Marketing design
13
min read
Many early-stage companies treat design like an afterthought. They focus on performance marketing, SEO, and product, and then scramble to “make it look nice” at the end.
But 94% of first impressions are design-related. Users judge credibility in seconds, and visual appeal plays a bigger role than most teams realize. Add to that the pressure for personalization: 71% of consumers expect it, and 76% feel frustrated when it’s missing.
And design is the layer that makes personalization work. It’s how intent signals turn into relevant, timely, visual triggers. At TodayMade, we’ve seen how skipping this step costs more than it saves.
In this guide, we’ll explain marketing design, how it differs from graphic design, and why it is important in business growth, especially for startups. We’ll also discuss examples, challenges, and best practices that make design work for your marketing, not just with it.
Let’s start by defining marketing design and why it’s not just another name for “graphics.”
Marketing design is the visual side of your marketing strategy, what people see when interacting with your brand.
The banner ad gets the click, the landing page converts, and the email layout nudges someone to hit “Buy now.” It’s not about making things pretty. It’s about using design to move people toward a goal.
In short, marketing design is what turns your messaging into action.
It blends creativity with strategy. You’re not just designing for aesthetics. You’re designing for behavior. That’s why marketing design always starts with questions like:
If you don’t answer those, it’s just marketing graphic design.
Graphic design and marketing are used interchangeably, but they’re not the same.
Graphic design focuses on visual communication, such as logos, posters, packaging, or event flyers. It’s about aesthetics, branding, and making something look appealing.
If you want to see graphic design examples, look at brand books, packaging design, or event posters.
Marketing design, on the other hand, is where visuals meet business goals. It supports specific outcomes like conversions, clicks, signups, and engagement. You’ll see marketing design in landing pages, email campaigns, paid ads, and social media graphics optimized to perform.
Here’s how they stack up:
Different channels and goals call for different types of visuals. Below are the most common types you’ll see in modern marketing.
Each one plays a specific role in your funnel. Here's how to use them wisely.
Your website is often your most important touchpoint. If the layout is confusing or the visuals feel off-brand, trust evaporates in seconds.
Good marketing design here means:
For SaaS products especially, the landing page needs to be clear, fast, and built to convert.
If you’re looking for SaaS landing page examples, you’ll notice one thing the best ones have in common: they don’t just look good, they tell a story, fast.
Take our client Refera, for example. We redesigned their landing page to replace generic illustrations with a real doctor’s photo and calming colors that conveyed professionalism and trust. The result? More demo bookings and stronger lead capture.
Advertising and marketing design includes banner ads, paid social creatives, Google Display assets, and anything interrupting a scroll.
It’s a core part of marketing and advertising graphic design, where every asset has to work hard and fast:
There is no time for nuance. People scroll fast. For Refera, our team create a wide range of marketing materials, from print assets to email signatures and scroll-stopping social ads, to consistently reinforce trust and drive conversions.
Here, consistency matters more than complexity.
Think:
Your followers should recognize your brand even when your logo’s not on screen. That’s what we achieved for Eleken with a consistent visual style across Instagram, YouTube, and beyond.
Email marketing designs still deliver some of the highest ROI in digital marketing, but only when done right.
Effective emails should be:
We followed these exact principles when designing weekly and monthly report emails for SEOCrawl, turning dense data into clear, action-driven messages that actually get read and clicked.
Whitepapers, guides, and other downloadable resources are B2B essentials.
But even great content gets ignored if the layout is hard to read or the visuals feel dated.
Good design makes it readable and actionable. A few key tips:
We applied these principles when designing ebooks for Eleken, making complex topics approachable and visually engaging. As a result, higher engagement and more leads converting from content.
One of the fastest ways to make your product feel alive is to include video ads, explainer animations, and even subtle GIFs.
It helps you:
Motion grabs attention and keeps people watching. Just look at Slack’s onboarding animations. They use smooth, friendly motion to guide users through setup without feeling like a chore.
Pitch decks, investor presentations, and sales enablement slides all have one job: to tell a clear, compelling story quickly.
