This is the last in a series of articles adapted from the chapter introductions of The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook. Here we’ll look at reasons why marketing-savvy freelancers constantly adapt their business offer to stay valuable to the people that matter most.

The term ‘marketing’ is often mistakenly used to mean only ‘promotion’. In actual fact, promotion is just one type of marketing activity.

Marketing is an entire business ethic. It’s the strategy of researching what customers want, and then developing products or layers of service that respond to customer needs.

But customer needs don’t stay the same. New competitors are constantly fighting for market-share, people decide to try something new, and trends and fashions change over time. These are all factors that can influence an established customer-base to defect to another product or service.

OK, so how does this relate to freelance self-marketing? Well, quite a lot. Your business faces the same challenges. Even if you continue to demonstrate your worth with every assignment, your clients aren’t guaranteed to stay loyal to you.

Many freelancers rely on only three or four clients for the bread-and-butter of their business. So losing consistent business from just one big client can significantly affect your turnover.

There are several reasons why the phone can suddenly stop ringing.

Client wants a new approach.
Output from just one designer can feel staid after months of regular work. That’s why many clients, especially those working on marketing collateral, often decide to change their designer for a fresh injection of inspiration. They will almost certainly come back to you, but you may notice a lull in work. Avoid this by developing a list of creative contacts who can help you provide new ideas for tackling familiar briefs.

Another designer has moved into town.
Other freelancers who offer a fresh perspective can arrive on your patch at any time. Your regular clients may decide to try them out instead of hiring you. It’s tempting to think you have no control over this, but actually you do. Keep an eye on what your competitors are offering to new clients, and hone your business offer accordingly.

Clients’ design needs change.
Businesses are constantly evolving as they respond to changing international demographics. This could mean your clients move into new markets and communicate with different people with different aesthetic tastes. For example, over the last year my company has produced 75% more publicity aimed at Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese customers. That means I have to find new designers who specialize in East Asian design. Through market research, you need to keep track of your clients’ needs well in advance of sudden shifts in demand—so you have time to learn new skills or find appropriate partners.

Clients’ outsourcing needs change.
Just as your clients’ customers change over time, your clients’ organizational set-up may change. As the economy takes a turn, department personnel may change. So when the market picks up, your clients may build in-house teams and outsource less; when the market slows, in-house studios may be cut, and more aspects of a project may be outsourced to freelancers (such as copywriting, project-managing, and printing). You need to be ready to hone your skills so that your service continues to add value to your clients’ business, in good times and in bad times.
Just like other businesses, the key to success is to allocate sufficient time and effort honing your service so it remains an enticing prospect for your existing clients.

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The above article is adapted from Shaun Crowley’s new book The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook, available for download at www.marketing-designers.com

The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook shows you how to:

• Develop a persuasive business offer.
• See your best ever results from prospecting.
• Write a hard-working website.
• Get your business into the newspapers.
• Build a reputation as ‘designer of choice.

Newspaper advertising
Although newspaper adverts can be expensive and don’t guarantee instant responses, you can use them to play a ‘primer’ role in your overall marketing strategy.

If a potential client notices your advertisement in a trade newspaper, he or she is unlikely to make a mental note of your contact details. But if your advert effectively communicates your business offer, the reader’s awareness of your service will be primed for recall later on. So if you follow-up with a telephone or email campaign, you will get the most out of your advertising.

Indeed, the most effective marketing strategies synergize different forms of media. People who are already familiar with your business (because they have seen your name) are more likely to respond favorably with a targeted follow-up.

So for the huge ocean of unknown contacts, newspaper advertising can create a buzz of awareness which you can exploit later in a telephone or email campaign.

It can work like this: Submit consecutive advertisements into a trade magazine specific to the industry sector you work in. Then rent the newspaper’s data list, and phone or email people on the list. Your previous advertisements give you a prestigious angle for your opening pitch: “You may have seen our ad in Packaging Times…”

So advertising can work as part of a larger, multi-faceted marketing strategy—in the same way as you can combine direct mail and telephone prospecting, sending teaser postcards to high-status contacts and following up with a call.

Press releases
Newspapers can offer a more effective and cheaper way of getting exposure. Why pay for an ad when you can have a news feature for free?

Up to three quarters of the stories in most trade magazines are made up of press releases. If you have an interesting story to tell, a press release will help get you noticed by journalists and editors, giving you the chance of gaining free exposure.

Maybe your design contributed towards a breakthrough marketing campaign. Maybe you have learnt something smart about designing within a particular industry sector. Maybe there’s a story behind your step into the freelance circuit. Or maybe you offer a desirable level of service.

If you have been involved in anything your target clients might find interesting there’s an opportunity for a story, and all the business exposure that comes with it.

When you sit down to plan your marketing strategy for your year, it’s a good idea to allocate specific months for a timely new story. This is particularly important if you notice regular periods of downtime at certain times of year.
For example, if business typically slows in the summer you could plan to send a press release in June, and spend the preceding months working on an activity to inform your news story.

It might be better to plan your news story around your target clients. If you work in a sector which sees annual conferences or exhibitions, these are good times to submit press releases as readership figures increase directly before and after the event.

Your news story should appeal directly to your most likely clients. So if you design in the packaging sector, buy a few copies of Packaging Weekly or Packaging Today (or your local packaging-specific trade journal), and see what kind of stories get printed.

