Do you want to attract more of your ideal customer? Do you want to turn your existing customers into loyal fans? Build a sense of community? Are you running out of ideas as to how to get more engagement with your business? If you’ve answered yes to any or all of those questions illustrations might be able to help.
But before I share with you five reasons why your business should commission illustrations, let’s make a quick distinction between bespoke illustration as opposed to stock illustrations.
Bespoke Illustration vs Stock Illustrations
I don’t have anything against stock images and illustrations. After all they’re pretty convenient: in just a few clicks you can get a few images you didn’t have a few minutes prior, and just like that, boom, voilà! You can use them in your marketing, on your website and sometimes even on your products!
But let’s face it: the fact that stock illustrations are made available to anyone with a budget means that they’ll probably be used by a few other people, maybe even by your competitors. When something is used by too many people it’s not so unique and distinctive anymore and we begin to blend in rather than stand out. Haven’t we all used at some point a free Canva template because we felt it represented our brand well only to see it used by three other businesses on social media in less than a week?
The first reason your business should commission bespoke illustrations is that…
1) Bespoke illustrations create distinctiveness
When you hire a professional illustrator to work on bespoke illustrations you give your business a chance at becoming distinctive meaning, according to the Oxford dictionary, “having a quality or characteristic that makes something different and easily noticed.”
Professional illustrators will work in their style (that’s a topic for another blog post) and will come up with a unique creative solution tailored to YOUR needs to fulfill your brief.
We, as humans, are a visual species so you might as well make the most of that trait and stand out from the crowd.
2) Bespoke illustrations help you tell (your) stories
Bespoke illustrations are a great way to tell your stories visually, whether it’s the story of how you started your business or creating a story to support one of your brands or products.
That’s a format that we are used to from a very young age: we read picture books (or look at the images before we can read), we watch cartoons, and we play with toys and games that involve enticing visuals.
And that’s a format that is so ingrained in us that it still works really well as we become adults.
3) Bespoke illustrations explain, inform and educate
Illustrations are not just about pretty or colourful pictures. They’re also a form of visual communication whose primary goal is to clarify information while making it visually enticing.
There’s a reason why a lot of user’s manuals have images in them: sometimes pictures are just so much clearer than words, and they’re not bound by language either.
Illustrations can clarify, explain, inform and educate your audience and/or customers.
4) Bespoke illustrations entertain and delight
Now I might be stating the obvious here, but people like to have fun, be entertained and do things that make them happy.
Illustrations are not only a way to convey complex ideas or messages visually, they shout creativity. Because they’re not as tied to reality as some of other mediums they encourage us to use our imagination and can give your material a sense of play and fun which will delight your audience and customers.
5) Bespoke illustrations create connections
Finally, illustrations are a powerful way to create connections: connections with your business or brand, and connections with other people.
As we saw earlier, from a young age we are taught through images so there’s something quite primal about this mode of communication. It also happens to trigger the areas of our brain that are linked with intuition and our emotions and as a species, emotion is what drives us: what drives us to connect, and what drives us to take action.
This means that illustrations have the power to get your audience and customers to identify and feel more engaged with your business. It also means that you’re creating opportunities for people to rally and to form communities around what you stand for.
And that’s not all…
Illustration is pretty hot right now! It’s being used more and more by brands and businesses (including the big guys like Mailchimp, Airbnb and Google) who understand and wield its visual power.
Have a question or want to discuss how bespoke illustrations can help your business? Let’s talk!
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