To propel your business forward, you need to market and promote your business to your customers.

This means understanding who your customers are, where they are and what they want to know. Any marketing campaign should contain the critical elements that make it a success – it should be driven by a strategy, you should review and tweak the campaign as necessary, and it should yield the results you want, known as Return on Investment (ROI).

However, some marketing campaigns can flop. The reasons why are many and varied but, one reason is that it created the wrong impression.

Creating An Impression

An impression can be negative or positive and is formed within seconds of someone meeting someone else, seeing their business premises or when they first see your poster campaign, leaflet or tweet.

Those first few seconds count because coming back from a negative or bad impression takes a lot of time, effort, and energy. A poor response to a marketing campaign can cause severe problems for a business.

Which is why you need this guide on creating a great first impression with your marketing from Colour Graphics.

KEY ELEMENT 1 – Logo And Colours

You have spent money and time creating the background to your brand. The logo represents your business, you have chosen colors to support it, and the font also contributes to the tone and the impression you want people to have of your business.

You need to stick with these key tools for your marketing campaign. Customers become familiar with your logo and your branding. They come to trust it because it is the symbol of great quality products and services from you.

KEY ELEMENT 2 – Great Text With Call To Action

What is it that your marketing campaign is telling customers? What is it that you want customers to do when they see the poster or read a tweet?

Call to Actions or CTAs are commonly thought to just be ‘call now’, ‘call today’ or ‘book now’ kind of sentences when in fact, they can be so much more.

They can be subtle but powerful – take a look at these 31 examples of fantastic calls to action that entice people to take a closer look – and the text needs to be great too.

A clear message, delivered in a way that is understandable and clean, without being patronizing. It can be informative and educational, or market-speak. The point is, if the text is right for the campaign, it’ll be accepted by the viewing audience.

KEY ELEMENT 3 – No Errors Or Embarrassing Typos

Nothing like an embarrassing typo to get you noticde*, is there? (*see what we did there!).

They can be the smallest of errors – a misplaced capital letter, or a tiniest of typos but it all creates an impression that the copy was rushed out.

Whilst some of these high-profile grammar gaffes and atrocious apostrophe placements can be funny – they still make an impact after all – they are not creating the right impression of your business.

KEY ELEMENT 4 – The Right Tone

The ‘tone’ of voice you use will depend on your brand, but also what you are selling and to whom.

Younger audiences are receptive to a different tone than maybe the older generation. Funeral directors would market their businesses with a different tone of voice to that of a hairdresser, and so on.

Take care with the tone of the marketing voice because too formal can look too stern and unapproachable. Too ‘young and bouncy’ can look patronizing.

KEY ELEMENT 5 – Supporting Images and Graphics

Too much text is off-putting. Not enough blank or ‘white space’ clutters the page or the poster. And frankly, choosing an irrelevant photo or an inappropriate graphic also hurts how your marketing campaign is received.

Choose images wisely. Opt for ones that support the text or, if you have a professional design team on your side, the image can convey the main marketing message, with the text in a supporting role.

Looks And Feels Right

A marketing campaign that is strategized and planned gives off the right impression. Planning it is a process of thought and actions. Many heads are better than one and that not only refers to the planning stage but also to the ‘testing phase’.

Why not test some of your ideas on a sample of your customer demographic? What impression do they get? What feels and looks right to them?