Launching your first marketing campaign is exciting because it culminates all those days and weeks spent dreaming, ideating, and planning.

And while you have a big idea for your campaign, something else needs to be locked down to make it a success — your campaign’s design.

We’re experienced in creating branded design assets for businesses of all sizes, and we want to share the five most common design mistakes that happen when launching a marketing campaign for the first time.

Mistake #1: Overcomplicating your campaign’s design

You’ve got a lot of great offers that you want to promote to customers, and it’s tempting to include all of them in your marketing campaign. But doing so quickly leads to your designs becoming busy and confusing.

Incorporating too many visuals, messaging, and offers into marketing and sales materials makes your reader’s eyes glaze over because they don’t know what to focus on. Nor will they understand what the takeaway is or what their next action should be.

The fix?
Sometimes, less is more. Stick with one offer and message to keep the design of your sales and marketing materials simple and focused. It allows you to produce designs that support your message, not force your audience to do more work to understand it.

Mistake #2: Inconsistent branding

Your brand identity, at least its visual elements, helps potential customers recognize your business so they’ll think of your product first when they’re ready to buy.

But what are those elements? At a minimum, it’s your company’s logo, fonts, and color palette. But it can also extend to icons, graphics, and even illustrations.

And one of the things that can throw a wrench into how people perceive your brand is when it isn’t uniform and cohesive. Using off-brand colors, unapproved logos, or other components that break away from your style guide chips away at your brand, making it harder for people to take it seriously.

The fix?
Stick to your brand guidelines. For organizations with teams juggling a lot of deliverables, maintaining brand consistency across channels ensures your audience’s first and future experiences with your business are good ones.

Incorporating your style guide into the new employee onboarding process gives them the tools to independently and correctly use the company’s brand when producing assets for new campaigns.

Mistake #3: Ignoring the rules of typography

Every typeface has its own personality. Some are wild and dramatic, while others are calm and minimalistic. It’s important to think about how each font used in your first marketing launch adds to or takes away from it.

Font style and size can affect the readability of longer blocks of text and headlines. Your campaign assets have to prioritize the audience, taking into consideration their age, where they’ll engage with the content, and any visual impairments impacting readability.

The fix?
You want to adhere to typographic best practices, which provide general guidelines for using fonts in print or digitally. To start, we recommend limiting the number of brand fonts used in any design to no more than three. This will help you avoid cluttering it with too many competing typefaces.

Mistake #4 – Using low-quality graphics

Perception is everything, and your product imagery shapes how people see your business and what it sells. Blurry images and subpar stock photography can make your company and its offerings look cheap and unprofessional.

Even if the price point for your product is inexpensive, you don’t want to send the signal that customers are going to waste their hard-earned money.

The fix?
Websites like iStock, Shutterstock, and Adobe Stock offer millions of photos, illustrations, and graphics for an affordable price. But if you have the budget to conduct a professional photo shoot, you’ll have a library of images to show your target demographic(s) and your products in the best light.

Mistake #5 – Forgetting how designs translate across channels

When producing assets for your first campaign, it’s not uncommon to design for one medium (e.g., email) and overlook how it would appear on a different one (e.g., outdoor billboard). More often than not, it won’t be a one-to-one pick-up of the design.

Instead, it would need to be reformatted to take it from a small digital layout to a large print setup. To do this requires different specifications that would need to be used to make sure the final design looks good in a different layout.

The fix?
Once you have your campaign idea down pat and know which channels you want to use, the next step is to get the specs from your printer or developer to pass along to your creative team. With this information, they can create a design that checks all the boxes for production and grabs people’s attention in a good way.

“Wow” people with your first campaign launch

Launching your first marketing campaign is an opportunity to introduce your business to new audiences and plant the seeds that lead to long-lasting relationships. But remember, its design can enhance or diminish your killer campaign idea.

By avoiding the most common design mistakes that could throw a wrench into your first campaign, you can give potential customers a positive impression of your brand. Partnering with a creative team that understands the ins and outs of campaign and brand design will give you a leg up in creating an effective campaign that elevates your business.