Ryan Brown is head of brand strategy at Ceros. Ryan is a frequent thinker and speaker on creative strategy and all things experiential. His previous marketing and brand experience efforts has included work for Amazon, NFL, DreamWorks Animation, Hulu, Lincoln Motor Company, Madison Square Garden, HubSpot, Capital One, HGTV, and others.
While we’re not quite to the Matrix level of living digitally, we sure do spend a lot of time in the digital world. Every day, we take in thousands of brand experiences, whether we’re looking for a new pair of tennis shoes or trying to find the best content marketing software. Whether we know it or not, each of those digital touch-points influences our perception of and emotions toward the brands we’re interacting with. If brands fail to deliver engaging digital touch-points, they’ll fail to catch and keep our attention. Digital design that focuses on creating immersive experiences is needed now more than ever.
For digital designers, now is the time to unleash your creativity and capture today’s modern consumer. Great digital design today:
1. Engages audiences on a deeper level
Have you ever visited a website only to scroll rapidly, click through a few pages, then close out? Chances are, that website didn’t prioritize creativity and design. Great digital design engages audiences while creativity helps to connect with them on a deeper level through every step of their journey — cutting down their temptation to close out and move on to the next shiny digital distraction.
2. Communicates with compelling visual stories
When we meet a new person, we want to know their story (and the more compelling it is, the more we care). The same goes for brands. If consumers miss the story (or worse, if they don’t care), they’ll turn somewhere else with a better one. As we’re designing our brand experiences, it’s important to create and clearly communicate with immersive visual stories that deliver “ah-ha” moments around every turn.
3. Stands out while staying true
As brands strive to develop unique and interesting content, it’s crucial they also remain authentic. After all, we all gravitate to that which we can relate and trust. Brands that attempt to stand out (in any way that’s not fully true) get called out. Brands that leverage purpose and mission as fuel for their creativity will design the digital experiences that dreams are made of.
Digital touch-points are literally found everywhere in the world we live — and immersive, innovative digital design is the way forward. Due to the pandemic, a brand’s digital presence is only increasing in importance. Today, design focused on crafting immersive and compelling digital experiences has never mattered more.
