How to make incremental changes to your creative for a big impact

If you want to make a big impact, you must make sweeping changes, right? But where does the budget come from for these massive overhauls? While we'd love to work on comprehensive rebrands every day, we understand that most marketing leaders need to make changes over time.

That's why we want to provide you with some ideas for incremental changes that will build on each other's success. Think of it as a menu of action items to help you create your optimization roadmap.

Brand

Typefaces

Occasional use typefaces

When companies build out their visual style guides, they sometimes forget to include ceremonial or accent typefaces. They focus mainly on body copy text and headers, but there are certain occasions like centennial celebrations or special events that call for a bit more pomp and circumstance. Adding the right typeface for these moments can breathe new life into your brand and allow your team to get more creative with their designs!

A full refresh

One typeface doesn't have to stick with your brand for its whole lifespan. You may have outgrown your previous look and you'd be surprised just how big a difference a full refresh of your staple typeface can make on how you're perceived.

Iconography

Icons can influence the hierarchy of an entire website. A fresh set of icons can also help boost your brand's personality and can be a great answer to breaking up content without the need for custom photography. Having a library of these icons makes building web pages and other collateral so much easier!

Photography and other visual elements

Depending on your goals and business needs, stock photography can be a suitable image solution. But if you'd like to take it to a whole new level, a custom group of photographs that showcase your business and your people together alongside a curated library of stock images can be very powerful.

"In today's content-saturated world, strong visuals are no longer a luxury – they're a necessity. Stock photos can be a great starting point, but don't let them define you or leave your audience underwhelmed. That's where strategic visuals come in, helping you infuse your brand personality into every image.

"By subtly incorporating your color palette, typography, or logo, we can create more cohesive visuals that tell a unique story. Investing in original photography can also make a world of difference. Images that capture the essence of your brand and resonate with your target audience will go a long way toward building trust and engagement.

"Visuals are a powerful storytelling tool when used to showcase your products, highlight your expertise, or connect with your audience on an emotional level. By putting effort into improved visuals, you'll be well on your way to strengthening your brand and ultimately achieving your marketing goals." –Christian Keyes, Associate Creative Director, Visual Design

Messaging

Updating or strengthening your brand core and brand personality is key to producing messaging that resonates with your personas.

"Words matter. How you speak to your ideal customers matters. It's a form of respect and that respect translates directly to more success. Having an up-to-date editorial style guide that resonates is a key business initiative that too many people deprioritize." –Gillian Barnes, Content Strategist

Website optimizations

Modules

Adding new website module sets allows you to bring fresh offerings to market faster and in a more visually appealing way.

"At Imarc, we build flexible content modules to align with our clients’ requirements and to support the best content authoring experiences, regardless of CMS. That’s why our engineers collaborate closely with our designers to bring their vision to life and to ensure successful outcomes." –Maribeth Fitzpatick, Director of Front-End Engineering

Targeted page refreshes

While the optimal solution would be to do a global revamp of your website, targeted optimizations can mean major ROI. To get started, take inventory of key conversion pages and give them a fresh coat of paint!

"We talk a lot about platform-based optimizations for paid search and social campaigns, but one of the most important optimizations to consider in tandem is visual. Driving potential leads to a landing page with walls of text and no creative assets like videos/infographics means leaving conversions on the table. Focus on streamlining your message and aligning your landing page experience directly with the content of your campaigns for a boost in conversion activity." –Derek Cummings, Senior Digital Strategist

Audits

While it isn't an immediate visual upgrade, strategic creative research is a smart play too. You can set yourself up for success with a website content or competitive audit and then craft a targeted roll-out plan using it to inform your next updates.

Our creative team completed this process for our client, Metro Credit Union and they are now using it to align what they do in 2024.

"Reviewing all visual components of a brand, whether it be typefaces, iconography, color palettes, or website design with audits is an excellent way to have an introspective of one’s visual language. The information gathered from a design audit will be integral to developing and growing your brand year after year. I recommend performing regular audits to ensure your brand is always performing at its strongest." –Rachel Lemieux, Senior Art Director

Successful projects

At Imarc, we've completed many projects that have yielded marked results over time. Some examples include:

Breezeline – This United States cable operator was looking for ways to optimize their site to keep competitive with other large broadband providers. Our Strategy and Creative teams worked on finding an easy way for people to start by addressing into the site before eventually entering the buyflow (the purchasing track).

The final solution was a sleek address bar that easily prompted users when accessing the site. Together with other ongoing optimizations and marketing efforts, this single line addressing in solution resulted in a 14.95% uptick in order completions.

ASC Engineered Solutions – The "My Orders" process that was in place for this major provider of precision-engineered valves, pipe fittings, supports, field services, and design tools left something to be desired. Their biggest challenge was that they didn’t have any way to track orders except to physically call the company and see if items had shipped yet.

To enhance this, we created a user experience that supported their distributors who order thousands of different things at once, that typically ship from different warehouses to give them a clean and straightforward view of order status.

The simple design utilized colors like green for "shipped" and provided tabs to represent different statuses for easy searchability. These basic design elements and the streamlined user experience made the site more useable and saved their internal team time that they normally would have spent picking up the phone and looking up an order manually.

HelloJetBlue – This longstanding, trusted airline that needs no introduction came to us to update their brand color and make font modifications so that they could stay current in the market. Needless to say, their brand is still going strong and is even more relevant with modern audiences.

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The best part about choosing a digital agency partner like Imarc for your creative optimizations is that we know how to track improvements, run A/B tests, and more to prove efficacy. Even though it may seem like you're making a small dent, the data can tell a compelling story that will allow you to get more buy-in for a stronger budget!

If you are interested in making your mark using a phased, data-backed creative approach to a complex business problem, let's talk.