Then ask yourself, what activity can you perform that will make for a timely and interesting story for this readership? Can you conduct some kind of research (e.g. into effective packaging design)? Can you describe an appropriate case study (e.g. designing a new type of packaging)? Can you reveal an interesting trade secret (e.g. the packaging industry’s favorite packaging designs )?

Integrating press release into your marketing plan can help to lift your exposure just when you need it to. And if reinforced with persistent telephone prospecting, the newspapers can offer a valuable avenue for marketing your business.

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The above article is adapted from Shaun Crowley’s new book The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook, available for download at www.marketing-designers.com

The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook shows you how to:

• Develop a persuasive business offer.
• See your best ever results from prospecting.
• Write a hard-working website.
• Get your business into the newspapers.
• Build a reputation as ‘designer of choice.

It’s also a good vehicle for exhibiting your talents. In fact, I regularly hire new freelance designers on the strength of their online portfolio—if they present their services persuasively on their websites, I don’t always insist on face-to-face meetings.

If you’ve got good material in your repertoire, you should have a good website to present it. And if you’ve got a good website, it makes sense that you make people aware of it.

There are two ways to exploit your website to its full potential. Either you make yourself accessible to website browsers by optimizing your website’s exposure on search engines and major sites, or you buy a data list of potential clients and present your website directly to people in an email campaign.

Cracking the search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is perhaps the cheapest way of getting your online portfolio noticed, but it takes time and energy to creep up to the top pages of the major search engines. Think of SEO is an investment in the future of your business. It should be an ongoing process you continually chip away at, so that one day, when a prospective client types the name of your city and the word ‘designer’ into Google, your name heads the list.

The success of your SEO efforts will rely on having a flexible website with several niche focuses. In search engine terms, the standard homepage-heavy format does not make for a Googlable site. If you want a high quantity of quality hits, your website should have pages of targeted and useful content that responds to a variety of niche keyword searches.

To get maximum exposure on the Net, you need to know what your target browsers are searching for and offer content that meets their needs.

Announcing your offer.
Direct Email campaigns can offer more immediate results. It is a very pleasant feeling to see scores of reply emails in your inbox, just minutes after sending out your email. But that comes at the price—around $1,500 USD (£800 GBP) for a medium-sized email campaign—which most freelancers can’t afford to pay on a regular basis, especially when there is no guarantee you’ll get a return on your investment.

The success of your email campaign will rely heavily on the strength of your list. If your business has a highly targeted business offer, your task in finding the right list will be a lot easier.

A final word on internet marketing.
Your website copy will play an important role in getting you noticed on the internet. Not only should your copy be riddled with good keywords, it should also provide browsers with a good reason to make return visits or enquire about your services. You need a balance of informative content to lure target browsers, and sales-oriented copy to convince browsers they need your services.

A common pitfall made by freelancers is to use their internet presence to exhibit elaborately designed websites with minimal copy. But the marketing-savvy freelancer will put an emphasis on copy as well as an emphasis on design. After all, it is the copy that talks to the browser and offers reasons to click through and explore your site.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

The above article is adapted from Shaun Crowley’s new book The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook, available for download at www.marketing-designers.com

The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook shows you how to:

• Develop a persuasive business offer.
• See your best ever results from prospecting.
• Write a hard-working website.
• Get your business into the newspapers.
• Build a reputation as ‘designer of choice.

Approaching companies can be an exciting time. It can also be a nervous time. Get it right and you’ll start your freelance journey with lucrative work. Get it wrong and you’ll splutter onto the scene.

Below is a brief list of questions to ask yourself before approaching potential clients.

Are you allocating your time efficiently?
You need a system for identifying your most promising leads, so you don’t spend valuable time chasing red herrings. One simple system is to separate potential contacts into two groups; high-status and low-status.

Ask yourself what sort of contact would constitute as ‘high-status’ in the area you work in. This will depend on your design offer and the location you cover. But some sectors will always be more profitable than others, such as the technology sector or areas of business such as marketing. Profitability should inform every decision you make.

Are you keeping track of the people you are contacting?
You need a system for tracking your marketing activities. If you don’t keep organized notes of who you are contacting and when, you may inadvertently ignore some leads and accidentally pester others.

Are you positive about prospecting?
The telephone is likely to be your most effective self-promotion tool. But if you don’t believe telephone prospecting will work, it won’t.

The fact is, telephone prospecting really can get results. If you believe in it, your enthusiasm will pull you through.

On the down side, telephone prospecting is unlikely to get you an assignment straight off. That’s because people often treat cold-callers with natural skepticism. People only let their guard down when a prospecting freelancer becomes familiar. So the secret: don’t try to do too much all at once.

Break down your initial contact into smaller steps, asking for an actionable response each time. So instead of asking for an assignment in your first call, simply introduce yourself and ask for permission to email a link to your portfolio. In your email, ask for a meeting. At the meeting, ask for the assignment.

Are you client-focused?
You won’t win assignments by talking about yourself. You’ll win them by discussing your clients’ business needs and demonstrating how your design offer is relevant to them.