Effective slide design should:
Stock templates won’t cut it. Investors and clients can instantly tell when a deck’s been thrown together.
That’s why we crafted a custom pitch deck for Kipsi, focusing on clarity, branded visuals, and strategic flow. It helped them confidently deliver their message and made the design feel as polished as the pitch.
Yes, print still matters, especially at events, in direct mail, or when you’re putting your brand in someone’s hands.
Common assets include:
Mailchimp is a great example. Their event booths, print ads, and even swag bags reflect the same quirky, bold design you see on their website. It all feels unmistakably them.
This is the foundation that holds everything together. Without a solid brand identity, your marketing design ends up fragmented, inconsistent, and forgettable.
A strong identity includes:
When your identity is clear, every design, from a tweet to a billboard, feels like it’s coming from the same voice. Think of Spotify. Their use of color, typography, and motion is instantly recognizable. That’s the power of a tight, well-executed brand identity.
Each type feeds into the same goal: move people through the funnel with clarity and consistency.
Now that we’ve mapped the landscape, let’s examine why all of this matters and how marketing design directly impacts business performance.
A clean visual identity and frictionless layout can do more than a clever headline. Why? People decide fast, and design shapes perception in milliseconds.
Let’s break down where marketing design earns its keep.
You know what kills trust? Inconsistency. If your social posts look different from your landing page… and your emails look like they’re from a different company altogether, users notice.
Even if they don’t consciously notice, they feel it.
Consistency builds recognition. Recognition builds trust. Trust drives action.
When visuals are strategically aligned with your business goals, they become one of your most effective tools for growth. That's the essence of graphic design marketing: using visuals not just to look good, but to guide users toward action.
Consider this: the HubSpot study revealed that landing pages with optimized visuals can improve conversion rates by up to 35%.
Marketing design isn’t just what users see; it’s how they move through your ecosystem.
Key elements include:
If your design makes users work to understand your offer, they’re gone. In fact, 52% of users sometimes or always leave after a bad user experience. UX is marketing, too.
You can’t fake professionalism with a headline. Users judge your product by how it looks. Outdated or messy visuals suggest a messy experience.
But sharp, polished design? It builds trust instantly.
The Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report shows that 88% of users are more likely to buy from a brand they see as trustworthy. In a crowded market, clean, authentic design is a competitive edge.
Next, we’ll cover the common roadblocks teams face when trying to scale marketing design and how to overcome them without burning out or breaking the budget.
If marketing design is so important, why do so many teams struggle with it?
It’s not because they don’t value design; it’s because executing it well is hard. Budgets are tight. Deadlines are tighter. And scaling visuals across channels without losing your brand’s soul? That’s a full-time job.
Let’s examine the most common challenges and discuss how to solve them without losing our minds or marketing KPIs.
You’re launching fast, experimenting constantly, and every asset looks… different.
One day, it’s a polished email banner, the next, it’s a rogue social post with Comic Sans.
Solution: Create a unified design system.
A marketing designer on Reddit recommends, “Use a design system (like material design by Google) to design your apps (if you want a different look & feel, read their design docs, its really great). For social media posts, just buy a subscription of envato & download the templates similar to your brand.”
Even a lightweight system, with color codes, font hierarchy, and reusable templates, can bring order. Better yet, invest in a design partner who builds systems, not just assets. Plus, it’ll save hours of back-and-forth whenever you brief something new.
You know design matters, but hiring a full-time designer or committing to a traditional agency might not be feasible right now.
As one Redditor put it, “If you don't have the money to hire good designers, you don't have the money to deal with bad leads/no leads. Design in marketing is much more than just making things look good.”
And while it’s tempting to hire a graphic designer on a freelance basis, managing one-off projects often leads to inconsistent output and slow turnarounds.
Solution: Try a design subscription (like what we offer at TodayMade).
When you compare a freelance graphic designer and agency vs TodayMade, the difference is clear. A design subscription model gives you:
Marketing moves fast. Design... doesn’t always keep up.
You’ve got a campaign ready to launch, but you're stuck waiting on mockups. Deadlines slip. Momentum stalls. It’s frustrating and expensive.
