an asset to:
  • improve their internal efficiencies and adapt their products and services
  • change their business model when information becomes a service they can sell to earn revenue in its own right

• As their own staff experience information-overload, presenting it in ways that can be understood better and faster, saves the firm money.

Getting to grips with ‘infographics’

We use information visualisation constantly: the public transport maps used by city-travellers; the TV weather bulletins with maps and temperatures and election nights without the computerised infographics of the polling results would now seem pretty dull.

The term ‘infographics’ is credited to Edward Tufte in the early 1990s. There are various terms linked to visualizing information, which usually indicate the amount of numerical information in the item, or specific applications of the visualisation.

Not all infographics solely represent data – those that do may be described as data visualisation. ‘Visual analysis’ tends to describe a more sophisticated process where high volumes of data are manipulated and the patterns and trends displayed to help analysts extract the findings and insights. Technical, scientific or medical information analysis would need such higher-end analysis.

In more general business use, we can create infographics to either help stakeholder viewers understand information about our business or sector more easily (annual reports have always included visuals to represent statistics in forms of basic charts, graphs etc) or to produce some interesting content in a form to get customers or prospects to take note of the company who produced it.

The key word here is ‘interesting’ use of graphic treatment to add value to information: images simply overlaid with NUMBERS in LARGE fonts isn’t really making the grade of giving recipients something of value to really engage with.

Could infographics be a useful business tool for you?

The first principle is worth repeating before thinking about whether to create any infographic: The aim is to use graphics to make information easier for the viewer to extract the meaning, so getting to simplicity is important – whilst avoiding using graphics which are appealing but actually obscures or even worse, distort the understanding of the underlying information.
The elements you’re going to need to bring together in producing an infographic are:

• The visual – colours and graphics (theme and reference)
• The content – usually the facts, figures
• The knowledge – ‘the insight’, the viewer must get an out-take that rewards them for the effort in looking at it.

The key questions to ask

Who do you want to communicate with?

Existing customers, prospects, investors, other stakeholders or decision influencers, or even the general public?

What response do you want from the targets?

For example, do you want to surprise them by challenging some assumptions about your industry? Educate them to influence attitude or behaviour? Amuse them just as a general reminder you exist? Give them a handy summary of information they will keep as a reference, so keeping your name in mind when they view it?

The objectives can be wide-ranging but, for any one infographic get focused on your target audience and your communication objective, just like planning any other type of communication. You may have a set of different figures and information but you want them to converge into a single overall theme and message.

The infographic theme and message

With targets and overall objective in mind, you need to consider what specific message you want them to take out of the infographic, and what data and information you have or can collect to support that.

Timing

Is the information current and likely to date? Or will the information stay useful for a long period? This will obviously dictate how quickly you need to produce and distribute.

With objectives and a key message in mind, the ideas for treatment can be created either by yourself or with creative designers. Concepts, flows and figures are drafted together. As the nature of an infographic is to add a lot of value to understanding, it’s a good idea at this stage to test the draft concepts with others not involved in the creation process. As with all communications, there can be many a blip between the creation of the message and how it is actually ‘decoded’ by the viewer.

It is also easy to get carried away with interesting concepts and forget the basics such as making sure the most appropriate graphic form is being used for a particular type of data set. For data, there are five primary ways to display: time-series data, statistical distribution, maps, hierarchies, networking.

Spatial relationships are the most important relationships to depict in an infographic. This may sound too obvious to mention but you do see common errors. For example, a pie chart is a common method of displaying certain types of data, but it is actually difficult to assess the relative size of ‘segments’ unless added text or numbers support them. If each visual ‘slice’ of the pie is not accurately sized in relation to it’s % value against the others, the credibility of the whole infographic is undermined.

So check out hierarchies and relationships, interpretation of symbols, dominance of colours etc. with the volunteer testers.

