How Illustrations Can Boost Marketing Strategies for Startups

Finding an effective marketing strategy is the difference between success and failure. It encompasses communication between customers and businesses. 

In times of content overload where 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced by humans every day, 73% of people admit to skimming blog posts. It is nearly impossible to translate the information into something actionable that provides a tangible return-on-investment (ROI). Visual content is an emerging trend in digital marketing that meets the requirement of filling the gap. 

Illustrations are quirky, colorful, and playful graphics that communicate information and emotions entertainingly and organically. In this guide, we will discuss how businesses use illustrations to skyrocket their marketing strategies. 

 

How illustrations can help your brand

While stock photography has its place, they are redundant. Sometimes it’s critical to be bespoke, and illustrations are an effective way to do just that. They creatively communicate brand image via blog posts, presentations, and more, bringing brands to life. 

At Crafttor, we pride ourselves on creating emotive, memorable, and unique illustrations. It isn’t just about pretty pictures, but about uncovering the little things that truly make a brand unique to the world. 

For example, HelpScout creates custom illustrations for every blog post and feature pages. 

Similarly, Trello also has custom illustrations throughout its site, from the homepage, product pages, to all blog images. 
 

Image credit: Trello

 

Here are seven benefits of using illustrations for marketing strategy:

Illustrations allow brands to employ custom visuals. They have a wider audience reach, better customer engagement builds brand identity, improve user experience, few communication mishaps, and much more. Below are the following benefits of employing custom illustrations for startups:

 

1. Communicate in the universal language of visuals

Your brand’s mission, message, product, and other essential elements can be challenging to convey to users. First impressions matter, as it takes only 1/10th of a second to form a first impression about a person and about 0.05 seconds to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they’ll stay or leave. You’ll have to quickly establish a connection, and emotions play a large part in it. Illustrations allow delivering much more information while triggering the intended emotion. 

Image credit: Divan Raj

 

2. Avoid walls of text

More and more people are skimming content, and nobody likes big chunks of texts to read when all they want to understand is how your product can benefit them. Instead of scaring users with a wall of text, use custom visuals like infographics, exciting charts, symbols, and illustrations to your advantage. Invite them to an exciting journey of a simplified, aesthetic version of your product or brand message that you want to convey. 

 

Image credit: Saikat Kumar

 

3. Explain complex ideas coherently

The human brain is fantastic in recognizing patterns, and sometimes the best way to explain abstract concepts is through visuals. Use illustrations with creative metaphors to brighten up complex ideas and communicate them from a storyteller’s perspective. 

 

Image credit: Saikat Kumar

 

4. Build and strengthen brand identity

Prospective customers should understand why they should prefer your service or product over those of your competitors. Explaining your ideas and brand as a story will convey the values and mission that your company stands on. While creating an online brand identity focusing on consistency and uniqueness across multiple communication channels will allow the right audience to find you. Illustrations are a fantastic way of doing this.

Google uses illustrations from their product onboarding to help page.

 

Image credit: Google

 

5. Attract viewers’ attention

Grabbing and holding the customer's attention can be extremely difficult with so much new content available from multiple social media channels. Nothing else will catch a users’ attention other than custom illustrations that deliver vivid, emotive, and unique images to convey your ideas. 

Slack uses illustrations throughout the interface and on blog images. 

 

Image credit: Slack

 

6. Present a carefully crafted product

A fantastic and high-quality user experience is essential to a business's success in a world full of options and varieties. Stock photos and other typical graphics prove a lack of attention to detail for internet-savvy users. It's essential that your visuals are unique and tailored to fit your product and brand message perfectly. 

 

Image credit: Zahidul

 

7. Solve communication problems

Communication between your brand and existing for prospective clients is as vital as maintaining internal brand communication. An effective marketing strategy needs to communicate the right message to the right portion of a demographic. Blogs and other written content create an emotional gap in which illustrations can perfectly fit. Illustrations will help your startup to form a coherent narrative that will be easily interpreted by the human brain. 

 

Image credits: MuziYing

 

About Crafttor

Crafttor currently offers a huge library of icons and five families of vivid and lively illustrations—Jeet, Akki, Cord, Kako, and Sandy. Our free plan offers free illustrations for startups, freelancers, and brands to download free illustrations in PNG & SVG with a limit of 2 SVG/day & 10 SVG/month. Whereas our Individual and Premium Member has no daily limits and comes with extra perks.