All businesses need a feasible strategy to succeed in their industry. But, companies or brands offering services face the unique challenge of having to deploy every aspect of their operations towards marketing. New and old design firms need a sublime marketing strategy to guarantee success in selling their designs. It’s after all, a thing of pride if a popular brand sports your design in their logo or themes.
Every good design is a footprint, the masterpiece of the designer. If Mona Lisa or any of Cezanne’s works are as priceless as they are today, it may give an idea into why the graphic design industry is presently worth at least $13 billion in terms of annual revenue. Such a figure reeks with opportunities to build the ultimate graphic design business.
Nearly 130,000 graphic design businesses are in existence, and close to 90 percent of them operate on a freelance basis. They may also be businesses without paid employees. So, what does it take to build the graphic design business of your dreams? Of course, you’ll need to do three things:
- Adequately differentiate yourself from the competition,
- Be creative about winning new clients and making more sales, and
- Position your business to succeed.
Staying organized while you sell your brand to customers is key. That’s why it’s important to use the B2B automation tool to stay focused and accountable.
Before You Begin…
A graphic designer isn’t just a job; it means developing the mindset of a partner contributing to building your clients’ brand. Visual communication is critical to selling every brand to customers, hence it’s a big part of how brands market their businesses.
Sticking to a specific niche helps to position service providers as experts. As a graphic designer, you need to do this by becoming a specialist in a specific area. It throws you into the spotlight enough for the right types of clients to know that you exist and are available to meet their needs.
In what possible directions can you go, anyway? You can become a web designer, brand designer, or print media designer. You may also provide graphic and commercial art or visual communication design services.
Other graphic designers work with corporate organizations, become illustrators, photo editors, or work in film and video editing. Other areas your graphic design skills are in demand include:
- Animation
- Architectural and Engineering Drafting
- Package Design
- Product Design
The whole point is, let your prospective market know that you provide a specific service.
Every Startup Needs Capital: How Much Have You Got?
Now that you’ve identified what you will focus on, that’s what you’ll sell to a public hungry for your services.
The cost of launching a design business sits in the range of $2,000 to $50,000. More doesn’t necessarily mean better. How much you cough out depends on the type of design work you’ll be doing. Other primary factors include the geographical location and how much marketing you’ll do for your services.
Let’s say you’re starting Lean, as many freelancers do. You’ll at least need a business card, a brochure, and a cloud-based design software subscription. If you’re using Adobe Creative Cloud (that’s $50 every month).
On the other hand, if your studio will be in an upscale part of town and you have employees, you’ll have to stump up close to $50,000 to get things going.
For you to get more certainty concerning your startup costs, you need to develop a business plan. It’ll provide plenty of insight into the kind of graphic design firm you’re working to own, your location and your mode of operation. You’ll also have a fair idea of what’s realistic for your expenses and revenues columns.
Here are a few sources from around the web for business plans and business plan templates for graphic shops:
- Bplans
- Mplans
- My Top Business Ideas
- Profitable Venture
- The Finance Resource
The Crux of the Matter: Marketing Design
Marketing graphic design aims to communicate and promote a brand and its products or services in a visually engaging way. The graphic design process creates multiple materials, each of which is to conform to the company’s visual identity.
Marketing and design are inseparable twins. The reason is that marketing generates public interest in a brand, while the design is the means or language to communicate the brand. This intersection of marketing and design is where many organizations need help and where the expertise of a graphic designer becomes crucial.
However, a marketing strategy is not born in a vacuum. It proceeds from essentials known as “brand guidelines.” These make it easy to maintain consistency in communication for your brand. Besides, great design marketing goes beyond a fancy company logo, images, font, or page layout.
Design marketing precipitates the connection of brands to customers, instilling confidence in the public. Design is what customers see before they get a chance to feel the effects of your product, so it doesn’t just involve using trendy graphics and glossy images.
For instance, take this website whose main focus is “bathroom renovation”. The site’s theme is responsive and authored to build trust and showcase the services provided in a powerful way.
Marketing often includes clear copy and precision targeting, yet it’s only a success when it converts or performs. An ad design is only as good as how many customer conversions it brings about. Therefore, it makes sense to combine marketing with great design. Remember the Nike Air Max ad where the shoes formed both human lungs? Recall that ever relevant accompanying copy, “They keep you alive?” That’s just one example where marketing and design combined to excite and win the customer.
3 Reasons Why You Need Top-Notch Marketing Graphic Design
#1 – To Boost Conversions
If the graphic designer does business marketing right, prospects will find it easier to take action. The designer has simply achieved the aim of paving the road to conversion. Great design multiplies the impact of the call-to-action (CTA) button.
At every stage of marketing, the crucial task is to create engagement with the audience and to ultimately convert engagement to the action you want. Two questions to carefully consider are:
- How do I turn a call to action into an actual sale?
- How do I create a brand experience from digital marketing design?
Regardless of the marketing campaign, aim for the graphic design to be the vehicle for evoking an emotional response from the audience. Integrate visually striking elements, such as an appealing generated dynamic QR code, that not only captivate attention but also foster a deeper and more memorable connection with your target audience.