If a contact agrees to meet you for a chat and a browse through your portfolio, make sure you prepare a pitch based on the contact’s business environment. Personalize your pitch. Which page of your portfolio will the client be most interested in seeing? What should you show first, second, third? What additional aspects of your service will the client find appealing?

Keep yourself organized, remain persistent, and always think about the business needs of the people you are pitching to.

The above article is adapted from Shaun Crowley’s new book The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook, available for download at www.marketing-designers.com

The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook shows you how to:

• Develop a persuasive business offer.
• See your best ever results from prospecting.
• Write a hard-working website.
• Get your business into the newspapers.
• Build a reputation as ‘designer of choice.

First, the basics. There are four fundamental elements to a successful freelance marketing strategy. It’s useful to think of these elements as four central pillars that will hold up all the marketing you do later on.

These pillars are your business offer, your portfolio, your website, and your business cards.

If you are still at college or in full-time employment, you are best advised to concentrate on building your four pillars before starting up.

If you are already freelancing and don’t have a strong business offer, a well-considered portfolio, an informed website, and clearly branded business cards, you should focus your energies here before contacting prospects.

Don’t rush in.
Prospecting freelancers who make a bad impression on first contact find it difficult to find favor on the next call.

That’s why it’s vital you are well-prepared before you start contacting the most influential companies in your area.

A lot of designers make a good living from just a handful of clients. It’s likely that the bread and butter of your business will come from the work you do for just three or four people.

Since the next person you call could be your next big client, it’s essential you have a plan before you pick up the phone.

Your plan should be based around your four pillars:

1. Devise a persuasive business offer so new clients remember you and recommend you.
2. Have a selection of work in your portfolio that clearly demonstrates your business offer.
3. Have a well-structured website that reinforces your business offer.
4. Have a stash of business cards that remind prospects of your business offer after you have met them.

Do your research.
You wouldn’t release a new product without first identifying a clear target market. Likewise, you don’t want to start contacting new prospects without first understanding the business environment they work in.

Why? Because the type of people you target will affect how you present yourself as a business.

Research your most lucrative clients, then work out how you can package your talents in a way that will appeal to your chosen market.

This will help you formulate a concrete business offer, informing the way you present your work in your portfolio, the way you structure your website, and the key message in your self-promotion.

Adapted from the introduction to the ‘Getting started’ chapter in The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook

The first is the perception that ‘word-of-mouth’ is part of the self-marketing mix, and the second is that self-promotion is best organized only during periods of down-time.

Word of mouth: the ultimate marketing ploy?
When I ask freelancers and small business owners how they market their business, the response is often: “My business relies on word-of-mouth” (defined here as the assumption that clients will recommend without prompting—not to be confused with any proactive promotion such as social networking, which can be a valuable self-promotional activity.)

I have found that this kind of ethic is shared amongst a significant number of freelance designers. And I have noticed that those designers who follow this ethic tend to be less busy than those who actively promote their services.

Sure, your reputation will contribute largely to your success. If you produce good enough work, your clients will recommend you. But sustaining a reputation is a principle that drives most entrepreneurs in their pursuit of perfection. It is not, and never will be, a true marketing ethic.

Word-of-mouth is something you have no control over. If you want to take control over your business, you need to toot your own horn.

Down-time: the best time to market your business?
Here’s another question I ask freelance designers that often elicits a familiar response: “When do you promote your business?” The usual answer: “When the work has dried up”.

The problem with this ethic is twofold. First, it results in stressful peaks and troths in workload, where some months you have to work all day, all night, weekends, and holidays too. Other months, business is depressingly slow and you struggle to pay the bills. By promoting yourself only in those slow periods, you are simply fuelling the peaks-and-troths cycle.

Secondly, self-promoting during periods of down-time can feel like an uphill task. For a client on the other end of the phone, it is very easy to detect a sense of desperation in the voice of a cold-calling freelancer. Unfortunately, clients prefer to hire in-demand freelancers than those who struggle to find work.

Self-promotion doesn’t work when you’ve waited too late to do it. If you want a steady, manageable year and a consistently high monthly turnover, you need to integrate self-promotion (and other marketing activities) into your weekly schedule–even during those busy periods.

The bad news: you may have to refuse work from time to time–and no one likes to turn down an assignment. But the reality of business means there can be no middle ground. It’s much better to turn away clients because you are too busy, than frantically call people in desperation for work because you haven’t been busy in weeks.

At the end of the day, refusing clients isn’t such a bad compromise. Of course you’re in demand. That’s because you’re good at what you do. Clients will understand that, and that’s why they’ll be back later.

If, however, you find that you are consistently getting offers for work that you are too busy to accept, the stage is set to 1) increase your fee; and 2) expand your business and hire a junior. That is one big step towards setting yourself up as a full design agency.

And it all hinges on your marketing.

The following article offers tips for contacting prospective clients in the marketing communications sector.

Define your prospective clients.
There is a saying in direct marketing that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your list. This is very likely to be true for your business too.

Only 20% of the companies in your area are likely to offer a good return on your marketing efforts. We can term these clients as ‘high-status’ contacts.

80% of the companies in your area are not likely to offer a good return on your marketing efforts. We can term these clients as ‘low-status’ contacts.

The time you spend pitching to prospective clients should be proportional to the status they fall into. As a rough rule, spend 20% of your time marketing your services to low-status contacts, and 80% of your time marketing to high-status contacts.