Are the draft ideas passing the tests of:

• Appeal – will this tempt people to view it, and perhaps share it?
• Comprehension – is it easy to process the information mentally and get the ‘out-takes’ accurately?
• Retention – is it memorable, and/or useful enough to keep?

Promoting and distributing the infographic

Alongside the work of creating and producing the infographic, you’ll have been planning how to promote this to your audiences. Remembering if this is achieving the aim of being a valuable nugget of information you can go beyond your existing customer base to place this in any number of potential places where your audiences may be found.

Get everyone involved in putting links to the infographic out via emails or seeding it across blogs and digital hubs where it may be relevant to those audiences.

The number and variety of online outlets will without doubt include a number where your material is relevant but you may not have sent communications to previously. Infographics have become such a successful promotional tool that yours will be competing for attention amongst many – but given the desire of so many people to have succinct, useful information, that doesn’t mean there won’t be space and attention for yours.

We know one when we see one… great brands are built through distinctive, consistent personalities. We know what they stand for because we can ‘read’ their personalities. Brands exist within the mind of the customer and while their overall identity is created deep within the company, it is the language of design that creates its external image as it is one key pillar of communication to the customer.

Intentional brand building starts from within the company and from senior executives but the perception of buyers builds from the bottom up via their own experience and contact. Design and marketing work together and are experienced during those contacts.

Roles and level of brand

Brand building works at different levels with each of those serving a specific purpose.

From the most basic level, the roles of a brand build through:

• Recognition and a sign of ownership – as a legal mark for the company, it has to be distinctive enough for the company to be protectable. Once used, this allows the customer to buy again, or avoid, so it is a short-cut to decision making.
• It acts as a signal for a set of functional, product or service benefits.
• Quality guarantee – once the buyer has experienced the brand they know what to expect as a level of expectation has been set for future purchases.
• At the highest level of development, brands add a bundle of emotional benefits and associations.

To brand purists, unless the customers can associate the brand name with a set of differentiated emotional benefits, the name is really a well-known trademark rather than a true brand.

The visible elements of a brand are there to trigger a shorthand understanding of the bundle of benefits offered to the buyer by the brand owner – both functional and emotional – and as such design and marketing work hand in hand to communicate the value proposition on those and the ‘brand promise’.

Design is inherent in creating brand associations and influencing emotional responses – both with customers externally and internally with staff who must deliver the brand promise. So imagining that graphic design stops with the logo and marketing brochures is way off the mark.

Building blocks of brand

As a brand exists at many levels, one analogy used for a strong brand is that of an iceberg; the tip is visible to all, (customers, other stakeholders and the public) which sits above a deeper, invisible base (the internal, hidden organisation).

At its foundation is the brands purpose and vision (why it exists, what it will bring to the world), high concepts that are the source of the brand’s identity. Like an individual, we want the brand to have an identity that is cohesive and consistent and to live to a set of values that will guide its behaviour.

Of course, a brand is not an individual person but is represented by many, different individuals – its staff. So creating clarity about the brand’s stated purpose, vision and values for all those who together make up the company brand is achieved via internal communications. The challenges are no different to other communications; the need to gain attention, interest, response and memorability for the company’s messages gave rise to the internal marketing concept, with design and branding of staff initiatives being instrumental in stimulating engagement and influencing behaviour.

The set of values followed by staff creates the company culture and links the brand to the daily operations of the organisation. Strong culture becomes known beyond the staff and increasingly business and consumer customers select where to purchase based on how well they relate to a specific firm’s culture. The signs of culture can be picked up through the ways the company communicates through its formal online and offline communications but also through its actions which, these days, may be publicly commented upon in social networks and customer feedback that the company can influence but can’t fully control.

While a brand’s culture and reputation drives off behaviour, the brand personality is by contrast what marketers aim to project and what the company wants people to think about the brand.

The starting point for brand building is usually designing the company name and logo. Colour, typeface and shape work in unison to find a unique expression of the spirit and brand personality.