As one Redditor pointed out, “…You can also buy pre-made templates on sites like CreativeMarket. They save you some time/effort.”
True, templates can help in a pinch. But they’re not a long-term fix if you need high-quality, on-brand visuals at scale.
Solution: Build a lean request process and work in iterations.
Clear briefs, async feedback (Slack, Loom), and dedicated design time blocks speed things up without sacrificing quality. We at TodayMade use this approach by default.
Your startup’s gaining traction. That’s great. But now you need a design for:
One Reddit user shared, “I am a co-founder at an early stage, bootstrapped startup. I am personally horrible at anything design-related (e.g.: newsletters, social media posts, slide decks, website design, blog posts, whitepapers, case studies,...”
That’s when many teams scramble to hire a website designer or find freelancers to plug the gaps.
But hiring one person to juggle it all often leads to burnout or bottlenecks. And bouncing between contractors only adds to the inconsistency.
Solution: Build a system, not just a hire.
Use design templates, centralized assets, modular layouts, and design subscriptions like TodayMade to give you the flexibility to scale, without adding overhead or sacrificing quality.
Most teams hit these friction points. What separates the high-growth ones is how quickly they solve them.
Next, we’ll dig into the best practices that make marketing design run smoother and perform better.
To get the most out of your design efforts, alignment is everything. When marketing and design work together, every campaign becomes more effective, more consistent, and easier to scale.
Here’s how to make your design efforts more consistent, more effective, and a whole lot less chaotic.
Before you design anything, lock in your visual basics:
A strong identity keeps your brand recognizable across every channel and format.
Spotify nailed this with their internal Spotify Design rebrand. By defining new brand DNA, from hand-drawn doodles and bold colors to human-centered photography, they made it easy for designers across teams to create assets that felt cohesive, even when expressing individuality. Their brand book became a practical toolkit, not just a style guide.
Your visuals shouldn’t just look nice but reflect what you’re saying.
Design amplifies tone. Treat it like a strategic layer, not just packaging.
Again, Spotify does this exceptionally well. Just compare the branding for “Spotify Wrapped” with something like their “Equal” playlist. Wrapped is wild, colorful, and social-first. Equal is elegant and minimal, matching its purpose. The visuals match the messaging.
Chaos kills design. Even small teams need a process.
What works:
We use async-first tools like Notion, Trello, and Slack to keep things moving without endless meetings.
Don’t reinvent the wheel every week.
Startups waste hours redesigning buttons and banners from scratch. A smart system turns repeatable into scalable.
Google’s Material Design is a great example. It provides a comprehensive framework, including button states, spacing rules, motion patterns, and component libraries. It’s not just about consistency; it’s about creating a shared language for designers and developers. Material Design has saved countless teams from design drift and reinventing the basics.
Aesthetics don’t mean much if the experience frustrates your audience.
Good marketing design is:
Test your assets like you would your product. Treat every click and scroll like data. Consider how Spotify refines its app UI and promotional banners based on listener behavior. It’s a masterclass in designing around the user journey.
Design decisions don’t have to be subjective.
Test things like:
Even small tweaks can significantly increase click-through or conversion rates.
Too many teams fall into the content churn trap, cranking out dozens of visuals that no one remembers.
Instead:
One great landing page, as the one we designed for Eleken will always outperform ten forgettable ones.
Startups don’t need more content. They need better content delivered consistently, aligned with strategy, and built for growth.
If you’ve made it this far, you already get it. Marketing design isn’t about fluff or polish for polish’s sake. It’s about clarity, conversion, trust, and growth.
It’s the difference between a brand that knows what it’s doing and one that looks like it’s still figuring it out.
Let’s recap the essentials:
Some teams try to fill the gap with graphic design outsourcing, but the results are often hit-or-miss, with slow turnarounds, misaligned output, or inconsistent quality.
If you’re ready for a better way, that’s where TodayMade comes in. We help fast-moving teams create better designs without hiring full-time or micromanaging freelancers. Contact us to get started.