So how do we define high-status and low-status contacts in the marketing sector?

High-status contacts
High-status contacts are simply clients likely to give you on-going or lucrative work.

In the main, we’re talking about people working in big companies. More specifically, promotional coordinators and marketing managers in sales and marketing departments.

These contacts offer the best return on your marketing efforts because they have bigger budgets (which means more lucrative assignments), they have more numerous on-going projects, they are more likely to rely on freelancers, they might recommend you to other departments, and they are likely to move around within the industry, taking their contacts with them.

High-status contacts may also be managers of smaller businesses, whose design needs relate to your particular area of expertise-maybe because you have substantial experience designing within their industry sector.

High-status contacts require personalized marketing contact. Focus your energy on getting meeting time with them. Stay visible; mail them, call them now and again, and send emails once a month to remind them you’re out there.

Low-status contacts
Low-status contacts are either people who rarely call upon freelance designers, or people who only call upon freelance designers for small-scale ad-hoc items. It is therefore unlikely they will offer lucrative or on-going work.

Low-status contacts are likely to be general managers or marketing managers of small-to-medium-size businesses with small promotional budgets. Since they don’t produce a constant stream of promotional materials, it’s not worth focussing your marketing efforts on substantial personalized contact.

The exceptions would be existing clients or contacts who may call on you as their ‘designer of choice’, maybe because you provide a specialist service (as mentioned above).

You shouldn’t neglect low-status contacts because they make up such a large section of your potential client-base. Sure, only a tiny percentage of low-status contacts will offer a good return on your marketing efforts. But even if just 1% of low-status contacts offer on-going or lucrative design work, that 1% is a large enough list of prospective clients to make a real difference to your bottom line.

Target low-status contacts with an email or mailing campaign.
It’s not worth personalizing your contact with such a large section of low-priority contacts. Instead, look for ways of reaching these people on-mass.

You can do this by buying a data-list of low-status contacts, and emailing or snail-mailing the people on the list. In my forthcoming book “The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook” I’ll show you how to buy a data-list, how to set up a direct mail campaign, and how to write your email or DM letter.

Set up a database of high-status contacts.
High-status contacts require lots of personalized contact. But first you have to find them and gather their details.

Search engines are the simplest way of looking for high-status contacts. Simply type in “Marketing department” followed by your region, and look for contact names, email addresses, and telephone numbers of likely high-status marketing contacts working within big corporations.

It’s a good idea to build yourself a database of high-status contacts, and to keep it regularly updated by adding new contacts on a weekly basis.

A database allows you to update all your marketing activities, so you can see who you contacted, when you contacted them, and what their response was. It’s an essential organizational tool.

To set up your database spreadsheet, allow columns for company name, company description, contact name, contact position, address, telephone number, email address, website address, low-status/high-status (we’ll discuss the reasons for including this later), and update notes.

Spend as much time as you can Googling businesses and searching their ‘Contact Us’ pages, entering new high-status contacts into your spreadsheet as you go. Your aim is to have hundreds of contacts on your database. The law of averages dictates that around 5% of these will make promising leads.

Phone then email.
The standard strategy for contacting prospective clients is to phone first, then follow up with reminder emails. There are two reasons why it’s advisable to contact people in this order.

Firstly, in an age when spamming is an increasing problem, a lot of people only trust emails from known contacts. To become a “known contact” you need to introduce yourself either face-to-face or on the telephone.

Secondly, talking to contacts on the phone gives you a chance to ask what kind of design needs they have. You can record everything in the company description column of your database, so when you email the contact later, you can tailor your message to the specific needs of the contact. You can also include relevant links to your online portfolio, making your design offer more targeted to the individual.

When you have phoned a contact on your database, make sure you keep your update notes column up-to-date. Include the date you contacted, degree of interest in your offer, and when next to contact.

In some instances, a telephone conversation will reveal that the contact isn’t really high-status at all, but for some reason or other, falls into the low-status category. Rather than delete the contact from your database, just tag the contact as low-status for your own reference—you’ve gone to the trouble of calling, so a quick email now and again won’t be a waste of time. (That’s why it’s a good idea to include a high-status/low-status column in your database, as advised above.)

(My new book The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook includes a section on Telephone and Email Prospecting with tips and examples for effective cold-calling and follow-up email writing. The book is available for download at www.marketing-designers.com)

Snail-mail then phone.
Cold-calling people can be a daunting experience. It is especially daunting if you’re calling really high-status contacts; when the stakes are high and one call can make a profound difference to your freelancing job opportunities.

In these cases, sending a teaser mailer through snail-mail a week before you call will help to break the ice, so when the contact picks up the phone, he/she already knows who you are.

Your teaser mailer could be a postcard with a thought-provoking line, a provocative question, or something else to arouse the recipient’s curiosity. For example: the front side of your mailer could read:

Heard the news?…

and the back could read:

…there’s a new freelance publicity designer in town

Then a short message at the bottom to introduce yourself:

Jon Woo— freelance publicity designer.
Need a fast designer? Callmewoo.com

The secret of a good teaser mailer is to grab the recipient’s attention. You’re not trying to say everything about you and your service. Save that for your follow-up phone call. You’re simply gaining exposure by communicating your name and the core aspect of your design offer in a memorable way.

