Marketing is all about communicating your business’ core message. Through various avenues, from advertising to social media through to sales, marketing relies on ancillary materials to promote this message. This is to help convince prospective customers that your business is worth a second look. From a practical perspective, this means that marketing images and logos are often required in a variety of different formats and sizes. For the slickest results, these images must be vector images, to enable easy transition between different required dimensions.
Visuals and printed materials are one of the most important aids you can possible have in marketing your business. These are the tools that do the marketing for you, and that persuade people to buy your products and services when you’re not there to do it face to face. It is perhaps no surprise then that the images used in marketing materials can be of critical importance to the weight and effectiveness of the message.
At the same time, these marketing materials are often designed for a range of uses, and as such cover a range of formats. To build a brand, you need visual consistency – a similarity of design across everything you do, so you can build recognition within your target market and start to develop a stronger brand identity. But to build your business, you may require marketing materials in a much wider range of sizes and formats. For example, the images you use on a 6-foot banner display stand will need to be the same images you use on a small A5 flier, but obviously the sizing will be completely different.
The answer here is to use stock vector images. Normal images cannot be increased in size by much before they become distorted and unusable. This is because there is insufficient data in the image file to actually handle the increase in size. But vector images are designed in a different way. With vector images, sizing is based on ratios rather than on pixels, which makes it feasible to expand an image or shrink an image as much as is necessary to fit. This is the solution professional graphic artists use to get a slick, professional veneer from their market.
This can have a major impact on the perception of your business. In a toss-up between a business with blurry marketing images and a business with razor-sharp vectors, the latter will probably win. This might not be a conscious choice, but people are drawn toward businesses with more effective marketing and design, and that certainly extends through to the use of vector images.
The images you use in business say a lot about your company, and they are one of the first bases against which your offering will be judged. Customers do judge the book by its cover when it comes to businesses. This means the way you present yourself must be as slick and as professional as possible to give you the edge over the competition, and a fighting chance of securing their business.
Image source: http://www.gopopupstands.co.uk/content_images/bannerexample.jpg
Image source: http://vectormagic.com/images/v3/vectorization_explanation-fp-ac5e89bf84f43f54409fadf8d928286c.png