If your small business is trying to leverage social media for marketing, you're probably struggling to build a large, engaged audience.
You're not alone.
Every 60 seconds there are 293,000 new posts and 136,000 new photos posted on Facebook alone.
Businesses need to leverage every strategy and tactic they can to effectively market on social media.
One of the most important strategies: investing in good design to amplify your content marketing strategy.
Here are five proven ways good design can amplify your content marketing strategy.
As we wrote in Why Good Design is More Important Than Ever for Your Business:
People have a very short attention span. In fact, according to a Princeton University study, snap judgments count. The study found after seeing a face for only 1/10th of a second people formed opinions about that person. Judgments were made on attractiveness, likeability, and trustworthiness, and prolonged exposure to that face just reinforced the initial impression.
With the incredible amount of content the average user encounters on social media, first impressions and snap judgments play an important role.
Research has found the attention span of the average adult has dropped to a mere 8 seconds.
When you have so little time to catch the attention of social media users, good design becomes even more critical.
Colors, type, imagery, and layout contribute to the visual essence that makes up a brand.
These things are also vital components of good design.
Think about ways to incorporate elements from your brand in your content marketing.
Whether it's a splash of color, the use of your corporate typeface, or an element from your logo subtlety integrated into the background of an image, there are many ways you can add your brand in without overwhelming the content. For more on logo design, we recommend you read 2018 Logo Design Trends: Your Guide To Navigate Hot Trends and Avoid Fads.
Scientists have found that people's ability to recall images is dramatically better than remembering text alone. They even coined a cool name for this phenomenon: the Picture Superiority Effect.
Inc. magazine explains:
It works like this: If you hear information delivered verbally, you are likely to remember about 10 percent of that information three days later. Add a picture, however, and your recall rate will soar to 65 percent. Put simply, visuals matter-a lot.
"Human PSE is truly Olympian," writes molecular biologist John Medina in Brain Rules. "Tests performed years ago showed that people could remember 2,500 pictures with at least 90 percent accuracy several days post-exposure, even though the subjects saw each picture for about 10 seconds.
That kind of recall is even more critical when you consider the deluge of content people scroll through every day on social media.
Incorporating images with good design is a powerful way to extend your brand. For example, if you're showcasing your products on social media, be sure that you have strong packaging design (the physical packaging for your products) and package graphics (the graphics, including images and content, on the packaging) so that your products stand out. To learn more about this, read 7 Important Packaging Design Trends.
74% of social media marketers use some visual asset in their post and marketing, and 37% of marketers said that visuals were their most important form of content. Only blogging rated higher.
According to recent studies, an incredible 80% of the time on social media is spent using mobile devices.
This is a problem for communicating with customers and prospects because post and image sizes on many social media sites are quite small:
Good design can help boost your content when you're working with a limited amount of space.
How something is organized visually and how well it's perceived is primarily informed by psychology and how our brains interpret what we see. To learn more about this, read The Psychology of Design: Why Your Business Must Understand How Design Influences Customer Behavior.
Less can be more.
Marketing studies reveal a staggering statistic: the average American is exposed to around 5,000 advertisements and brands per day.
Only twelve ads leave an impression.
Want to be like those twelve impressive, spotlight-stealing brands?
You need practical, attractive design.
When consumers are faced with deciding between a wide array of choices - all things with similar features or benefits - they go with the one that they either recognize or the one that has a more pleasing design.
For example, images attract more clicks, retweets, and likes
According to research conducted by Buffer (a social media tool we use and like), tweets with images received 150% more retweets than those without any images.
Customers aren't the only ones that agree good design helps companies on social media platforms.
60.8% of marketers said that in 2017, design was essential to their marketing strategies. 93% agreed that it was very important.
By leveraging good design, you can ensure that your content marketing efforts won't be another momentary blip in your customers' endless social media stream.
About the Author: Amanda Bowman works in customer service at crowdspring, one of the world's leading marketplaces for crowdsourced logo design, web design, graphic design, product design, and company naming services. Amanda helps guide crowdspring customers through the easy process of obtaining affordable, high-quality custom artwork and content for their business.