How To Build Brand Awareness Using Graphic Design

Brand awareness is the most important stage in marketing: the first impression. And there is only one chance to make a good first impression. Learn how to use good graphic design to make sure you impress your potential customers.

When potential customers first discover your brand, form an impression of it and remember it even exists, they are at the brand awareness stage. It is an immediate recognition of a product or service as a result of good branding, or the customer’s capacity to recognize or recall a brand under different circumstances.

This memory consists of multiple brand identification visual components, overall feelings about the company, and any other information about a product or service.

Brand awareness is different from brand recognition, which demonstrates how effectively buyers can recognize a company through visual cues such as the logo, typefaces, and colors.

So, graphic design can directly help you improve brand recognition as well.

However, the feeling customers nurture towards a strong brand is also encompassed in brand awareness, so in this article, we will focus more on that—how your potential customers can recognize and remember your brand and its values through good graphic design.

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Target audience research

You should know who your customers are in order to provide them with a personalized experience that exceeds their expectations.

Not only are demographic statistics vital to know about them, but so are their hobbies and values. Who are the people for whom you build experiences?

When creating a complete buyer persona, keep the following in mind.

This is a no-brainer. But how do you uniquely brand a service?

Two different brands of the same wine sort. I always pick the left one (first time because of the design, then because of the taste.

• Hobbies and interests: Know what your target audiences like to do in their free time and what they deem to be fun. Their hobbies and interests should tell you where you can find them in their leisure time and what locations or events would attract them to your brand.
• Values and beliefs: Different demographics have different values on a pedestal. Offer a brand experience that will make your ideal customer trust your company because it stands for the same values as them.
• Inspirations and achievements: What inspires your customer, and how do they like to celebrate important achievements? Make your brand a part of their happy and celebratory moments.
• Routines and habits: This will tell you a lot about where your ideal customers can be found, what their day is going to look like, and what they do as a way to relax or empower themselves.
• Places of interest: Cafes, restaurants, festivals, public transport and public spaces, are all places where your brand can place an experiential marketing campaign, pop-up shop, or similar.
• Tools and gadgets they use: Are they Apple or Android users? Are they more likely to be on a PC? Which social media platforms do they use?

Memorable brand identity

By designing a brand identity that can be easily distinguished from the rest of the companies on the market that are your direct competitors, you will make sure that audiences are impressed and can memorize it easily.

A brand identity is more than just a good logo and catchy value propositions. It is both how the company’s branding design looks, and what it stands for.

By creating a unique visual style that encompasses all your value propositions and will catch the eye of your target audience, you make sure that your brand is noticeable, catchy and relevant to them. This can help shape the way clients think about your brand, and in turn increase your brand's value (brand equity).

The most important elements that you need to think about when creating your brand identity are:

• Physique: the design and iconography, the visual identity of the company
• Personality: how the brand communicates with the outside world, its tone of voice
• Culture: its behavior, both internal and external
• Relationship: the relationship between the brand and its customers
• Reflection: the typical personality of the customers, ideal buyer persona
• Self-image: how the customers perceive themselves and the ideal that brought them to that brand.

Consistent use of graphic elements

A graphic design element such as a logo, brand mark, font, color palette or symbol can greatly increase brand awareness through consistent and repetitive use.

For example, you don’t see a company like Coca-Cola using anything else but red and white, do you? And their font is always their signature, swirly cursive lettering that immediately reminds you which brand uses it.

The reason for that is because consistent use of graphic elements can help a person memorize a brand more easily. It is a Pavlov’s dog experiment of a kind: you see a certain color or symbol, then your mind strays away onto the company, and then on to what the company sells. And just like that, you find yourself craving some Coke.

Uniquely branded product or services

Catchy and high-quality product packaging or well-presented services can really help a company’s brand awareness.

For physical goods, well-branded labels, wrapping, boxes, and additional elements that come with them are very important.

Here is a simple situation in which flashy packaging does the trick: in a supermarket, you see two bottles of wine next to each other. One has a great packaging design, from the bottle’s shape and label to the colors and font on them.

The other one looks outdated and not classy at all. They have the same price. Which one do you pick? Almost always, when one doesn’t have enough information for either product, they go for the one that looks better.

Well, with a great website or landing page. Even offline branding elements, such as a brick-and-mortar store, stationery, business cards, vehicles… Anything that your company owes can be your own marketing channel. Make sure to infuse your brand in all your assets, and people will easily memorize your identity.

Color palette based on color psychology

Different colors have different effects on human psychology. This is called color psychology.

Color psychology is both a science and an art form when it comes to working with color. It covers how people see color as well as the visual consequences of colors mixing, matching, and contrasting with one another. It is concerned with the signals that colors convey as well as the technologies used to recreate color.

Colors are divided on a color wheel into three categories in color theory: primary, secondary and tertiary colors.

You can make good branding decisions if you have a fundamental understanding of color schemes. The appropriate color palette can help you highlight your company's strengths and attract the right customers. As you may expect, the incorrect combination can have the opposite impact.

Noticeable visual style in marketing efforts

A smart way to be different from the bunch is to always move your limits when it comes to creativity in marketing. Just think about how many ads you remember because they were creative, out there, inspired you or made you laugh?

Make sure that the design of your ads, branding and all marketing efforts is always cutting edge. And not just that: keep in mind that they should be done according to your brand at all times.

Whether it is by keeping the same visual pattern and color schemes, infusing your unique value propositions in ads, designing catchy ads and lead magnets or even traditional marketing tactics like print ads will as a result improve your branding awareness, although with a slower effect.