Ahh, a brand new year – one filled with new hopes and dreams, goals, and KPIs. Will the tech sector finally begin a rebound? Will companies that embraced a more conservative stance look to invest and prepare for growth?
Having practiced in this space for more than 10 years, one of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered is companies who grow but do so while compromising quality – and ultimately limiting their potential.
While not the only remedy, leveraging design to create new value is a potent one. For companies that have invested in brand design and built a strong foundation, I’d like to layer in the importance of visual communication design. Visual communication design helps companies maintain differentiation, simplify the complex, and humanize their technology, all of which help them communicate more clearly to their customers, prospects, and partners. So, if your company has plans to grow in the new year, let’s look at how visual communication design can help.
Companies within the B2B technology industry offer similar products and services. Often, it’s nearly impossible to tell them apart. To address this, companies invest in brand research, strategy, and design to build their foundation and establish differentiation.
But as a company grows – maybe it expands into new markets, adds new products, or acquires another company – maintaining its brand consistency and differentiation becomes more critical and complex. Unfortunately, many companies rigidly adhere to existing, static brand guidelines, limiting the expression of the brand or resorting to using generic stock images or non-descript visuals instead of continuing to evolve and shape an ownable direction.
One dimension to consider is that your brand is often first experienced through sales and marketing materials. Visual communication design can help ensure your go-to-market efforts are clear and compelling and guide prospects throughout their journey, from display ads and website landing pages to ebooks, sales presentations, and case studies. When you tell a prospect a consistent story about who you are and what you stand for, it reduces confusion and reinforces your brand’s credibility at every stage of the journey.
Growing companies need more artifacts. But as we learned at a young age, more doesn’t always mean better. Even with a proper foundation, things can get out of hand quickly during periods of growth. Internal creative teams often juggle the brand across every facet and deliverable, leaving little time for strategic thinking as more and more things require their attention. To bring relief, teams often add headcount or partner with external agencies. However, that results in more and more people developing brand assets with less and less oversight and potential misdirection. During growth, the need for efficiency is high, as teams don’t have time to redo projects they didn’t have time for in the first place.
Visual communication design can address these challenges by proactively developing and extending design systems, core templates, and assets. Once these tools are in place, internal teams and external partners can more easily scale their efforts without compromising quality.
Companies can gain further efficiency by storing these assets on digital platforms, instantly deploying them across every team – from marketing to sales to HR to external partners – and ensuring alignment with its standards. Using digital platforms also saves time and reduces redundancy. People will rely less on you to guide them through questions and directions related to your brand, resulting in more projects delivered on time and on brand.
B2B SaaS companies market complex and abstract products or services. Cloud-connected? Tokenization? Blockchain? The AI Enterprise Platform?!? These are not items you buy off the shelf of your local grocer.
As a result, people have difficulty envisioning and contextualizing what they are, how they work together, or what benefits they bring individually or collectively. If your assets are chock-full of text or overly complex technical diagrams, you will fail to deliver a message that most people can easily understand and rally around.
Visual communication design bridges the gap between technical complexity and customer understanding. Tools like infographics, marketectures, diagrams, animations, and other visuals can distill abstract concepts into digestible and engaging formats. These visuals help people quickly grasp the value of your offerings, especially when they may not have a technical background. Compelling visual storytelling ensures your message resonates, regardless of the complexity of your technology.
Technology, by default, is confusing, impersonal, and technical, which often adds to feeling scary. Consider artificial intelligence. If you search Google Images using the term “AI,” what do you see? A mixture of humanoid robots, microchips, and brains, among other imaginary imagery. Nothing is real; you’re more likely to see an image of the Terminator than you are of a real human being.
In his book Alchemy, Rory Sutherland states, “For a business to be truly customer-focused, it needs to ignore what people say. Instead, it needs to concentrate on what people feel.” The best way is to communicate through emotion, not bits and bytes.
Visual communication design can help humanize your brand by adding emotion to your efforts. Visual communication design enables a deeper, more human connection through visual or verbal storytelling, clear data visualizations, and relatable imagery. This emotional connection fosters trust and loyalty, making your brand more approachable and memorable.
This is an untapped lever for growing B2B technology companies. Investing in visual communication design allows you to build cohesion and have your brand resonate with people, creating trust and loyalty, which positions your business for even more healthy growth and long-term success.
You can learn more about our visual communications services here.
As the VP of Design, Brian leads Studio Science's design practice focused on helping organizations progress by defining and shaping their cultures, experiences, and processes to be more holistic and people-centered. Brian is a multidisciplinary design leader and strategic thinker who uses people-centered design to enable more effective end-to-end experiences.