7 Tips to Improve Your Print Marketing Designs

Print design is not just making sure you have met all specifications or utilized digital print finishing equipment to create a professional-looking physical product. A significant part of it is all about marketing successfully your target audience – your clients. When it comes to print design marketing, any information you can get about the clients need and want is very important.

In this article, we’ll show you some important and useful tips to improve your print marketing design process.

Know Your Audience

Before you can start any print design, you really should know your target audience. If you know who you are marketing to you can better adapt your designs and imagery to appeal to them. Any information from your client will be helpful such as location, age, race, average household income and so on.

Get Everything Upfront

It’s extremely hard to create any design when a client does not send you everything upfront. Even worse, they send it little by little or keep making changes to what needs to be included. Make sure you stress the importance of needing everything upfront, and this includes all copy, logos, graphics, photos and anything else needed. This will make the design process much easier and go smoother

Create Wireframes

Wireframes are usually used when creating website designs but, creating quick wireframes for print designs can really help you find the best layout quickly. Once you have all the copy, graphics and images you should be able to easily create some wireframes.
You should also consider sending wireframes to clients to ask them which layout they like best. This can help keep your workload and amount of revisions down.

Brand, Brand and Brand

Branding is by far the most important part of any design project. For a brand to grow strong it most convey a consistent message via style, brand graphics, text and so on. It is a designer’s job to convey that message in promotional items such as business cards, flyers and posters. Always be sure you are following the brand’s style guide so that your designs match other marketing materials.

Create Impact

We all get tons of mail, some of which we may not want, but if you want your designs to have a chance of working you need them to have impact. It is this initial visual impact that will grab the attention of a person so they can see what the company has to offer.
Use large graphics or photos and have a large text heading that will lure the person’s eyes in. Once you have their attention you can make the sales pitch.

Always Call to Action

Every design serves a purpose and it is usually to get a viewer to take action, which can be commercial or not. It’s the designer’s responsibility to make the call to action clear. Sometimes it’s calling a number, visiting a website or just absorbing the information or message. Whatever it is, make sure viewers know what to do!

Tracking is Key

If you really want to know how good your designs are there should always be some way to track your return on investment. An easy way to do this is to make the call to action some sort of special code to enter, number to call or something similar. This will let you know which orders came from which print promotion. Simple as that!