3 Tips for Marketers: Don’t Let Poor Design Hold Your Awesome Content Back

If content is king, design is queen. Design is content’s partner; it’s better, more eye-catching half. Emphasis is always on the message, but you need good design to help you deliver it. As a graphic designer, strategic communicator and graduate student in Northwestern Medill’s Integrated Marketing Communications [IMC] program, I have a few easy lessons that will help you marry your awesome content with good design.

Design has a big impact on how audiences understand and receive messages. Communications scholar and professor Curtis Newbold, also known as "The Visual Communication Guy," in Top 5 Most Common Design Mistakes that Will Make You Look Like an Amateur outlines some of the most common problems in designing communications: center alignment, all caps, overemphasis, small margins, and tacky fonts. He says that while most people know poor design when they see it, they do not know why it is bad or how to fix the design issues. He is right and offers practical advice for avoiding a typical #designfail.

Design skills are necessary for marketers and communicators who want to better communicate to, interact with and serve their audiences. Tips are useful, but even more so when combined with design thinking. Designer and AIGA member Emily Hamre speaks to the process of solving communication problems with design in her article 3 Tips For Becoming A Better Design Communicator: understand the problem, gather insights from others, and make ideas tangible. Just as you plan your message and carefully craft copy, design is planned. 

Universal design principles and theories can help guide your understanding of what makes good graphic design — but you don't have to learn them all. I've synthesized my knowledge of good design into three key design rules that you can keep in mind the next time you plan the design of your marketing communication:

1.  Make it readable. 

Readability is twofold. Think legibility and comprehension. Knowing your objective and audience is just as important to design as it is to marketing. Ask yourself, is the text easy to read at a glance, and can my audience easily take away the key message I am trying to convey? 

2.  Make it consistent.

Clear and consistent use of type, graphic styles, and graphic elements gives your audience a framework for receiving your message and understanding the information. You want to provide an overall visual system for your content that brings all elements together into a more easily understandable whole. Consistency makes things instantly recognizable, simplifies learning, improves user experience, and ultimately builds trust. 

3.  Make it pretty (or make it C.R.A.P.).

For some, "making it pretty" comes naturally. For others, some things to think about when arranging elements in a composition: structure, order, harmony, balance, which translate into the main principles of design – unity, variety, and hierarchy. You can achieve unity, variety, and hierarchy using different strategies. One of the easiest is the C.R.A.P. or contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity. The best way to get better at making things look pretty is to look at pretty things. Look here and here.

These are my mantras. You too can learn these simple design rules to make your communications look more professional and let your awesome content shine.

Maggie Hutaff
I am a graphic designer and communicator in North Carolina. I hold a bachelor’s in visual communication from the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication and am currently working on a master of science in integrated marketing communications from Northwestern University’s Medill School. I have taught Introduction to Graphic Design at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Follow me at @designmah.

Senior Executives: Mobilize your employees to solve business problems

As a senior executive, you look for ways to harness the massive creativity and brainpower of your employees to solve business challenges, like product innovation, customer loyalty, or strategic growth. As a graduate student in Marketing Communications at Northwestern’s Medill School, I have found two articles that help us understand how to mobilize our employees.

Too often your messages to employees are weighed down by impersonal and technical language that leaves employees uninterested in, unmotivated by and confused about how their work improves products, profits, or customer satisfaction. In Corporate Executive Board’s Three ways to move stakeholders to action, Dorian Cundick shares ways to get your employees' immediate attention. Cundick recommends putting your employee's perspective at the center of the message by creating a sense of urgency and "channeling your inner newscaster" to develop attention-grabbing headlines for your message.

Once you've got your employees' attention, Weber Shandwick’s fascinating report on employee advocacy titled Employees Rising outlines how to spur your employees to act. Weber Shandwick segments your employee population by advocacy willingness and potential, sharing ways to motivate your employees to be fully engaged. They note that over half of your employees could be company advocates if you value their ideas, keep them well-informed, and listen and respond to them.

Based on my insights from these articles, I recommend you take these three actions immediately.   

1. Put the employee at the center - Employees spend the day thinking about their work, their families, and their challenges. In order to get their attention, word the message in terms of their needs and business perspective. Moreover, speak specifically on their role in developing the solution. For instance, if the business challenge is financial, replace your financial vernacular with terms that the employees use in their daily work, providing examples of how their work impacts the desired goal.