For example, one teaser I recently received from a touting freelancer was a Heinz tin-can, labeled “Double-concentrated talent”. The tin-can contained pureed tomato—the fact I tried to open the can reflects how successfully it caught my attention.

(In fact, I was so impressed by the self-promotion of this designer, I made it my mission to give him a graphic design assignment.)

* * * * * * * * * * * *

The above article is adapted from Shaun Crowley’s new book The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook, available for download at www.marketing-designers.com

The Freelance Designer’s Self-Marketing Handbook shows you how to:

• Develop a persuasive business offer.
• See your best ever results from prospecting.
• Write a hard-working website.
• Get your business into the newspapers.
• Build a reputation as ‘designer of choice.

Actually, you don’t need any. To move into freelance publicity design, all you need to do is:

1. Familiarize yourself with the conventions of direct selling promotional materials.
2. Develop a basic understanding of your clients’ marketing goals.

I’m a copywriter and I work with designers. I prefer to work with designers who understand the marketing aims of the graphic design assignment I hand to them. I tend not to call upon designers who design visuals that are unsuitable for the sales messages I am trying to communicate in my copy, however good the design looks.

That’s why the tips I reveal in this article are not really ‘design’ tips. They are practical tips aimed at giving you clarity when you interpret your brief. If you want tips on what colors or effects to use, this article isn’t for you. If you want ideas to help you plan your approach to publicity design, read on.

Direct selling promotional material
Direct selling promotional material has one objective: to sell. Every copy section, every photograph, every flash box, every graphic—should reinforce the selling power of the publicity piece.

But surely your job as designer is to make direct selling promotional material look attractive?—it’s the copywriter’s job is to sell the product, right? Wrong. Your job is the same as the copywriter’s: to sell the product. Making the piece look attractive is important, but it’s a means to an end. The real goal is to help your client increase their sales.

So what approach should you take to sell a product through design? Here are 5 questions to ask yourself as you’re reading the brief:

1. WHO IS THE CUSTOMER? What sort of people will read the publicity and buy the product? A clear description of your target audience will help you gauge what sort of feel your design should have. The look of your design should always reflect the preferences of the customer, not your own preferences or the preferences of your clients.
2. WHAT ARE YOU COMMUNICATING? What emotions should you convey? What specific things should you draw the reader’s attention to? Read your client’s copy carefully. Use the message of the copy, especially the headlines, to inspire the ‘message’ of your design.
3. HOW CAN YOU REINFORCE THE MESSAGE OF THE COPY? Is your design consistent with the messages in the copy? Can you increase the impact of the copy message in your design approach? For example, if you’re designing a brochure for some computer software, and the dominant marketing message seems to be that the software is ‘easy to use’, your design should reflect clarity and freedom, maybe with lots of white space and clear copy sections. In short, don’t rely on your client to brief you properly on what the design should achieve. Take the initiative to work it out yourself.
4. CAN YOU SHOW PRODUCT BENEFITS? Can you demonstrate how good the product is through your choice of visual? Can you show how the product makes a real difference to people’s lives? Read through the copy and make a note of all examples of what the product does for the user. Then think about how you can demonstrate people benefiting from the product in your graphics and choices of photos.
5. HOW CAN YOU PRESENT THE PRODUCT? Can you show the product? Even better, can you show people using the product? Publicity that shows people is proven to be the most successful at driving sales. Good publicity should encourage readers to imagine themselves using the product—so show people of the same demographic using the product! Get as many pictures of the product as possible, and work these pictures into your design.

In marketing, successful design isn’t necessarily the best-looking, it’s the design that best complements the selling message of the copy, thus leading to more sales. Ugly publicity can be successful if it effectively communicates the selling message in a persuasive way for the target audience. Pretty publicity that wins prizes isn’t necessarily successful publicity.

If you want to learn more about improving your publicity design, start by learning about what makes good copy. Work out what the copy is doing and you’ll have a better idea how the design should reinforce it. My advice: Read a good copywriting manual.

Design custom brochures
Brochure design is challenging. The brief to produce an attention-grabbing cover with clean, consistently attractive pages can be daunting. Where do you start?

Remember your best-practice approach for designing publicity. Think about the reader and think about the essence of the product, service, or company that the brochure is selling.

Below are 13 tips for designing custom brochures that sell.

