One of the significant aspects of content marketing is design.

What your brand stands for and how your customer relates to your content can be simplified by using excellent design elements e.g., stock photos, infographics, illustrations, videos, charts & data visualisation within your content.

There is power in being consistent in your design across various platforms to help you achieve the following goals: build your brand, foster engagement and inspire conversion.

Content marketing strategy blueprint

Start with the brand and KPIs to build successful content. This already helps to guide your planning and the final direction you take.

For a robust content marketing strategy blueprint, you need 8 key elements:

1. Write your goals and the reason you are writing the content.
2. Create your customer personas, representing the key traits of a large segment of your audience, based on the data you have collected from user research.
3. Audit your current content to provide insights into how to improve underperforming content.
4. Create a step-by-step process that allows you to bring your potential customer one step closer to your content.
5. Map out your content distribution channels.
6. Put all the ideas on the table in a brainstorming session.
7. Create your content calendar using Excel or Airtable.
8. Implement the sum of 1 – 7.

Content Design

Content creators may shy away from using design elements within their content because they fear not getting the right design, which I clearly understand as a single poor design can ruin great content.

However, as you think about your strategy, consider engaging your designer at the start to help frame how design can help illustrate complicated concepts and enhance your content. Whatever content you are creating, design elements can greatly improve that content’s engagement. You can add photos, videos, illustrations, infographics, or gifs.

You should try to incorporate design concepts as a standard to any content you create.

Here are 4 ways great design can help your content, and simultaneously achieve the above goals.

1. Build brand awareness

There is a POWER in being CONSISTENT. You need to create a golden threat across all touchpoints using different design elements that can improve the way your brand and customer is being perceived. Your brand colour and font must be used consistently on all communication and marketing materials.

Check below how SATIB used similar design elements in it is Social Media design Ad, Zoom, Mailer and Tourism Update Gif Banner.

Inconsistency in the design elements you are using in your content and across all touchpoints will make communicating your brand persona much more difficult.

2. Design elements provide more value

According to brain rules, people can recall over 70% of the visual content they see almost two days later, compared to about 15% of written content. You should put your most important information in a visual, such as an infographic, graph, or chart.

A noteworthy little insight in this regard: In 2020 Nadya Khoja from Venngage talked to over 200 marketers to see how they used visual content in 2019 and how they plan to use the same in 2020.  Over 40% of marketers according to Venngage said one of the best ways to share content visually is using infographics.

3. Be different

According to Content Marketing Institute in 2018, over 85% of B2C marketers and 91% of B2B companies see content marketing as one of the major strategies to get customers. Hence the need to be different and just a few marketers create their own unique visual.

Designing visuals that your audience wants to share will help you build a robust brand and it can also increase your ROI. Original design can help to drive your content success and increase efficient communication engagement.

4. Repurpose your content

There are over 113 content types that you can organise your content marketing strategy around and it is not possible to integrate all in one content, but using different design elements is the best thing to do to help you easily repurpose any piece of content.

Let us take a piece of content from NightBridge on #TouchlessTech as an example and how it was repurposed into different formats on various platforms.

• An infographic was created.
• A video was created around #TouchlessTech piece.
• Blog post on how COVID has changed how we travel was written to give the #TouchlessTech piece more reach.
• Social media post was designed and shared from the #TouchlessTech piece.

From the above, it is obvious that once you are able to get the right piece of content, it will be easier to repurpose your content piece and update if need be.

Content repurposing with well-designed design elements will drive more engagement and increase social media shares.

The use of visuals like infographics, videos, charts, and other design elements in content marketing cannot be overemphasised.

If you write a lot of content, start thinking about smart ways to integrate various design elements which can also draw your audience in and improve engagement.

See how you can challenge yourself during what’s left of 2021 to find ways of bringing design into your content so that it’s not just ants on a page.

Babajide Olowookere is the Design Lead with Big Ambitions, a leading content marketing company in South Africa.