Improve Brand Awareness, Streamline Website Design, and Keep Your Digital Marketing On-Point with a Style Guide
Cohesive design, tone of voice, imagery, and other components of your marketing design bank help your audience see your business as one they can look to and trust when they need your products or services.
These are all considered parts of your business’s design system, a collection of components that are guided with clear standards – like a style guide – that can be assembled in many unique combinations for all your digital marketing needs. This ensures a design never repeats, but is clearly related to the rest of your assets.
And while you certainly can settle on a design system, if your team doesn’t understand why you’ve adopted it, it can be hard to craft and control every aspect of your business, including how you deliver customer service, what you stand for, and why you’re unique.
In short, a design system creates understanding for your customers and your employees. That understanding leads to increased conversions and retention.
What Goes Into the Development of a Design System?
Creating a design system for your business is a task that requires great thought and consideration. It should be completed before you venture into small business website design, online reputation management services, or other high-profile digital marketing tactics, or simultaneously to them, so you can implement your system immediately.
- Purpose and shared values. Your design system conveys your brand’s values and the product. You’ll need to know your value proposition for this part. Your purpose and values are the foundation for cohesion. And your employees must know and understand your value proposition, too. If they don’t, they cannot accurately sell your products or services, nor are they capable of having the buy-in you’d like them to have when it comes to being a brand ambassador.
- Brand language and brand identity. Document all acceptable colors, typefaces, company logos, and voice that your team and your marketing partners should use. In combination, they represent your business, and help your customers immediately recognize you.
- Design principles. For each asset created, your design principles should outline exactly what the end product will look like. This doesn’t mean you’re creating identical ads with no variation; it means you’ve calculated the perfect formula for creating assets.
- User interface (UI) elements and other components. Think of your UI components as building blocks for all your marketing work. Reusing these components makes designing digital ads go much more quickly, because you’re never recreating them, nor your concepts. Your pre-made element library can include CTA buttons, icons and symbols, form fields, and anything else you’d like to repeatedly incorporate to leave an indelible mark on your audience’s brains.
Work with a website design company near you, like iFocus Marketing in Overland Park, Kansas. Get started on your design system that will inspire a website you can be proud of.
Your Business Can Thrive, Thanks to a Design System for Your Digital Marketing Strategy
A design system comes in handy for scalable projects, because of its interchangeable parts. Quick evolutions – like the ever-changing state of business – means your digital marketing assets always feel fresh, and you save time and money on customer experience projects.
These same interchangeable parts make design efficient; there’s never a need to recreate components and concepts, which will save you time on preparing to begin your digital marketing strategy for every new season. You’ll find a more simplified workflow within your marketing department, which will extend to the digital marketing agency you work with.
One of the strongest reasons to employ a design system in your business, however, is to ensure you have a cohesive brand image. This consistency saves time and helps your audience easily identify and remember you, even if they come in contact with your business across multiple digital channels, including display advertising, social media, and OTT video.
Design Systems Take Time
It’s unlikely that you or anyone could pull off completing a build of a design system in a day and applying it to all your media touchpoints.
But if you want to start experiencing the benefits of instant recognizability and a clear representation of your brand, then it’s always a good time to begin creating one.
If you’re ready to give your business’s marketing assets a makeover, but you don’t know where to begin, or you simply don’t have the time to manage it yourself, rely on the experts at iFocus Marketing, a forward-thinking digital marketing agency in Overland Park, KS.
Our designers and digital strategists know how to help you create a cohesive brand design system and get you in front of your audience on a variety of platforms. We’ll work diligently, providing you with top-notch data and updates, while you focus your time on running and growing your business.
Let’s grab a cup of coffee and talk about how iFocus can help you.