Design has a number of ways to build brand personality further into the overall brand look and feel. This is created by brand and style codes, which include:

• Brand colour/s
• Typography
• Shapes/icons – specific brand properties
• Textures
• Use of layout grid
• Types of imagery
• Use of white space

Colour is such an important tool in helping customers recognise and associate with the brand that it is recognised as a valuable equity. Mention Cadbury’s purple; Lloyds Bank Green or Barclays’ Blue and most people in the UK could at once visualise the exact colour.

The language of colour is deeply rooted in our psychology as symbolising specific qualities, even if these can change across different cultural environments. In the West, a red/orange brand is signalling innovation and a challenger brand, whilst the deep blue corporate colours are showing us the substantial, authoritative character of a company; while neutrals such as grey or silver are sophisticated. The interplay of colours used in combination can be used to signal different facets in a brand personality.

The coding of colours guide us to price expectations, to relate competitors in a category or help define the relationships between multiple brands in a company portfolio.

Quite apart from our enduring associations with colours, on a more temporary basis they express the mood of the times. Just as colours in our wardrobe or homes can label us as being stuck in an era, how colours are used in the brand design system will need an update at times to stay modern.

Communication themes also drive the design approach and can change over time, being less stable than stylistic codes.

The copywriting tone of voice and vocabulary in communications are elements of personality used highly effectively by some companies but under developed by many.

When design is used expertly to create a personality for the brand through a distinctive look and feel, those who have created it and/or designers and marketers who use it in implementing communications should be rapidly able to see what designs and ideas are ‘on brand’ or not without consulting its formal guidelines. A drastic shift in any of the core elements of branding is one of the riskiest things a company can do in terms of affecting customers’ opinions since through associations in their minds they have taken on mental ownership of brands they love. As a strategic and financial asset, brands are a form of intellectual property that far outweigh other types of hard assets as analysts know brands represent future cashflow from loyal customers.

We’ve focused here on graphic design and its role in brand building. Graphic design is just one type of design that comes into play when the brand touches the customer, and has a key role in creating the perceptions of the brand and the customer’s pleasure when encountering it. Working with marketing, it is a major creator of brand equity for the company.

Design is an integral part of making your sales and marketing activities work well – and as such has a key role in your company’s revenue-generation engine.

In business, you have to spend money to make money but naturally you want any outlay to be money well spent. As sales and marketing are often a company’s major cost centres, this article looks at some ways in which astute buyers of design services get the most bang for their marketing communications bucks.

Design and the profit levers

If you want to increase company profits (and who doesn’t) we all know you need to find ways to increase volume and increase margin – however you look to balance those two profit levers.

To increase volume – your aims are to sell more (increase your share) in the markets you already serve, either by selling more to current customers or finding new customers; or expand into new markets, again targeting either new or existing customers, or both.

To increase margin – you can reduce costs (fixed or variable); adjust prices; and move or extend your product range.

Design has a role to play in the marketing activities needed to pursue these various goals, and smart companies use design services well to help them on both sides of the ‘increase sales’ and ‘reduce costs’ routes to higher profits. Here are some principles worth copying:

1. Get a new brand ‘right’ before launching to avoid a near-term ‘remake’ being needed

When launching a new brand, which is by definition unproven and not earning income, it may seem tempting to avoid professional design costs until the brand is more established. Sadly, you only get one chance to make that first impression – and it’s usually possible to tell if a professional hand has not been behind a brand’s creation from the outset. In fact, although we non-designers could make a stab at a name and logo icon it takes much more than that. How many times have you seen new brand logos that weren’t quite right? Those tell-tale signs in the proportions, typography, placement and so on? Experienced designers anticipate a host of factors for the context in which the brand will be seen and used and pre-empt those difficulties when they are creating the core brand elements.

So it’s more cost-effective to get advice early rather than later encounter negative feedback or discover the difficulties of using an identity in different situations or media, and needing to change.