1. Find out what worked in the past. Take a few minutes to go through past publicity with your client to identify a successful look. If the target audience responded well to a particular style of publicity, there may be no point in reinventing the wheel.
2. Ask your client if the company has a house style and if your brochure should be consistent with it.
3. Keep in mind the product’s or company’s brand values when you are creating your general look. Ask your client to come up with five words that reflect the company’s brand image and try to respond to them in your design.
4. For a general starting point, communicate an idea, a visual metaphor, or emotion that is associated with the product. Search the royalty free photo sites like Getty-Images or I-stock for images that respond to the general mood—but bear in mind your client will need to pay to use them.
5. Focus the visual idea on the product’s Unique Selling Proposition. The U.S.P. is the one thing that readers will find most desirable about the product that is only true of that product.
6. Make the headlines stand out. Reinforce them with visuals if possible.
7. Use photographs as visual anchors. Faces help to humanize the design and make the product or company feel warmer and friendlier. Photos of people who reflect the target demographic work well because they help readers to imagine themselves using the product.
8. Ask yourself what consumer-need the product responds to, and use this as inspiration for your visuals. Some designs work well because they remind people about the nasty things in life they seek to irradiate, then present the solution with a photo of the product.
9. Use visuals to demonstrate the product:
   • If the copy is highlighting a benefit, show somebody benefiting.
   • If the copy is highlighting a feature, show it (for example, if it’s a small hand-held, show it to scale in someone’s hand; if it has lots of components or is part of big package, take a collective pack shot.)
   • If the copy is highlighting the product’s popularity, show lots of people, preferably using the product.
   • If the copy is guaranteeing the product, give it a guarantee stamp.
   • If the copy is offering a money-back guarantee, show cash or a check.
   • If the product is endorsed, show the endorser using the product.
   • If the copy is leading with an impressive statistic, show it visually in a table or graph.
   • If the product solves a problem, show a ‘before’ and ‘after’.
10. Each spread of the brochure should seek to catch the reader’s attention anew, to keep readers hooked so they carry on turning the pages.
11. Keep to a consistent style but try to let the design evolve with each page. A good brochure should tell the product’s story; it should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Try to reflect this in your design.
12. Give the reader two options: to skim read and pick up the core messages from the headlines, sub-headings, visuals, and captions… And another option to read the headlines and the body copy linearly. Do this by creating a reading area where the general body copy fits into, but also pull out some of the additional copy messages, visuals, and flashes to catch the attention of wandering eyes.
13. Recommend using printing techniques to reinforce the message of the copy, such as spot varnishes, holograms, die-cuts, unusual folds, indented pages, additional pantones, and pull-outs.

You may have noticed that most of the 13 tips above are based on an analysis of the brochure copy, using the messages in the copy as a starting point for the design. As a copywriter and campaigns manager, this is the first thing I want a designer upon briefing. The number of times I have received design proofs that don’t attempt to reflect the sales message in my copy … let’s just say I never ask those designers to work for me again.

I look for designers who have an awareness of my marketing goals. I look for designers who will sit and read my copy, and will only start to conceptualize the design when they have analyzed the copy. I look for designers who combine artistic talent with some basic marketing knowledge to help them interpret the brief.

And I’m not alone. I’m sure I speak for most campaign managers and copywriters. In short, these are the words of your prospective clients, so take heed. If you want to get ahead of the competition in the publicity design arena, you need to learn the basics of marketing and copywriting.

Buy a copywriting manual
Learning the basic rules of marketing and copywriting is easy. Forget about the expensive courses, you can learn the essentials with a good book. The three best are:

The Copywriter’s Handbook,
Robert W. Bly (Owl Books, 1990)
A clear, comprehensive guide to the business of and techniques used in advertising copywriting. Includes guidance on the tasks of a copywriter, the copywriting business, and how to write a variety of different printed publicity including public relations material, radio and TV commercials, speeches and sales literature.

Teach Yourself Copywriting,
Jonathon Gabay (Teach Yourself, 2001)
A guide for anyone who needs to know how to produce advertising and marketing materials. The revised edition includes chapters on e-mail and Internet marketing and covers new theories and practices in copywriting.

100 Copywriting Tips for Designers and Other Freelance Artists,
Shaun J. Crowley (Shaun Crowley E-publishing, 2006)
My book, written specifically for designers, reveals 100 copywriting tricks-of-the-trade including guidance on planning and conceptualizing web and print publicity, how to produce publicity that sells, and how to marry your copy and visuals together. It’s available for download at www.copywriting-designers.com

Freelance POP display design and exhibition display design
Freelance display design is one of the most challenging areas of publicity design. You only have ten seconds to grab people’s attention and lure them over to the product or exhibition stand. At the same time, your design must be consistent with the product’s or company’s brand image, and communicate its sales message immediately.

Here are 10 tips for effective POP display design and exhibition display design.

1. Always think about who the customer is. Who will buy the product? Who will be drawn to the display? What are their likely ages, genders, occupations, incomes, personality types, goals, and aspirations? Use your knowledge of the customer to inform your design.
2. The headline is king. It is the mouth-piece of the display. Your design must reinforce the strengths of the headline to help communicate its sales message immediately. Keep the headline simple and easy to read from a distance.
3. Use compelling images for eye-catching impact. Images have more impact if they are clear, specific, and definable. For example, an image of a telephone on a plain background is more likely to grab attention than an image of indefinable objects such as bubbles, wisps, or stripes.
4. Remember that faces tend to grab more attention than inanimate objects.
5. Use the best quality images you can. Urge your client to buy the more expensive photos, not the cheap free images. Make sure the resolution is sufficient for large exhibition panels. All images must appear crisp and vivid at full size.
6. If you are creating multiple display banners, brand your display with a visual theme, so people recognize and remember it. Most importantly, the theme must connect to the brand in some way, either via the logo design or the message of the slogan. It’s no use people remembering your design if they can’t attribute it to the company or product.
7. If appropriate, try to include the product in the visuals you use. Make the product look as good as possible. Make it 3D, make it glow or sparkle, make it jump out and look desirable.
8. Always conceptualize your display so that the product is presented or demonstrated in the best way possible. Don’t hide or embed the product, make the design revolve around the product so the product commands maximum attention.
9. Jazz-up your POP displays by using different types of materials. You don’t have to print on cardboard—try using acrylic, canvass, or glass—but make sure the material you use is consistent with the product image.
10. Strive for a unique look. Find out what other types of designs your display will be competing with, and use this to inform your approach. For example, if no one else is using fluorescent colors, and this is consistent with the brand image, use fluorescent colors. Maybe you can use lighting to your advantage. Gizmos like battery powered lighting or interactive features help give the display a unique look.