2. Create an experience - Employees want to feel something, so consider how employees feel about the business challenge. Address those emotions using personal pronouns to communicate that you understand their concerns and problems. And, not every message has to be framed seriously. Find a way to make it fun - poll employees, ask them thought-provoking questions, and if appropriate, make them laugh. If your message reaches an employee’s emotions, they will be more likely to talk about it with other employees thus furthering the creative solutions.


3. Be social - Your company’s internal and external social communities are full of creative solutions to business challenges. Use this existing database to source solutions and to encourage further dialog around a problem. Personally respond to employee ideas on these communities to signal that you value their ideas. As mentioned before, put the employee at the center and create an emotional experience. Your engagement will increase their likelihood to act for the benefit of the company. Not only will your social activity help solve the current business problem, your dialog on social channels can help address future challenges.

Senior executives, think like your employees to encourage creative solutions, and then cultivate these inputs on social channels to show that you value their thoughts. Once they see that their ideas are important to you, they will be ready to go solve the problem. 


 

Posted by Johanna Soyars
I am a communications manager for a Fortune 50 company. I have worked in small businesses and large corporations on change management, employee engagement, and external communications. My time with Sensors Unlimited, Goodrich and UTC has taught be that the fundamentals of people, communications and networks remain the same. I plan to continue on in marketing communications after graduation seeking fresh ways for businesses to gain customer and employee trust. Questions? Contact me through Twitter at @jgsoyars.

RSVP, in english please. (1/5 - Things to Remember for a National Ad Campaign )

While the title is catchy, it really doesn't speak directly to your targeted reader.  I would recommend you re-do the title to something shorter and more pointed to your reader.  Maybe something like "Not Deeply Understanding your Target Markets = Risks and Failures"  Or something like that.

Now, remember we are speaking with a very sophisticated but time compressed audience.  So we need to immediately get their attention and quickly move to your studies.  Therefore, your opening paragraph should be  2 short sentences focused on engaging the target reader and then establishing your expertise on the topic.  I would recommend starting with something like:

While agencies "preach" target markets, the explosion of social, mobile, and web touchpoints makes it imperative to really understand who they are and where they go to get information.  As a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC marketing program and an executive with XXXX agency, I have been researching some of the perils of marketing in today's more complex marketplace and have found two articles which offer guidance and directions agency managers need to know.

Now, don't start with step 1 but start with the research.  I would start by discussing the Year of Mobile.  Cite the author and have another link to their site.  Tell the reader about the article in a single paragraph to highlight the key findings from the article.  Keep it short.  Avoid personal stories but keep your analysis of the article in a natural voice...which you are using very well in this document.

PS, one other thing.  It looks like this is a typewriter font.  I would change it to something which looks more modern like Ariel or another newer font.


Step #1 - Know your audience, determine the media, speak their language and they'll respond.

The various media outlets we have at our disposal today allow marketers extraordinaire to e-eavesdrop on our customers.  Finding out where your customers "are", what they're talking about and how they like to communicate are the keys to getting the RSVP you're looking for.
You really don't need the RSVP theme.  Start with the first article.  It looks interesting Don't you hate it when you send out 50 invitations, 5 people respond and 55 people show up? Me too.

Before you lick the stamps and mail the letters figure out who your customers are and THEN invite them to the party.  I manage several national ad campaigns during daylight hours and find it so easy to jump to " The Year of Mobile " when a client asks how they can expand their reach.  I've seen presentations from partners on geo-fencing and call transcription services and these are natural ideas to jump to.  Everyone wants to be invited to the party, right?

Perhaps a mobile campaign IS the right way to go.  Companies like xAd offer both search and banner options that may fit your clients' audience and there are many reasons for a "why wouldn't you do it?" argument...but...getting back to the RSVP...where are your clients? what are they talking about? and, how are you going to get their attention?
While personal stories are interesting, either make this your second article or drop it.  It makes the blog too long and more difficult to read. I was recently involved with a client who conducted a trial with CityGrid for several months.  Previous to this test they believed that their B2B model wasn't a match with advertising on an interactive network, but much to their surprise, it is now their top converting platform with conversion rates in double-digit excess of their other efforts.  Why?  Well, it turns out that people who are faithful CityGrid users (CitySearch.com, UrbanSpoon.com etc.) are the same customers our client is looking for.  They like food, they like eating and apparently they like reading advertisements while they're at it.

It isn't a novel concept, I know.  But I'm a bit of a traditionalist (and, yes, I keep Emily Post on hand).  Once you find your guests and pick out the best invitation, attract them with a message that sounds like them (skip the photos of your dinner/cocktail/dessert please).  They want to know about how awesome the party is going to be, and how going to the party will do so much for their social status.