Astute users of design, however, go straight for professional support as they know that designers love creating new brands and will be pragmatic about a start-up’s resources not matching those of a big international client. Also, giving a design company the opportunity to align with a new business that may grow is a smart way to secure services at an accessible cost and get the benefits of solid branding from the start.

2. Use design codes to signal your desired marketing position – and attract the right prospective customers

Getting the right advice early in the brand creation stage helps way beyond the technical aspects of design. The brand image creation is fundamental to building your brand position in the marketplace. This is not just about gaining awareness for the brand, it is about how the customer will place it mentally in relation to others it competes with.

Brand owners often instinctively think they want their brand to look unlike all competitors, but things are not quite that simple. A potential customer seeing something new has to find a way to process that information – and to do that needs to place the new item ‘near to’ or ‘away from’ those already stored in their mental filing cabinets.

Design is used to provide the visual clues to help the customer position a product or service – it’s one of the most important things a brand owner needs to get right and is at the heart of their marketing success.

So brand owners who see design as a major tool to implement their brand strategy, will work with experienced designers who can dissect the subtle visual clues within a category of products or services. Designers understand the ‘norms’ customers know and then use their design toolbox of colour, typography, icons etc. to accurately project visually just where the brand owner wants to position. For example if the aim is to steal share from others then position ‘near to’ competitors, or if there’s a completely new market-space being opened up ‘away from’ is appropriate… but will involve a lot more activity to educate the customers.

3. Make the points of differentiation memorable

Part and parcel of positioning, whether in an established category or trying to create a new one, is the need to project a differential versus competitors not only to attract interest but also to create memorability.

Design alone doesn’t create the strong value proposition needed to win and keep customers, but where competing offers are not really very different in terms of product or service features, design helps in communications to highlight any small differences in benefits which do exist; and it creates the brand personality which itself becomes a key differentiator on which people select. This includes the key brand elements that become the ‘properties’ associated with it over time.

This holds true as much with business buyers as with consumer purchases. When there is little difference in ‘what’ a company does versus others, the ‘how’ it does it in terms of how the style of the company is projected becomes more important. Of course, this ‘how’ goes far beyond the territory of graphic design and is down to how the company conducts its business. Yet even here, design is found as part of the culture created within the company by the imagery around people, and in the internal communications they receive, all shaping their beliefs about the company brand from the internal view. So design as part of internal marketing helps to create engagement of people – the ultimate differentiator of a company. Visible items branded to trigger memory of initiatives, beliefs or processes to help embed them, are a low-cost way to support company performance initiatives aiming to affect the bottom line.

4. Know and reflect your target customer in your visual and verbal language

Is your company unintentionally excluding some potential buyers? As humans we can’t help looking at reference groups depicted in communications and judging if they reflect us personally or the customers we may buy for.

Smart marketers who have a very focused idea of the target audience for a communication, can convey this to the design team and work with them to understand how the viewers will be able to self-reference themselves to the people they see depicted in communications. Changing these reference groups comes into play when looking to expand markets to target new types of customers. An astute user of design will judge wisely when the use of a stock shot to save a small amount of money is likely to create the wrong impact in a communication and prove costly in the longer term by ‘turning off’ potential or existing customers. The same principle applies for the copywriting tone of voice and knowing what will feel natural for different types of readers.

5. Make the intangible tangible – so customers trust enough to make a purchase

Making the intangible, tangible. Design is the advance ambassador of a service brand, or of products customers can’t touch and feel before they buy. This is an area where making the most of the qualities of offline media shouldn’t be forgotten. We can do a lot online, but it can’t engage all the senses. Print media can engage the senses of touch and smell to convey quality; direct mail and experiential can bring in taste, touch and smell.

If you need to persuade and give an assurance of quality to someone who hasn’t experienced what you offer, and especially if you deal in highly priced products, services or contracts, it is money well spent to have designers create the clever cues of quality that can win a sale.

