An excellent online marketing strategy has several components, but one of the most crucial to consider is your content strategy. On its face, it sounds pretty simple; content strategy is how a marketing department plans, creates and manages its created content. Actually implementing a content strategy can be anything but simple, however. 

This article isn’t about how to create a good content strategy but rather one important consideration you should keep in mind when creating one. Effective graphic design can turn a good content strategy into a great one. Here’s why. 

Internet Marketing Content Needs Visuals

Any good content needs imagery and visual components in order to be successful. Furthermore, as search engines become more intelligent, they increasingly scan internet pages for relevant imagery when returning search results; therefore, images become crucial for search engine optimization (SEO). 

Beyond how images feed into search algorithms, they also encourage more interaction and more backlinks from other sites. Posts with visual content can generate more shares, and content that includes video can boost the number of backlinks to the content from other pages. Since both can improve a site’s SEO ranking, it becomes crucial to implement graphics carefully.

Good Graphic Design Can Improve Website Metrics

One of the reasons behind your entire content strategy is probably to improve your website’s metrics. This may include measurements like clickthrough rates, time spent on your page, number of conversions, number of visitors, or how many pages a person visits. All of these metrics are valuable, and good graphic design can help improve all of them. 

There are various reasons for this, but suffice it to say that a large part is due to how much impact visual content can have on the human brain. A good graphic designer can choose a suitable color scheme and relevant imagery to help your brand get its message across, often without even using any words. 

If you’re going to focus on one graphic, make that your logo. If you’re a small company without a significant brand presence, you often have very little time to make a good impression on potential customers. Your logo needs to effectively capture the essence of your brand and convey that to your audience. If you’re in need of a logo and you’d rather design one yourself, head over to LogoCreator, where you can create one completely for free from a variety of templates for many different industries.

Graphic Design Goes Beyond Marketing

Graphic design isn’t only useful from a marketing perspective, though. Even if your primary goal for your online content isn’t to sell your product, graphic design can help. Nobody wants to visit a clunky website that looks like it’s from the early 2000s; the average website visitor expects a modern, sophisticated design filled with high-quality graphics. Your website needs to meet and exceed that expectation. 

Check out some of these statistics for graphic design over at Don’tDoItYourself, and if you’re not convinced after reading through them that you need graphic design, we don’t know what to tell you. More small businesses realize that graphics are increasingly important to their bottom line. They’re willing to invest more in paying for custom design. Many people cite website design and appearance as a main contributing factor to whether they make a purchase. Clearly, graphic design is an important part of growing a business.

A good content strategy should include how graphics will fit into the larger equation. Great graphic design, created by a professional, can really enhance your internet content and improve your business in a few different ways. 

By Casey Day