“Content is king.”
We’ve said it time and time again, and so have many others (because it’s true).
It’s well known that high-quality copy goes a long way for content marketing and your brand in general.
There’s just one tiny problem with relying solely on copy: a lot of people won’t read it. 40% of people state that they NEVER read blogs.
Of course, there are other forms of content, but the point is that people don’t read as much as we want them to.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to abandon copywriting, you just need to make it more effective. Yes, quality matters, bullet points help, but the key is to combine copy with design.
Design Makes Copy More Effective
Here’s the part most people miss when they tell you content is king: design is queen (or another king, however you want to see it). These two, design and copy, are a royal duo. Think peanut butter and jelly, mac and cheese, any other delicious combination that simply does not have the same impact separately.
Design and copy are often seen as two completely different modalities, but they work best when combined. Quality copy is good, it’s helpful, but quality copy with great design is unparalleled for marketing.
Ways Design Improves Copy
Let’s take a look at exactly how design makes copy more effective.
Engagement
Think back to elementary school, when you were first learning to read. What drew you in more, a book with lines and lines of small print, or the picture book. It doesn’t matter how good of a reader you were, because the books with images certainly flew off the shelves during free reading time.
Give your audience credit, they are smart, but that doesn’t mean they’re interested in a huge blob of text. Design improves copy by making it more engaging. As of a 2018 HubSpot survey, 54% of consumers wanted more video content from a brand or business they support. Why? Because they find video more engaging and interactive than copy alone.
Better User Experience
Have you ever read a “how-to” article and still been confused as to “how to” do the thing you were researching? Sometimes this is a result of poor copy, but many times it is just because words alone can be hard to follow. Imagine getting instructions from IKEA with no photos (they’re hard enough with photos).
Adding design, whether in the form of a video, infographic, or image, helps provide a better user experience. It makes your content more consumable, and it allows you to appeal to a broader audience.
Repurposing Written Content for Social Media
Despite the lack of enthusiasm consumers seem to have about blogs, they are still helpful for your website and content strategy. By promoting your blogs, you can attract more readers and website traffic while contributing to your social media strategy. According to HubSpot, “ By posting valuable blogs on your channels, you could gain more followers, post shares, and engagements from audiences that you didn’t have before building a social media strategy.”
What’s the best way to promote your blogs on social media? Design! Social media is a highly visual space, Instagram is solely images/videos and TikTok is all videos. People go to social media to look at graphics, if you just post text and links to your blog you are setting yourself up for failure.
With the design, you can repurpose blogs into social media content AND use that content to promote your blogs. This is one of our favorite tips here at Content Cucumber, and one that our awesome marketing team nails every time. Here are some of our favorite ways to repurpose (and promote) written content with design:
- Turn a blog into a video. Take the main points of a blog post and turn it into a quick, engaging video.
- Graphic to promote content. Share a fun, engaging graphic that’s relevant to the copy you are looking to promote. Encourage your followers to click through to see the written content.
- Turn a blog into a carousel. Create a visual carousel using the main ideas from a blog. The first slide should contain minimal words, maybe just the title and an engaging graphic. Each slide will then have the main idea with a short description and a graphic. This idea works great for both in-feed and story posts.
- Share daily tips. With this idea, you can split a blog into many individual “tip of the day” posts. Use one tip for each post and create a simple graphic with the text for the tip on it.
- Quote/Stat graphics. Much like the idea above, you can pull out key statements or statistics from your written copy to include in social media graphics. This is a great way to repurpose a blog into many social media posts.
- Infographics. Ah, everyone loves a well-designed infographic. Take the main points or key statistics from a blog to create an engaging infographic.
Design Influences SEO
All of that keyword research and planning you’re doing for your digital marketing will go a lot further if you include graphics. Written copy is not the only way to boost your SEO. images and video make your content more interesting, which will boost user engagement. If your post on “The Top Grain Free Dog Foods” is engaging users and keeping people on your blog, it will tell search engines that your content is in fact valuable for that topic.
Additionally, graphics provide more opportunities for optimization. You can add image title tags, alt text, and more to describe the text to search engines, which will further assist your SEO strategy.
Design Serves as Inspiration for Copy
Content does not only serve as a catalyst for design, design can also inspire copy. You can take ideas used for graphics and videos and turn them into blog posts or social media captions. For example, maybe you have a graphic that demonstrates the different components of one of your products. You can use that graphic to create a complimentary blog post or listicle that explains each component.
Copy Boosts Design
The relationship between design and copy is a two-way street. Great copy improves the efficacy of design. The design of a graphic or video is one crucial element for value and engagement, but the copy is the other. Design lays the foundation for copy to do its magic. Excellent copy for graphics is concise, compelling, and clear. Including copy and captions on videos also helps draw your audience in and keep their attention, as many videos on social media automatically begin muted.
Obstacles to Combining Design and Copy
More brands are beginning to incorporate graphics and design into their content marketing strategy, but this powerful combination is still not used as much as it could be. If content and design are so powerful together, what holds brands back?
One of the biggest hurdles is the lack of a design team. Many companies have a digital marketing team or people to work on marketing campaigns, but few have dedicated design teams. Without a design team, creating graphics and videos can be a huge struggle. Without experience in design, graphic design can take a long time and lack the quality it needs to be effective.
Why not just hire a design team? Undoubtedly, hiring a full-time, in-house graphic designer can be expensive. For small businesses and startups, it’s not always realistic to hire a full-time graphic design team. Because of this, many brands simply forego design or rely on freelancers.
The Solution: Graphic Design Subscription
Are you doomed forever to miss out on the amazing benefits of combining copywriting and design?
Of course, you can get content written by professionals here at Content Cucumber, but we know when to stay in our lane. As much as we’d love to help you improve your marketing campaigns with graphics, we can’t.
We can do better because we have someone in mind who can do just that!
Kimp helps you get great unlimited graphic design AND video design for a flat monthly fee (sound familiar?!).
That’s right, for an affordable monthly fee you get a dedicated design team that will handle all of your graphics, videos, or both! Kimp offers 3 different subscriptions and they each come with:
- A dedicated design team
- Unlimited Design
- Quick turnarounds (24 hours for graphics, 2-4 days for videos)
- No hidden fees
- Stellar customer support
- Ownership of every design
It might sound too good to be true, but Kimp is not! Here’s how Kimp’s graphic design and video design subscriptions work:
- Submit your design requests, providing details of the design you need.
- Send your feedback and get any revisions you need.
- Approve the design once you’re satisfied, and download your project files.
Yes, it is THAT easy to get incredible designs for your marketing campaigns.
Your Kimp design service includes a specialized design team with 3 designers and 1 project manager. Your dedicated team will learn the ins and outs of your brand, creating graphics and/or videos that are an extension of your brand identity.
Save time and money while getting incredible designs for your marketing campaigns with Kimp. Instead of paying for a full-salaried employee or spending hours hunting for a freelancer for every project, you get access to experienced designers for a fraction of the price. For one monthly rate, you can expect high-quality graphics/videos and unlimited revisions.
You already know where you can get great content written, and now you can get high-quality designs as well. Kimp is the Bonnie to our Clide, the Thing 2 to Our Thing 1, and we can’t wait for you to get amazing designs to pair with professional content.
The combination of engaging content and stunning designs is one you do not want to miss! Sign up for Kimp today and get 30% off of your first month. Click the link here to get started or you can book a demo here to learn more!.