As individuals we see which companies have gone all out to show us with the quality of their materials that they would value our custom – be it a holiday or car company or those selling some smaller item. Likewise in business – smart sellers convey the message to potential buyers about their quality and attention to detail through the design of their communications, documents or branded items.

6. Avoid design delays to increase your speed to market

Agreeing project timings with suppliers is a given. Yet you still need confidence they will actually stay on track. How an agency can think innovatively to keep to turn-round times is important as unforeseen factors that could cause delays are always possible.

When procurement professionals assess suppliers, they do this against a raft of criteria and that’s a good idea for anyone to follow. As companies incur costs just staying open for business, the speed of implementing work is a key way to improve the bottom line and when marketing is involved there’s also the aspect of losing the edge on the competition based on speed to market. Time really is money.

So confidence in the design process itself is important as no-one wants delays to their project.
Smart buyers ask the questions beyond the creative sphere… probe about project management, and ask for examples of where unexpected events have happened in a tight-timeline project and how the agency overcame them.

7. Don’t pay for high overheads of suppliers for straightforward projects

Design and communications agencies come in many sizes and flavours. The breadth of marketing, communications and design is vast – and while you want all you present to the customer over time to be integrated and cohesive, it is difficult for an agency to cover every element of marketing under one roof. Except for the largest corporates (who will have a number of agencies providing different services to cover all the bases), most client companies are not using all types of marketing techniques at one time. So ask if there is a need to use an agency which may have a much wider range of capabilities than you will actually need to use – because that breadth of capability may be reflected in their charges. As a rule, complexity creates costs.

8. Evolve your image to help you go for bigger or new customers and to keep relevant

While branding should be consistent and coherent, that doesn’t mean being forever static. Although many people imagine the major corporate brands they’ve known all their lives have stayed the same, that is an illusion – and a sign of good design evolution.

While change for the sake of change may well be unwarranted cost, a brand refresh or change can be a smart investment if it is being used to signal a company’s move to a new stage in its growth, a change in its marketing strategy as it aims at new customers or territory, or as a means to prevent looking dated and risking losing customers.

There is financial risk to be managed in changes to brand identity and targeting; if it looks to existing customers the brand has shifted too far, they may disconnect. Any shift may also move the brand into the zone of different competitors. So again, expert manipulation of what the brand is ‘signalling’ through its imagery and messaging is crucial if it is to be a worthwhile investment and not a costly error. Expert designers deconstruct the elements of the brand to identify which ‘key equities’ should not be lost, and which elements can evolve with no threat.

9. Clarify your communication objective to give a realistic brief

Common reasons for marketing communications to fail to get the response desired are: too many objectives in one brief; a lack of cohesion across different forms of communication and expectations that one communication will of itself bring a flood of buyers from a standing start.

Trying to hit too many different types of targets – who should really receive different messages – will be far less effective than a focused approach. That doesn’t mean using one method towards one type of customer, but does mean working with an agency to make a forward-looking communications plan where design and messaging can be created for specific targets and media channels, to create your desired results over time.

10. Make your agency supplier your buyer

While you don’t want an agency too complex for your needs, on the other hand, it can be time consuming to manage a few suppliers if they aren’t all needed frequently.

Companies efficient at managing their design needs and costs will identify their bedrock requirements and select their agency on that basis, but also look for a ‘partnering’ attitude and capability in their agency so it can be used to manage more specialist or intermittent needs from other agencies when those occur.

This could be less costly than needing a bigger team of internal staff with enough domain knowledge to manage agency relationships. Experienced agency personnel will have significant buying acumen not only because of the number of jobs they will have placed with printers or other suppliers over time, but also due to the precise specifying skills that are needed to buy cost-effectively and without error.

Of course, each of the areas above can be examined in far more depth than can be covered in this article but these thought-starters can direct you to think about if your company is really making the most of design in its marketing activities.