I recently had the opportunity to take part in the mentorship program here at KWSM: a digital marketing agency. I was lucky enough to be paired with Brianna Zambrano, a Senior Digital Marketing Strategist in the Las Vegas office, who wanted to learn more about web and graphic design best practices. As her mentor, I took note of the skills and experience of our team and the results we have created for clients to design a program to share what makes web and graphic design effective. Brianna wanted to put our mentorship learnings into action by applying what she learned to a few of our existing clients.
Our Process
Our first meeting of the program was the discovery phase where I asked questions: What do you want to learn and what projects can we work through to best utilize our time together that may also benefit our clients? This helped us determine and identify a few objectives for the time we had together.
Our Objectives
- Share my knowledge on graphic design while also providing helpful tools Brianna can refer back to in the future.
- Walk her through the design process to give her a better understanding of what goes into each type of project.
- Ensure that she can go into the backend of WordPress and make changes as needed.
- Utilize the knowledge and implement design changes to specific client projects.
After we identified the objectives, I was able to put together a curriculum for Brianna and I to begin working on.
Our Project
- We started with the design process. I walked Brianna through the design process within our current strategy process for a handful of our clients to allow her to get a better understanding of the process as a whole, from start to finish.
- I worked with Brianna to identify and choose a few clients whom we felt we could improve specific design elements and layouts of their marketing pieces with the ultimate goal of improving engagement.
- In the few weeks that followed, we began designing and creating new layouts together, and implementing them in their marketing materials.
- Once we had the changes live, we identified additional clients where we could implement similar design changes.
One of our clients, an art transportation company, wasn’t getting much engagement on their blog posts and so we identified this as one of the clients we were going to focus on for this mentorship program. I worked with Brianna to design a variety of branded templates to be used as featured images that were also used in the body of the blog copy. In addition to the images, we created a new blog layout to help break up the heavy amounts of copy, including photos, videos, company quotes, and an anchor link to direct readers to the form at the end of the blog. After this blog template was implemented, we noticed readers were staying about 30 seconds longer on each blog post.
Another client, a tech firm specializing in regulatory compliance and data security, was seeing very few clicks on their newsletter each month. Instead, of using the standard template, where we featured a team quote, a blog article, a service feature, and a client testimonial, we adjusted the layout to feel more like an eBlast focusing on a single service and using a single call to action to email the team directly. We designed a graphic to support the service section to allow readers to quickly and easily consume the information.
Our Results
I’m confident this project has helped Brianna get a clearer vision of the elements that play a part in effective website design. In addition to the projects we worked together on during this program, Brianna has already begun applying some of these design changes to another one of her clients where she’s seeing positive results.
Increase Leads for Your Company With Good Design
Good design isn’t just about how your website and marketing materials look; it’s about creating an experience that generates interest, earns trust, and provokes meaningful action from your potential customers. Up to 75% of marketing credibility comes from design.
