Great graphic design captures attention. Done well and it also captures your audience’s imagination. It might be in the form of a great logo, an animation, colour palette or simply the choice of font. Or it could be an infographic, photographs, animations, video or CGI’s. Whatever it is, they all have their roles to play in a successful marketing campaign.

Marketing is all about telling your story through words and imagery in an engaging way that connects with people. Giving your audience something to believe in – be it a service, product, brand or message – and starting conversations which will eventually (hopefully!) translate into sales.

So how do you turn those first impressions into impactful conversations with your audience?

Every business, no matter how big or small, has its own unique story to share. As marketers it’s our job not only to make sure that every message you send to your audience is visually eye-catching, but also to ensure that we utilise every opportunity to communicate with existing or potential customers.

To make a campaign powerful we want to find mutual ground, that shared interest and start up a conversation. Ultimately, we want to make sure that conversation turns into sales, but we also need to use those interactions to help strengthen and maintain existing relationships as much as helping to make new ones.

There’s also such a widespread choice of communication channels at our disposal – TV, newspapers, billboards, social media, YouTube, advertising, radio, we could go on. The likelihood is that your audience will be using a combination of the list above, but perhaps at different times of the day and engaging with each in a slightly different way. We need to be aware of this and adapt the way we connect with them accordingly in order to make a powerful impact.

Here’s our top tips for success:

Identify your audience

Do your market research and work out who is most likely to want to engage with your brand for the right reasons. Only by knowing this can you decide how best to engage with them. This isn’t about just knowing which platforms to be seen on, but also what kind of images our audience likes to see, language to use, tone of voice and even what time of day to be actively communicating.

Understand how your audience likes to engage

This could vary immensely. We want to initiate conversations, get to know our audiences, understand their likes/dislikes and use that to establish a connection. Marketing is about taking all that into consideration and then creating interesting and compelling content to increase the potential for successful engagement.

Listen before you speak

It’s not just enough to provide engaging content, you need to be listening to conversations too. Not only does doing this help to identify opportunities to engage in conversations about your brand, but you can turn this insight into impact. If we don’t know what our audience wants, then we don’t know how to connect and influence them so we can use these conversations to make better marketing decisions.

Create engaging content and visuals

You’ve heard it before, but content is king. The deeper and richer content you can offer your audience, the more likely they are to want to do business. Think about the issues that impact your audience and how you can adopt this. It might be that your business provides a solution to this problem or at the very least can provide empathy. Consumers like this. Again be clever with the visuals. You only have to look at how platforms like Instagram have gained popularity to recognise the importance of imagery. Yes it needs to grab attention, but it doesn’t always have to be polished. Interestingly some of the most loved posts are slightly rough around the edges.

Measure, repeat

It is important to measure the success of your interactions. Which conversations resonated the most? Which platforms reached the largest audience? What time of day do they tend to engage? Only by analysing what really worked can you plan how to move your efforts forward. Pinpoint the elements that really connected and plan to do more of those moving forwards.

The successful growth of a business lies in its ability to connect with its current and target audience. Only once you know who you want to start conversations with and how they like to consume information can you put together an effective marketing campaign.

You won’t necessarily have all the answers from the offset but using industry expertise and experience can point you in the right direction. Keep it simple and concise, don’t add ‘fluff’. Get to the point otherwise you will quickly loose interest from your audience. You want it to be persuasive, but not too in your face. Your audience should feel inspired and ready to take action.