An important part of digital marketing and online presence in general is the imagery used throughout your marketing materials. There are many standards in place to make sure that your online presence is cohesive, complete, and attractive. This also applies throughout many different industries regardless of the target audience. It’s important to remember your goal audience and purpose when designing your graphics. Today we will cover aspects that every busness needs to put their best foot forward graphically. The following information is in no particular order.
- Branding
- Watermarks
- Quality
- Quantity
- Location
- Alt Text
- Purpose
- Dimensions
- Orientation
- Unique
Branding Your Marketing
Branding is a major aspect of your online presence and business in general. Branding refers to the colors, fonts, and the like that are unique to your business and make it easy to recognize your company and it’s purpose. When designing marketing materials (either print or digital), everyone knows to have your logo somewhere, but there is more to do in order to make your business marketing cohesive. You should strive to use your color palette on your marketing. For example, our color palette features a light blue, navy, light gray, green, orange, and teal. The first three (light blue, navy, and gray) are our primary colors and are used in our logo and a majority of our marketing. The latter three are our accent colors and are used on more in depth marketing items like the website, brochures, and business cards where I have a lot more information to accent.
Watermarks
Watermarks refer to a label or stamp of sorts used to show ownership of a unique image. You can use your logo, company name, or another unique item within the photo. Depending on the item you choose, you can add it to the corner of your image (in order to not detract from the image itself), you can keep it seemingly invisible by adding transparency to see the color that you’re laying it on top of, or by having it bold and visible (like how shutterstock does).
Quantity & Quality
Now it’s important to understand that while images are some of the best performing aspects of digital marketing (higher interactions rates, etc) that you don’t want to over do it. A good standard to live by is that you should include an image at topic changes or every 150-200 words. As for quality, it’s important to use the right dimensions in order to prevent an image from being pixelated or blurry. This also depends on the location such as facebook banner, instagram post, blog banner, or website graphic. You can find the correct dimensions through a quick google search or by asking your web developer for the different places in your website. Web design relies heavily on images to create an enticing site for users.
Purpose, Alt Text and Uniqueness
The final section of importance is the purpose, alt text, and uniqueness of the image. Google favors using unique/custom images. This is important because you want Google to prefer your post and put it up high in the search results. If you express the purpose of the unique image in your alt text clearly, then Google will rank you higher in the image search results, enabling more people to see your post. You can create custom graphics in Canva, Photoshop, or even just by taking images yourself.
If you’re looking for help with web design, graphic design, or any other digital marketing needs, feel free to reach out and we can help you find your marketing strategy.
