Marketing can make or break a startup or small business. As a small business owner, you may worry that your limited budget, time or design skills will keep you from creating exceptional marketing materials, but that’s not true. Now, more than ever, everyone has the power to design compelling brand assets.
You don’t need a corporate giant’s budget or a professional’s design skills to create impactful marketing materials either – you just need a solid strategy and accessible visual tools. In this guide, we’ll share how you can support your small business, from using a poster template to save time to A/B testing your designs on your target demographic. Read on to learn more!
Use Templates to Save Time and Stay Polished
If you struggle to ideate creatively, templates offer structure while still allowing you to assert control and employ your brand guide. Tools like Adobe Express are free and intuitive to use, proving that budgets and experience are no longer necessary to achieve a polished, professional-looking asset. You can simply browse through and select a social media or poster template to land on a well-polished, professional-grade graphic template that aligns with your vision. All you need to do from here is tweak the information according to your needs, maybe change the colour palette to match your brand and enjoy the time saved and a job well done.
Refine Your Brand Identity
Once a template is chosen, ensure you are well-versed in your brand’s identity. Define the colours, fonts and tone of voice that reflect your small business’s core message. Because consistency across platforms is crucial to building brand recognition and trust, it can be a good idea to review existing brand assets, like your logo, website and business cards, and fuse the colours used into your new templates to align your collateral. Creating a simple brand guide before designing can help lead your decisions and keep you on track.
Choose the Right Format for Your Message
What’s the goal of designing and distributing these marketing materials? Are you trying to attract local foot traffic to a brick-and-mortar store? Are you building a global online presence for your accounting agency? Your ‘why’ will guide your choice of format for your design. Posters, social media posts, EDMs and traditional mass marketing approaches like newspaper advertisements all serve a unique purpose and are easier to target to specific demographics, if that’s what you need.
For example, you can use email marketing to connect with your subscriber list. This audience is considered ‘warm’ leads, so you don’t need to explain who you are, and it can be a place where you keep graphics simple and showcase offers.
Physical forms of advertising, like posters and magazine ads, can bring in a more local and broad audience, which is great for community businesses like trades or dog walkers, while online marketing has the twofold benefit of reaching a wider audience and allowing you to target your ideal audience more specifically.
Focus on Visual Hierarchy
The most important part of your marketing – your ‘why’ – should stand out the most on your assets, whether that’s a huge sale, an event or your social media handles. Font size, bolding and the placement of phrases or images will draw the viewer’s eye to your ‘why’ immediately, making it the main takeaway of the asset.
To that end, only provide essential information on your marketing materials, not fluff – things like dates and times, sale details, the name of your business’s social media accounts, and your address. Overcrowding information can decrease the likelihood that people will engage with your materials and distract from your main message.
However, there are obviously exceptions to this, like in product catalogues when you want to be descriptive and emotive in describing your range, or when advertising events, all the information to get people to attend and find the venue needs to be included.
Design for Your Audience
Understanding your target demographic is key to creating a design that resonates with them enough to spur action. For example, younger folks tend to appreciate digital marketing, short-form social media videos, bright and quirky colours and cheeky humour in marketing, while older people may be more drawn to written content and traditional advertising copy.
What works for your brand may depend on your audience’s age, location, interests and income level. Therefore, the imagery, colours and language you use in your marketing materials should align with your specific audience. If you don’t have the budget for market research, use friends and family within the target demographic to your advantage, and A/B test different assets on them, using their feedback to guide your process.
Keep it Flexible
In the spirit of being equally efficient and effective, design with reusability in mind. Can a marketing poster become a static social media post? Can you cut a longer-form advertising video into shorter clips? Could your EDM work as a mailbox newsletter?
Thinking of your designs as multifunctional can expand your reach and save you time. Export your designs in multiple formats and sizes for reuse, and save brand assets as templates you can adjust for future campaigns.
Key Takeaways
With so many free and helpful visual tools available to you, designing impactful marketing materials for your small business can be a breeze. Here’s a recap:
- Use templates to stay polished and save time, using free tools like Adobe Express to start the design process.
- Stand strong in your brand’s existing identity, creating a brand guide of colours, fonts and tone of voice that can guide you as you design marketing assets.
- Choose the right format for your message – physical assets can engage a local audience, while maximising your digital marketing outreach can help you reach a global audience.
- Let your main message take centre stage on marketing materials and avoid overcrowding information.
- Design with your target audience in mind and utilise people in your own life to obtain feedback on different assets.
- Try to create marketing materials that can be used across platforms to maximise efficiency and minimise effort.
