Simple, sleek, and engaging – that’s the mantra the best brands in the digital space follow today.

With hundreds of processes, techniques, systems, and strategies, it’s difficult to ascertain a single way of marketing effectively. However, there is one specific strategy that has distinguished itself from this crowd, especially in the last year or so – minimalism.

 

What is minimalism in marketing?

As the name suggests, minimalism means the bare minimum. It’s a way of communicating a message to consumers without using unnecessary content, imagery, text, or visuals. Minimalism prides itself on removing any extra designs or elements and stripping the brand down to its core.

Minimalism focuses on clean and simple content and communication which includes designs or copy, in a subtle manner, to portray a clear and specific intention across.

 

Why do people prefer “less is more”?

Companies want to be recognized and remembered by people, which makes visual branding almost as important as actual sales.

Let’s try an exercise – ask yourself, what’s the one thing that would stop you from turning your eyes away from a logo?

The answer is connection. If a logo is able to form a connection and visual engagement with a user, it has successfully mastered brand recall and recognition. But a mere connection isn’t enough. Are you able to get a glimpse of the brand’s personality through the logo? If you spend 5 seconds looking at a logo, does it succeed in depicting its brand image?

 

Why is minimalism relevant today?

• Simple yet complex
  Minimalism is important because it helps brands create bonds with potential customers by cutting down on extra elements, be it through the design or other forms of communication or content. Brands are adapting to the concept of “less is more” because it allows them to get to the root of their persona and highlight exactly what the brand is all about.
• Purposeful and impactful
  More and more businesses realize the importance of doing away with fancy ‘fluff.’ Consumers are more aware of their needs and requirements today than ever – gone are the days of fancy communication, filled with unnecessary design elements that would appeal to a consumer. The point of minimalism is to communicate the purpose of a brand to the consumer while creating recall value, via the design and content.
• Pleasing and engaging
  Consumers are all about a clean sensory experience – with so much information being available online, if your brand identity or web presence, be it the design or the text, is cluttered and has too many images or text, it becomes difficult for a consumer to be engaged. When consumers tend to feel overloaded with information, they stay away from a brand. Minimalism ensures simple and engaging content (including designs, copy and text) that keep a consumer’s interest in the brand piqued.
• Creative consistency
  Brands are displayed across all platforms – whether social media, a brand’s website, or any other form of collateral. Wherever the brand is portrayed, the idea is to ensure creative consistency in terms of the brand’s identity. Minimalism allows marketers to remain consistent across channels in a more comprehensive manner, rather than making it complicated for brands to follow difficult imaging, text, visuals across different platforms.

 

What does minimalism focus on?

If you want to make your brand identity minimalist, for designs, focus on simple designs, colors and basics and for text, focus on communicating through simple and succinct text.

Minimalist designers use balance and negative space and use typography as opposed to color. Minimalist copywriters use engaging words to make short and crisp sentences which are eye catching.

Brands today that are pioneers in the minimalist space are Airbnb, Uber, and Apple.

 

5 tips to make your marketing minimalistic

• Focus on strategy

Even though minimalism may appear to have a simple output, the process that goes into designing it can be demanding. The best way to go about it is to have a proper strategy in place. This includes having clear end goals, manner, and modes of marketing, etc.

• Too many cooks will spoil the minimalist idea.

Large marketing teams often lead to a mess in the minimalist process. Reflecting minimalism through a branding identity is more process-driven and less personnel. For the best project and a minimalist identity, stick to a small team of designers and marketers and focus more on tools and software that can relay the message in line with your strategy.

• Quality not quantity

As you may have guessed, minimalism is all about quality and not quantity – both in terms of the design as well as the outreach approach. The communications should focus on putting across the message in minimal words and sleek design, rather than bombarding a consumer with more messages and less impact.

 

Try the Minimalist trend.

From big brands like Apple to smaller well-known brands like Casper, minimalism has been used as a simple strategy that attempts to steer clear of all kinds of marketing practices and instead highlight the absolute essential message or tone of the brand. Try using a minimalist strategy to portray your business communication – it’s easy; just find simple solutions.

Tags: campaign marketing, Content Marketing, Creative Marketing, Marketing communications, marketing content, Marketing strategy, marketing trends, Minimalism, Minimalistic Marketing, Social Media Marketing