How long do you have to make a first impression on your customers?

According to recent research less than a single second.

If you own a property management company, you know that the competition can be especially fierce. When you’re creating a strategy for your next marketing materials and online campaign, there are a few important things you need to keep in mind if you want to stand out.

Keep on reading to learn what to do — and what to avoid — when it comes to your marketing design.

Don’t Let Trends Take Over

When it comes to your marketing design, the last thing you want is to create something that looks like all the latest trends threw up all over the page. While it’s fine to let trends inspire you, following them too closely will only make your design look dated quickly.

Plus, it doesn’t do much to tell your customers that you’re an original. Instead, opt for classic, clean-cut designs when possible. If you’re going to use a more trendy element, make sure you just stick to one, like neon colors or a bold font.

However, you should look into special effects and simpler trends, like hand-drawn advertisements and showing, to make your designs stand out without getting overpowered by trends.

Communicate Your Services

A human’s attention span is officially shorter than that of a goldfish. This means that your design will need to say a lot in a short amount of time and space.

You need to make it clear that you’re a property management company, but you don’t want to have to rely on stereotypical designs to help you to do it.

For example, instead of a picture of a house, make your design ideas more active. Instead, make the roof of a house into a graph showing the potential financial growth customers can expect when they work with you.

One of the best ways to do make sure your brand’s message isn’t getting muddled throughout the design?

By including your logo and company colors on your marketing design. For example, take a look at the website of Liberty Properties. Their logo is at the top of their webpage, and they’ve used their company colors of red and green throughout their website design to build consistency.

Aim for a marketing design that makes it clear what sets you apart from your competition while remaining on brand throughout the campaign.

Connect With Your Audience

When you’re creating a marketing campaign, it can be tempting to want to connect with as many people as possible.

But often, this means that you’ll end up forgetting to develop a design that will connect with the people that are really the most likely to do business with you.

One of the best ways to ensure your marketing design makes it easy for you to find your customers, and vice versa?

Include a hashtag on your campaign, and encourage your target market to participate in a challenge or create a post. Not only is this a wonderfully effective way to grow your current campaign, it also makes it much easier for you to learn more about your target market for the future.

It’s a lot simpler to conduct market research when you have all the information you need stored in a single hashtag you can scroll through.

This way, you can measure the effectiveness of your current campaign and make tweaks where necessary — while planning for the future.

Don’t Forget The Basics

Of course, in the quest to create an engaging and dynamic design, it’s easy for you to forget about the most basic rules of marketing!

Always remember to keep your content legible. Keep in mind that any text and images you use in your campaign will likely need to be resized. While detailed and colorful images can look great when they have enough space to shine, they can end up looking like a blob when they’re formatted to be smaller.

Same goes for your the font you choose. It might be easy to read up close, but will someone that’s flipping through the pages of a magazine or scrolling through their newsfeeds be able to read it?

Finally, don’t forget about spacing. You don’t want your text and images to be sitting on top of each other. Focus on alignment, and always test out your design in multiple formats before you finalize it.

Pique Consumer Interest

Our final marketing design tip is probably our most important piece of advice. When you’re creating a design, you need to remember that it’s not necessarily your goal to sell your specific services.

Instead, what you really need to focus on is getting potential customers curious enough about your property management company that they want to learn more.

Resist the temptation to hammer your target market over the head with your services. It’s much better to position yourself as a company that’s already an established player in the property management industry. That way, consumers will realize that if they haven’t yet heard of you, they’re behind the times.

Take Your Marketing Design To The Next Level

Thanks to the marketing ideas in this post, your next campaign is set to be your most successful one yet.

Just remember: keep your design consistent, simple, and relevant to your target market.

Looking to learn more about how to create designs with serious staying power? Want to know how you can use the latest trends to your advantage? Would you like to learn more about logo design, SEO, and blogging?

Our resources are here to help.

Spend some time on our website to learn all about the best tools of the trade. Together, let’s make your branding and design stand out from the crowd.