Staying on top of the graphic design business means staying social, understanding consumer behavior, sales and personal selling, trends on how the latest technology functions, navigation processes, and the overall marketing objectives and strategies involved in web design and social media marketing. Each industry will be a new challenge as the
target market will be drastically different, and will think differently, navigate using a different browser and will navigate completely differently, will have different levels of patience, and varying goals and objectives. In fact, many of these factors will often be outside a graphic designer’s control. However, the important thing is to remember to take control and optimize the factors that you can control using as much information as possible including your own knowledge of design, marketing trends, and other resources.
Whether you are a graphic designer who has a client who would like to design a website, a Facebook fan page, Twitter background, YouTube channel or MySpace background, or even print media including flyers, business cards, pamphlets, brochures and other media, the best graphic design principles are applied and top results are achieved when a graphic designer possesses in-depth knowledge of marketing.
Thus, the intelligent graphic designer should be more inclined and motivated to perform the following tasks:
• Improve your overall knowledge of traditional and online marketing
• Acquire knowledge of the online shopping process and how to optimize user interfaces
• Stay up to date on recent trends in graphic design and online marketing, which currently include Google Remarketing, Google Plus, and Groupon
• Get on top of conversion optimization for websites, Facebook fan pages, and Twitter
The Role of Graphic Design in Social Media and on Websites
Every now and then, social media giants including Facebook, switch up their graphic design elements, including but not limited to user interface, overall layout, graphics and color schemes. That is to say, there is a calculated reason that certain changes are made, in order to increase sales. In a similar manner, some of the top-earning websites tweak their shopping carts, sales pages, overall layouts and color schemes, to improve the graphic elements and appeal to the target audience.
What this means for graphic designers is to acquire a better understanding of general marketing, and online marketing, to add value to their customers. The ultimate objective of any for-profit business on their respective websites and social media websites, which excludes non-profit organizations, charities, fundraisers and philanthropic operations, is to generate as much profit as possible.
So in a nutshell, what does a good graphic design really entail?
Good graphic design requires knowledge of the:
• client’s business and marketing objectives
• target market
• industry at hand
• various online marketing tools, techniques, technologies and strategies
• online shopping process and user interface
• conversion optimization