Great marketing is about sparking connections, not just pushing products.
The best marketing teams use words, visuals, and design to shape a brand’s personality—one that customers can relate to, trust, and remember. That emotional connection is what keeps people coming back and turns first-time buyers into lifelong fans. Marketing design plays a key role in making that connection stick. From your logo and website to product pages and ads, a consistent design strategy builds brand recognition and reinforces your brand’s values.
Read on to discover how a thoughtful marketing design strategy can help your ecommerce business create memorable campaigns and a consistent brand image.
What is marketing design?
Marketing design is a subset of graphic design used to promote goods or services. Marketing designers create visually appealing assets to support marketing goals, whether digital or printed. Website landing pages, email campaigns, and social media graphics are all examples of marketing design used to build brand consistency across channels.
Marketing design solutions help ecommerce businesses connect with potential customers and establish brand identity. Marketing and advertising design elements like color, image style, and text treatment tell consumers about your brand’s personality.
Making strategic stylistic choices to tell a story about your brand can help form an emotional connection with your target audience. Developing a signature design style and applying it consistently is step one of building brand recognition. A classic, upscale brand might pair a traditional serif font with a muted color palette to communicate elegance and sophistication, for example. On the other hand, a modern, rebellious brand might use bright, high-contrast colors and edgy fonts to make a bold impression.
Graphic design vs. marketing design: What’s the difference?
Graphic design is an applied art. It involves using visual elements such as color, shapes, images, and typography to communicate through design. It has a broad scope, encompassing everything from the paper label on a vinyl record to the graphic tees for sale outside of a Taylor Swift concert.
When explicitly used to create marketing materials, graphic design becomes marketing design (also called marketing graphic design). Marketing design uses the same skills and basic principles as graphic design, but with the specific goal of promoting a product or service.
Types of marketing design
Marketing teams use creative assets to enhance communications across platforms. These are some of the most common applications of marketing design:
Email marketing
Email marketing design aims to hook readers with a compelling message and use graphics to keep recipients engaged as they scroll. Email campaigns typically include elements like logos or images in addition to written content. Incorporating these graphic elements helps break up large blocks of text and display information in a visually appealing way.
Clear, legible text is essential for maintaining reader attention. Using responsive design—a web design approach that automatically adjusts layout, font size, and content formatting to fit different screen sizes—ensures that your messages display properly on both desktop and mobile devices, making all copy easy to read, no matter how your audience is viewing it.
Social media
Marketing design elements, such as animations or text overlays, can supercharge your marketing strategy. Adding graphic assets to social media posts helps capture attention and can convey additional information.
For example, imagine you’re creating a shoppable Instagram story for your specialty tea blend company. Applying animated text that lists ingredients and key selling points would add appealing context to a video of a steaming teacup. By using your signature fonts and color palette, you reinforce your brand identity and make your video content stand out more on social media platforms.
Digital and print advertisements
Digital and print advertisements both rely on marketing design to capture consumer attention. Print design includes direct-mail marketing campaigns, newspaper placements, and inserts included with your product. While print initiatives can use images and graphics, digital marketing campaigns can also deploy video and animations. Website banner ads and pop-ups are examples of digital marketing design advertisements.
Website and landing page design
Your brand’s website is a hub for critical consumer interactions. Social media posts, marketing emails, and all of your other marketing materials will most likely direct users to your website. A beautiful, functional design ensures potential customers have a positive experience and understand how to purchase your product once they arrive. The best websites and landing pages load quickly, display well on mobile and desktop devices, and use clearly labeled buttons to support user navigation.
Dianne O’Connor, the founder of the lifestyle company Weston Table, views her website as a tool for expression as well as a vehicle for ecommerce. “We are a creative team, and I think our entire site reflects that sort of creativity,” Dianne says. Weston Table takes an unconventional and ambitious approach to website design—they update their web design every three months.
As Dianne explains, “It is not for the faint of heart. When I say refresh, we’re not talking refresh a little bit. The site is 100% changed over.” For Dianne, overhauling the website is a way to provide entertainment and weave in additional storytelling, delivering more value to consumers, especially repeat visitors.
Marketing design best practices
Smart marketing efforts are clear and eye-catching. Follow these guidelines to create visually appealing assets and bolster your marketing strategy:
Follow brand guidelines
Stick to the colors and fonts specified in your brand guidelines. Using consistent brand elements across marketing channels will help build a cohesive brand identity. Weston Table follows this practice to maintain the brand’s identity even while regularly reinventing its website. Each time they refresh their website, they update email design templates to match the brand perception they’re trying to create.
Prioritize clarity and legibility
Clarity and legibility are essential for effective marketing design—consumers need to be able to read and understand your message. Text arrangement, font choice, and visual hierarchy are all key elements contributing to clarity.
For ease of reading, limit decorative display fonts to headlines and use creative arrangements, such as vertical or misaligned text, sparingly. Leaving some white space in your design allows the eye to rest—insufficient negative space may make images feel too busy. Preview your design on a mobile device and on its intended platform to ensure that the font is large enough to read.
Focus on a call to action
Effective marketing materials have a clear takeaway: Consumers should understand what they’re supposed to do after viewing your design. Consider the marketing key performance indicator (KPI) connected to your design and use this goal as an organizing principle. Include a clear call to action (CTA) to provide users with next steps. An advertisement aiming to increase brand awareness, for example, could include a button encouraging users to follow your brand’s social media accounts.
Test your designs
Consider using testing techniques to evaluate consumer response. You can use A/B testing tools to compare the performance of two creative assets. Testing multiple images can help your team achieve marketing success by identifying the most effective design.
Cofounder of the tinned-fish company Fishwife, Becca Millstein, used market testing to confirm the company’s eccentric approach was working. “We did a market test after we had created the visuals,” she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “We were working on developing products, and we did this tiny little micro launch of 100 beta boxes, which sold out in less than an hour. It was just very clear from the get that people were excited about the product.”
Marketing design FAQ
What is an example of marketing design?
Social media advertisements, landing pages, and web banners are all examples of marketing design. Marketing design applies to any visual asset that uses graphic design principles to support marketing goals.
What is the difference between a marketing designer and a graphic designer?
Marketing designers and graphic designers have overlapping skill sets and use similar tools. Graphic designers have a broader scope—they may work on any type of printed or web design, including editorial and creative projects such as magazine layouts or t-shirt designs. Marketing designers, on the other hand, support marketing campaign goals specifically by creating campaign assets to build a brand’s identity or sell products and services.
What are marketing design best practices?
Best practices for digital marketing design include focusing on your target audience, following brand guidelines, and including a strong call to action to create engagement. Following these guidelines helps designers establish a strong brand identity and support marketing KPIs.
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