Marketing yourself online as a designer, or similar, is crucial in building a successful career. With the growth of social media and digital marketing, it has become easier than ever to reach potential clients and showcase your skills. Use these marketing strategies to grow your graphic design business, generate leads, and get new graphic design clients.
Research • Research how others within your niche promote themselves online.
• When and how are they posting on e.g. social media?
• Find out how you can do it better.
• Find out your keywords.
• Find out your hashtags.
Build your brand
Make sure that everything you say, do, and post reinforces the impression you want your clients and customers to have. It gives them a sense of what you stand for and what you can do for them.
• Reflect your personality and design style.
• Consistency across all your online platforms.
• Logo, if necessary.
• Color palette
• Develop a style guide, if you like.
Build a strong online presence
• Create a website to showcase your strong portfolio and services.
• Keep it simple.
• Show the most important first.
• Write a short personal presentation.
• Show images of yourself.
• Use the three most important arguments for hiring you.
• What are your "keywords?
• Yes: "I save busy B2B marketing agency owner’s time writing email newsletters". • No: "I’m a marketing copywriter".
• Detailed descriptions of each project.
• Case studies.
• Social proof, testimonials.
• Previous and existing clients. Text or logos.
• CV or history. Make it easy to read, avoid repetitive information.
• Contact information.
• Keep experimenting until you find a formula that works.
• Ask a friend to take a look and give you feedback.
Showcase your work
• Show your best design work only. Make them long for more.
• Don’t be shy about sharing successes. Situation/Initiative/Result.
• Show e.g. UX design work, if you want to work with UX design in the future.
• Describe your design process.
• Use tags to help people find more within the same theme.
Create content
• Add value for someone.
• Write blog posts or record videos post them on your own website.
• Do the same for for established websites that accept freelance content.
• Post regularly.
• Create a lead magnet (checklist or similar to download) and collect email addresses.
Network and Collaborate
Don’t approach networking with the idea of finding out what you can get from someone. Instead, approach it as building a mutually beneficial relationship. You may meet someone who isn’t a good fit for your services, but maybe they’d be a perfect fit for someone you know.
• Network and collaborate with other graphic designers and professionals.
• Connect with other designers on social media. They expect you to network.
• Connect with former colleagues.
• Attend design conferences and events.
• Join online design communities.
• Engage with your followers.
• Follow up.
Communities
• Behance.
• Dribbble
People/clients might wonder:
• Who are you?
• What do you do?
• What are you good at?
• Where are you heading?
• Why are you doing this?
• How is your thinking process?
• How do you work?
• How are you as a person?
• What is your passion, driving force and interests?
• What value will you add?
• Guide me through one of your work. (Communication, goal, role, tasks, decisions).
• Describe a challenge and how you solved it.
• What is your favourite (digital) product? Why do you return or pay for it?
• What do you want to achieve?
• What do you value most of all in your personal and professional life?
• What do you want to learn?
• What is the first impression of you, body language, signals, clothing, voice?
• Why do you want to work with/for us? • Why are we special?
• What do we have in common? • How did you discover us? • What do you think about our products?
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