The What and The How - Communication Design Elements and Content Marketing

Great content isn’t just about the “what”, it is also about the “how”. As a marketing consultant, I find myself constantly reminding clients that how you get a message across, matters just as much as the message itself. It is for this reason that communication design elements affect content marketing. Communication design elements, in short, will influence the attention of your audience, how they react to the message and therefore creating trust in the brand. These factors are what in turn affect the performance of content marketing efforts. Creating a hierarchy for visuals guides your audience on where to look when first scanning the “message”. Having a bold headline, subheadings, and easy navigation, is the clear distinction, as opposed to having the same size, and style. Your message needs to be distinctive and easy to understand. Fonts play an important role in affecting content marketing. It is important to maintain clean fonts that are easily readable while maintaining professionalism. Doing this will prove positive results from marketing efforts. Too many different fonts, especially those that are not easily understandable will drive your audience away. Remaining consistent with brand colors affects your audience’s mood and attention to the message. It helps your audience to recognize and relate to the content, automatically. Consistency is key, especially brand colors for positive effects in content marketing. With any good message, there must be support from good images. The right image will express the message faster than simply text. For example, producing a map with all the locations of a franchise in a small town, rather than listing it out in a text format. This way your audience will get a visual description as soon as they land on the content, rather than having to read through text. Having a proper layout and remaining consistent throughout the message is key. Ensuring that all elements are aligned, the look is cohesive across all messaging platforms, and most importantly it all remains clean builds trust. When messages look familiar and are organized, your audience will engage. When a good design supports a valuable message, content marketing then becomes more effective. To conclude, having good communication design elements, in turn leads to results-worthy content marketing.