5 Tips to Leverage Design and Grow Your Business Faster

You might have the most useful and functional product on the market, but if it’s not wrapped up and tied in a pretty bow, chances are that customer aren’t going to take notice. This is because modern consumers care a great deal about aesthetics, how their brands use their visual elements, how they package their products, and how they approach their marketing from an aesthetic standpoint. Needless to say, investing in design from the start is one of the best ways to improve your business as a whole, yet not many business leaders give visual design the attention it deserves.

One of your priorities should be to weave design thinking and the design culture into your every process, in order to bring creativity to your departments and support collaboration that will yield better results, improved customer satisfaction, and better brand recognition. Here are the key ways you can make all of that a reality.

Build an amazing brand identity

Let’s start with the basics and address the problem of brand creation. Many novice business leaders either forgo the brand building process altogether, or focus on a single part of the brand puzzle hoping that it would be enough to create a brand people will want to engage with. Sadly, this is not enough to build an amazing brand, as one of the key elements is visual design, along with the brand’s personality, values, and tone of voice.

When you focus on the design aspects, you can unlock the brand’s true potential in the competitive marketplace, as visual design is one of the most powerful ways to stand out from the crowd. It should go without saying that standing out in this competitive climate is imperative, especially for startups that are yet to prove their worth against the well-established businesses. Be sure to focus on designing a visual identity that portrays your brand’s values, complements your industry and its trends, and showcases your unique brand personality. 

Encourage cross-department collaboration

For the designers in your team, it’s often easy to feel left out, alone, and left to your own devices until you get a project brief from your colleagues. Oftentimes, projects are discussed without them, and while you might think that everything is going smoothly as is, in reality, you are wasting your team’s creative potential and losing out on some amazing ideas that could have happened. This is why you should encourage and incentivize cross-department collaboration, and include your designers into every process.

This includes sales, marketing, PR, human resources, traditional advertising, internal and external communication, and everything in between. What you will quickly discover is that your designers have what it takes to make every process more creative and productive, and that their input can give rise to some truly unique solutions. This will also make your designers feel more appreciated, which will invariably elevate employee happiness.

Boost your offline marketing

Before we touch on the topic of digital marketing and the role your design team plays in the matter, let’s first address the problem of traditional marketing. Why? Because offline marketing seems to be constantly dwelling in the shadow of its digital counterpart, and so companies are wasting a big portion of their marketing potential. Concretely, your designers can help you take your offline marketing to a whole new level.

The key is, of course, to combine the creativity and proficiency of your designers with top-quality printing services to ensure that what they’ve envisioned and created gets transferred to a physical product, flyer, or any other type of advertisement the right way. You need all of your printed materials to boast a high level of quality in aesthetics and functionality if you are to engage your customers and achieve the desired effect.

Improve productivity with the right tools

Another important investment you need to make in order to unlock the full potential of your design team is to provide them with all of the necessary tools to make their time in the office more productive, but also enjoyable and rewarding. Given the fact that technology is constantly evolving, be sure to stay on top of the latest developments, and listen to your designers when they say that they would be able to achieve more if they had this software or a unique piece of hardware.

Take digital marketing to the next level

And lastly, don’t just go to your designers when you have a brief for your new marketing campaign or the next batch of ads – include them in the entire creation process from start to end. If you want to utilize the full power and potential of all digital marketing tactics, it’s important that your designers are a part of the process every step of the way, which will also prevent costly delays and setbacks when they send you back the brief with their detailed explanations why it can’t be, or shouldn’t be done that way. Hey, time is money, so don’t waste it.

Wrapping up

Designers might be a single part of your brand’s structure, but it’s important to remember that your design team plays a vital role in your long-term success. With that in mind, be sure to act on these tips and leverage your design team to take your brand to new heights.