Conclusion

• Direct selling promotional material has one objective: to sell. Making the piece look attractive, although connected, is a secondary goal.
• You need to think about the customer and the message in the copy before you sit down to conceptualize your design.
• You need to improve your knowledge of marketing and copywriting to improve your publicity design.
• A good copywriting manual will give you an overview of marketing practice, so you know what your clients want, and what your publicity designs should achieve.

The advice above is best-practice promotion for all freelance artists. Now let’s examine some ideas for artists who want to go a step further. How can you market your business to double, treble, even quadruple your regular income?

Offer something unique
You are most likely to be competing with other freelance artists in your area who offer a similar service and charge a similar fee. The fact that you might be better than them doesn’t guarantee regular work or considerable fee increases. You need to offer something unique to stand out in an increasingly crowded freelance arena. The idea is simple: offer something unique about your service, and clients will remember you; they will also be prepared to pay more for a specialized service, so you can charge a bigger fee.

A unique aspect of your service might be a specific skill you specialize in or a layer of service you provide that others don’t. For example, if you are a graphic designer, your unique selling proposition may be one of the following:

• Specialize in fast turnaround; i.e. newspaper advertisements designed and sent in a day
• Ability to work across media (Leaflet design, Animated presentation design, 3D design, web design)
• On call evenings and weekends: 24/7 design service
• Quick response promise: will respond to all emails and enquiries within 10 minutes
• Accuracy: a free proof-reading service before artwork handover
• Specialize in a particular style; i.e. exceptional picture research, Asian-appeal design, children’s design, etc

Specializing in one particular aspect of your job doesn’t mean you need to narrow the choice of services or design styles you can provide. Indeed, one unique aspect of your service could be its very broadness; that you can do everything from illustration to 3D design.

Even if you offer a highly specialized service, you can still market your general talents—you just make sure that the unique aspect of your offer is in someway highlighted, either when you phone potential clients, or written in your marketing materials.

A unique layer to your service will attract new clients and allow you to charge more. Once you’ve got new clients, you can offer a more general service too, resulting in maximum client lock-in. And of course, you’ll be offering your general service at a higher price for those new customers.

Communicate the unique aspect of your service online
Once you have isolated your Unique Selling Proposition, present it upfront on your website. By repeating your unique offer several times within your copy, you’ll increase your chances of your website being tracked by web-crawlers, boosting your chances of being found on the first few pages of the major search engines.

If you want to explore search engine marketing to market yourself on the Web, you need to start by choosing niche keywords in order to increase traffic to your website. www.wordtracker.com is a useful tool that enables you to see what keywords people are typing into the search engines, and how many websites are competing for the same keywords. It costs around $8 per day or $250 per year.

Find a profitable niche
It’s no good offering a unique layer of service if people aren’t interested in it. The key to finding new customers is to offer a specialized service that lots of people are looking for, but that other artists in the area don’t offer.

If, for example, you offer a highly specialized service like “ancient coin photography”, your number of potential clients will be small, thus limiting your profitability. However, if you offer a more general service such as “book cover photography”, you compete against other freelancers and agencies offering the same service, thus reducing your chances of finding work.

To find a profitable niche, offer a high-demand and specialized service to a lucrative segment of the freelance market where there is little or no competition.

To do this, you need to 1) Target the most lucrative market, 2) Research the market, and 3) Offer a specialized service that responds to the needs of your market.

1) Target your most lucrative market.
Suggestion: focus on marketing departments
The most profitable freelance artwork jobs are found in the marketing communications sector. If you can design (or provide artwork for) direct selling promotional material such as brochures, adverts, and websites, you can charge higher fees than designers who work mainly in other sectors such as publishing.

2) Research the market.
Suggestion: get to know the promotions controllers
Freelance designers with an understanding of marketing and copywriting are usually favoured above designers with no marketing knowledge. That’s because today’s promotions controllers are likely to be project managers; intermediaries between copywriters and designers, and not necessarily creatives themselves. Today’s publicity designers often have to work harder at interpreting what the client actually wants, and a knowledge of marketing communications often comes in handy.

Promotions controllers increasingly rely on copywriter-artist duos to conceptualize, write, and design direct selling promotional material, thus limiting the need for them to get involved unnecessarily mid-project. As a result, designers need to work more closely with freelance copywriters, and copywriters prefer to work with designers who are more in-tune with their way of thinking. How do you get in-tune? Simple, learn the basics of copywriting.

3) Respond to the needs of your market.
Suggestion: integrate copywriting into your artwork service and offer full marketing agency creative services
Copywriting and design services have become interlinked in today’s creative freelance arena. Briefing a copywriter-designer duo is a much more persuasive proposition for promotions controllers than briefing a copywriter, then briefing a separate designer.

