Responsive design: Find out what it is and how to apply it to your digital marketing campaigns

I’m sure you’re sick of hearing about the importance of the design of your digital marketing campaigns. So today we want to share with you the importance of having responsive design in your digital marketing campaigns.
This strategy is extremely important in the development of your digital marketing strategy, as it can improve your company’s results and make your brand significantly more relevant on the internet.

But what is it all about?
Responsive design is directly related to the design of your marketing campaigns. This is a programming technique used to improve your target audience’s experience when they visit your website, or even when they receive your email marketing campaigns. It allows you to change the layout so that when someone accesses or receives your content, it adapts to the device on which it was accessed.

In this way, you can see the content adapted to your computer, tablet or cell phone, depending on which one you are using. This reorganization of the content happens automatically, without you having to do anything.

How important is responsive design for your company?

These days, we access content from different devices and there’s nothing more annoying than not having that content adapted to the screen we’re accessing. In fact, we quickly leave a page that has been created without taking responsive design into account. And so you lose a sale, or a potential consumer of your content. That’s why the more adaptable your content is, the greater your engagement will be.
Another important aspect to mention here is the importance of cohesion in your communication. There are brands that we recognize just by the type of communication, the type of posts on social media, the color or design of the pieces. For this reason, it is extremely important that your brand’s communication follows a cohesive line, so that your customers think of your brand even without seeing it. Communicating a lot is better than communicating well.

Now that you can give responsive design its due importance, we need to define the main steps so that you can apply this strategy successfully.

Responsive design is a skill that you must master in your company so that you can work with interactive content. But what are the determining factors in this strategy?

1. The content:
For the development of any communication material, content is always the main star. To create a successful responsive design, you’ll need to design elements, layouts and interactions that are specific to the message you want to convey. Therefore, adapt the design to the type of communication you want to make and the identity of your brand. With design, your message will be better received.

2. The layout:
Now that you’ve got the content you want to convey well structured, you need to think about how you’re going to get good engagement and interactions on the various screens where your content can be accessed.
At this stage, the designer or person responsible for creating your brand’s digital content must create a flexible visual unit for the various screen sizes. To do this, they must be persistent with the information, i.e. create key elements of your layout such as menus, buttons and/or content blocks with consistent colors, shapes and positions, regardless of the device on which they are accessed. This way, the consumer of your content will always recognize that interaction with your brand.

3. Typography:
The typefaces you use in your design pieces can also influence the results of your communication. Here, the main focus is on legibility.
As well as choosing a font that fits in with your proposal, you should also analyze the size and density of the typeface, so that you can define the best readability on each screen.

4. Images:
Images are one of the most difficult components to adapt when creating a good responsive design, since, they are elements with fixed sizes, and have a greater limitation on where they can be cropped and resized.
For this reason, you need to plan the use of these elements very well before defining a specific layout for your piece. This point will depend a lot on the type of content you are creating, whether it’s a quiz or an online store, priorities change. In any case, the most important thing to bear in mind is how the browser will arrange these elements so that they don’t break your layout.

5. Animation and video
One of the main advantages of digital content is that it can be as interactive as you like. However, when it comes to creating a responsive design for your campaigns, videos are even more limiting in terms of size flexibility.
In the case of animations, you will probably have to create more than one layout version. A horizontal version for the computer and a vertical version for the cell phone, for example.

6. CTA’S
As you know, one of the main objectives of digital communication is to attract as many potential customers as possible in order to convert a sale. To this end, the use of CTA’S, or Call to Action, is quite common.
In this sense, when creating responsive design content it is essential that the CTA is always available and visible regardless of the screen. This may take some trial and error before it is eventually accepted.

With all these steps, it’s possible to create a perfect responsive design for your campaigns, whether it’s an email marketing campaign, a website, an online store… However, this type of strategy requires a lot of training, and it’s possible that you’ll create many designs that fail at something.
However, now that you know how responsive design can be one of the first reasons why your potential customer stays with or abandons your content, you may want to avoid running the risk of this type of content failing.

At Ontag, we’re experts in responsive design and we’re here to help.

Written by Inês Oliveira, digital marketer.