#2 – To Build Trust
Great graphic design software can minimize the anxiety that usually precedes converting. It should actively deal with the reservations the individual may harbour towards the product or service you’re pushing. You can focus on:
- The raw material for the product
- The return policy of the company
- The customer’s ability to try the product before buying
#3 – To Offer an Incentive
Customers need a solid reason to adopt a product or service. Therefore, it’s pertinent to advertise the product within a context familiar to the audience. What this achieves is to enable the audience to see how you can help them fix a problem they’re having and how it can improve their lives in some way. Having a context for the service or product allows a person to visualize how it fits in with their person and lifestyle.
6 Essentials About Graphic Design and Business Marketing
- You’re Designing for a Brand, Not Yourself
New designers struggle more than a bit with putting aside their design inclinations for the client’s preferences. Joe Tucker is the Creative Director at DigitalUS and Solodev. While accepting the importance of designing for yourself, he highlights the importance of wholeheartedly embracing the goals and needs of the client. Marketing design is rarely a solo effort and in many cases, your final output will be different from your original vision. You can also use publicly available information to gauge public perception of the brand.
Being open to a free feedback is necessary to improve the quality of designs. The client’s wishes matter more than the graphic designer’s whim. If you repeatedly deliver excellence, it’ll become easier to have your ideas sail because clients now trust you and can give you some creative freedom.
2. Learn Tact When You Don’t Understand the Client’s Taste
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Director and Operations Manager for Contractor Calls, Joe Goldstein, has an interesting take on this. He advises expecting a client to eventually ask for something that goes against the grain of good design. Well, the client pays the piper, expect them to say what tune they’d like to hear.
But, Goldstein says you can do three things in such circumstances:
- Make an attempt to show the client the issue with their option. Use their language, be clear, and never abrasive.
- Companies are mostly wary about spending money. Try to communicate the financial implications of their design decisions. Again, use clear language in communicating. They may want music to start playing as soon as a visitor visits their website and provides a file several megabytes huge. Well, if the song makes the site load slowly, the company may not be singing as happy a tune in the long run.
- Do as you’re told! If the client doesn’t enjoy external input towards their ideas, re-orient your mind to think of the job as a new type of challenge you can add to your reel once successful.
3. Keep Your Skills on the Bleeding Edge
Graphic designers take pride in being creative. Well, many jobs are quite rigid in nature. Advertising and marketing design is often a mix of fun, creativity, and lightning pace. Sadly, this is not the case at every company. Companies operate by standards that may prove to be rigorous for a graphic designer.
The best thing in such cases is to try out other ways to keep the creative spark alive. Side projects are a good option. The graphic designer can design for other clients or independently sell their work online.
4. Know the Target Audience – Know the Project Goal
Questions unlock your understanding of the client’s intent. Ask enough questions to get a clearer glimpse of the client’s needs. Understanding client needs improves your ability to suggest feasible solutions to improve the work.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) indicate the marketing goals of the project. The graphic designer should thoroughly before any attempt at execution. KPIs will ultimately guide what CTAs to include in a design project.
5. Learn Digital Marketing
A graphic designer in a business setting will do well to understand marketing. It’ll make you a valuable team member and make it easier for you to translate marketing goals into viable designs.
Understanding the foundations of platform-specific content, marketing funnels, types of emails designs used in email marketing, visuals for a company’s blog, landing pages, User Interfaces (UI), and User Experience (UX), helps to smooth out the working relationship between designers and people on those other teams.
Design alone is never enough on marketing-focused projects. Instead, having holistic knowledge of the industry needs helps you apply your skills in perspective.
6. Think of Design Beyond Your Artistic Ability
It’s advisable for graphic designers to be mindful of market needs. Success in marketing design requires far more than knowing about design. Even with knowledge of digital design and skill with graphic design software, there’s that all-important aspect of keeping multiple stakeholders happy while resolving any design goals conflicts. Indeed, this has proved to be the albatross of too many a designer.
The Graphic Designer, Social Media Marketing and Email Marketing
The graphic designer is a mainstay interfacing with multiple stakeholders on various levels within a company. It’s not a casual role, instead, they are instrumental to the success of the brand. Two novel areas where the graphic designer needs to have specific marketing nous are Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Email Marketing.
These two channels employ separate avenues to effect marketing goals. However, there are telling differences between them and the graphic designer needs to pay attention to the tiny details that make both types of platforms tick.
The invention of the infinite scroll has further reduced the attention span on social media. Besides, the demographic is skewed toward youth on social media too. The graphic designer must think of catchy, trendy, and captivating ways to engage the typical social media audience.
On the other hand, email appeals to people who may prefer longer-form content, allowing the graphic designer to delay the call to action a bit. Email marketing also allows for protracted engagement and the company reveals the benefits of a product or service over time.
Comprehensive customer analysis is essential to determine what designs would work for a specific audience.
Conclusion
Graphic design is an integral part of marketing. Just as poor graphic art has the potential to confine a brand to doom, great graphic design can transform the fortunes of a company forever. It all begins with having a marketing strategy that works for the target audience. It remains the surest groundwork for the graphic designer to build upon.