Cutting-edge technologies and new media platforms can drive insane results...or, they can fail to provide any calls, clicks, emails, "likes", pokes or tweets because your customers aren't there [yet].  Stay tuned for steps 2/5 of Things to Remember for a National Ad Campaign...and remember, know your audience, determine the media, speak their language and they'll respond.
This should be your second article.  Structure the blog to have the first article, the graphic, and then the second article assessment.  Tell the executive what you want him/her to understand from the article.  If you like it, they will like to know what you found. This post was written by Christina Kellman - Interactive Strategy

After the 2 sentence intro, the second paragraph on article one, the graphic, the third paragraph on article two, now you are ready for the action items.

Start with something like "From these two articles and my studies at Northwestern, here are three action items I recommend you initiate.

THEN, give them 3 bullet points.  They most be short [2-3 words] and really memorable.  Draw them from the two articles.  After each bullet point, you can put a dash and then a single sentence of explanation.  No more than that.

THEN, give us a great, short summary paragraph.  1-2 sentences.  Encourage the reader to act on the three action items and tell them the benefit.

Then you have your personal paragraph.   Try this format and, when you are happy, publish it and let's get testing.


Christina Kellman is an Interactive Media Manager in Orange County, CA. In addition to her active role with the agency, she is in the midst of obtaining her master’s degree in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University’s Medill School. Want to Follow her on Twitter?

The Big Battle of Twitter vs Time

As a marketing communications professional intrigued with the growing potential of social media, I always wondered what would be the right time ‘time of the day’ for a company to listen to their customers. When is it that the customers post on twitter, facebook, or blogs.   

With Twitter particularly, since it is the todays’ platform where customers complaint about brands and company want to be responsive instantly. Twitter to me always felt like a battle against the clock. But I found this great info graphic that helps us towards this dilemma.

This info graphic from Lemon.ly will help us marketers know what time of the day majority of tweets are posted, whether afternoon or the evening time slot sees the most social engagement, and such other interesting facts about Twitter w.r.t. time of day.

With a new twitter account being opened every 5 seconds, with my Medill IMC approach where we look at marketing and social media with a quant heavy focus and it is all about optimizing the right resources to gain maximum effectiveness, I now know that Twitter is my best friend from 9-11am and 1-3pm every day.

Akshit Arora

M.S. Integrated Marketing Communications

@akshitaroraimc

Loyalty Programs: Driving Incremental Revenue?

I recently discovered that the 3^rd largest retailer and #1 pharmacy in the nation has plans to roll out a massive loyalty program next year. Walgreens is currently running a pilot of Walgreens Rewards in Richmond, Kansas City, and Portland. The program is based on points that can be redeemed for substantial rewards like gift cards and merchandise. Even though Walgreens is late to market behind the competition, the program seems to build a relationship with the customer over time. In comparison, CVS ExtraCare Rewards are only good for a limited time and more difficult to keep track of. The program will be tweaked based on the results of the pilot, but it seems very easy to participate and rewards customers for behavior that they would be doing anyways. This got me thinking about loyalty programs and wondering if they actually drive incremental sales.

For me, loyalty programs work. I continue to go to Starbucks over any other coffee shop so that I can get closer to a free cup of coffee. I also added a credit card to my Chase account to get double the points from Chase Rewards. If I can be rewarded for behavior that I am already doing, I am likely to increase that behavior. I suspect this is probably true of many other consumers as well. In my opinion, there are a few best practices that will help create a successful loyalty program that drives incremental sales. After all, it costs 5-7x more to acquire a new customer than it costs to keep the ones you already have. So why not give them a reason to stay?

1. Most important is ease of use. Customers don’t want to be bothered to think about their points. They should be easy to keep track of and just as easy to redeem.
2. Collect data. Use the data from member profiles to target messages, offers and optimize rewards.
3. Create an experience. Encourage your members to share their stories, pictures, etc. related to your loyalty program. This will increase engagement and allow you to have meaningful conversations you’re your loyal customers. This can also help to establish passionate brand advocates.
4. It’s all about value. Customers will remain loyal and increase their spend if they feel they are getting a true value out of the rewards. An example is Southwest recently enhanced their Rapid Rewards program by allowing members to earn points for shopping at retail partners.  Consumers want the greatest value they can get out of each dollar they spend.

What rewards programs are you loyal to?


Jessica Wesley
M.S. Candidate, Integrated Marketing Communications
Northwestern University
@jeswesley