Hey everyone,
I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of visuals on people’s response to campaigns. I find that good graphic design makes posts, ads, and landing pages a lot more engaging to users. But I’m wondering - do you think design quality is enough to increase engagement by itself, or is it more about strategy? Have you seen creative graphics get you better results before? I’m eager to learn more about your experiences!
Of the two, I think the overall strategy is more important than good visuals. However, when the campaign involves visuals, those visuals automatically become a key component of the strategy.
I’ve seen plenty of campaigns succeed with poor visuals and less-than-good graphic design, but that doesn’t mean good design isn’t important. Instead, it means the campaigns succeeded despite the poor-quality visuals.
Lots of information on this subject is available with a few well-worded Google searches. However, much of this information is composed of people’s opinions. If you’re looking for more scientific evidence, that exists too, but almost all of it is locked behind the paywalls of the journals that published the study results.
We used to do A/B testing on our digital marketing, newsletters, email marketing, etc. We would work up two versions of the ads and deliver them to random people on the lists, or leave ads up for identical 30-minute intervals, and then see which performed better. If we got a five percent or greater variance outside the margin of error, we would choose or recommend the one that performed best. The best performing options weren’t necessarily more “creative,” as you put it, but there’s more to good digital marketing than creative graphic design. Sometimes, the creativity that designers like isn’t the kind of creativity that resonates with the target audience.
Of course, we were measuring clickthroughs on ads, newsletters, and emails, rather than sales results. Those figures are more difficult to tease out due to the many variables that influence decisions after the initial engagement with the visuals and design.
In addition, we never measured poor visuals against good visuals. Instead, we were measuring the difference in performance between two options that we were confident in. Because we saw a difference in performance between what we considered good options, I’m convinced that we would have seen much more significant differences between poor and good graphic design.