However, copywriter-designer duos are really only found in expensive agencies. This leaves a gap in the market; where freelance copywriters and designers can get together to offer full marketing agency creative services, without charging full agency prices. If you are prepared to try a few new tricks, you can get yourself established in this profitable niche market.

How to offer a copywriting-design service…
Find yourself a copywriting buddy!
Buddying up with a copywriter is a good way of offering a copywriting service without doing the copywriting yourself. A copywriting buddy benefits you in two ways: Not only can you offer a cheap copywriter-designer alternative to expensive agencies (a much more persuasive proposition for clients—they know they can hand the whole project to you at a fraction of the cost compared to using an agency), your copywriting buddy will also keep you in mind to design any assignments he or she finds from other clients.

You’ll get to know freelance copywriters as you work on freelance projects. Alternatively, do a Google search for copywriters in your region. Once you have identified a good copywriter, get in touch, send samples of your work, and ask if you can add their service onto your own website (and vice versa).

Why not offer full marketing agency creative services yourself?
Copywriting is a craft that can be learnt, and there’s no better person than you to have a go. With the help of a good teach-yourself copywriting manual, you can pick up the techniques to the point of competency in time it takes to learn a new piece of design software.

Writing as well as designing publicity makes perfect sense for freelance designers.

1. It makes life easier for your clients, because they avoid the time-consuming project management, briefing time, and service searching they would have to put into finding a separate designer and copywriter.
2. You’ll offer a consistency of message and aesthetic look that neither freelance copywriter nor artist could achieve on their own.
3. You’ll effectively offer the same service as an agency, but at the fraction of the cost. The result… more clients, happier clients, greater client lock-in, and up to four times more money.

Summary: how to boost your freelancing job opportunities and increase your fee on every project
The key to boosting your freelancing job opportunities and increasing your fees lies in offering a profitable unique service. The most lucrative market for graphic design assignments is in the marketing communications sector, and the most profitable unique offer for today’s promotions controllers is to provide a copywriting-design service, as this responds to recent trends in the marketing communications sector.

Conclusion

• Target the marketing departments of big companies with your promotion efforts.
• Use postcards, emails, telephone, and ad-hoc company visits to promote your services.
• Learn some basic copywriting rules to help you write your website and direct mail postcards.
• Focus on an area you specialize in and offer a unique level of service to attract new clients.
• Find a copywriting buddy to offer full marketing agency creative services and take advantage of a gap in the freelance market.
• Learn how to write marketing copy yourself and you can offer full agency services on your own.

Get the most out of business cards
Business cards are your most important publicity items. They tell people how to contact you (don’t rely on email signatures—clients will wipe off your emails without hesitation and will not be able to contact you when a job comes up).

Executives normally keep vendor business cards in a case or card-box. Make sure you’re in it. And make sure your card has ALL your details: mailing address, telephone, cell phone number, email, and website address.

Your business card should be smart, clean, and easy-to-read. Don’t be too flamboyant. I know a designer who had his details printed from left-to-right on one side, and his details printed backwards from right-to-left on the other side. Whilst filing it away, his biggest potential client clipped it onto a backer card inside out. When she called upon it later she couldn’t make sense of it. Consequently she trashed the card and called another designer.

Print plenty of cards. An extra thousand won’t break the bank. Give several cards to new prospective clients at meetings (they may give them to their colleagues), and if you have existing clients or contacts, make sure they are well stocked with your cards so they can recommend you. Add a few cards in with your invoices. Leave a few cards in company reception areas, at sports clubs, and anywhere where your prospective clients are likely to congregate. Get them in people’s hands.

Create an online portfolio
Unless you are a web-designer, creating your own website is not essential, although it does give you some advantages. A website will help you to communicate your portfolio via email without sending attachments (clients will be suspicious of emails with attachments from unknown addresses—a link to a website is preferable). A website is also a good opportunity to sell yourself with some hard-working copy. Good copy can help you to win new clients, so buy yourself a good copywriting manual and learn the basic copywriting tricks of the trade.

If you have no experience of designing websites, or you don’t have time to create one, don’t be put off, you can buy inexpensive templates online. www.templateshome.com is a good place to start, where you can buy smart website templates for around $60. Buying a dot.com address and uploading it onto a website browser should cost around $25.

Market yourself with mailer-postcards
You may want to print some mailer postcards at the same time you print your business cards. Direct mail postcard designs are a great way to show off your creative talents and get noticed. In an age when executives are familiar with receiving emails from scouting freelancers, postcards received through snail-mail are a novel and memorable way to sell your freelance services.

Showcase your best visual/visuals on side one, then write some marketing copy to sell your services on side two (and remember to include your full contact details). Your copy should focus on the benefits your clients will get from using you.

Think about who you are targeting
While you are waiting for your cards to print, you need to research the kind of companies to target for freelance work. Aim high; large corporations with multiple departments make better leads than small or medium-sized businesses. The work you get from a big company is likely to be more lucrative and on-going. You may also get internal recommendations across departments. One company can be a client for life and effectively pay off your mortgage.

Do a Google search for all the big companies who have offices within a reasonable driving distance, and examine each website for contacts. Build yourself a database of contacts in a spreadsheet including the names, titles, email addresses, mail addresses, and telephone numbers of all key sales and marketing contacts within your target companies.

Follow a rigid marketing strategy
Start by sending out your postcards to all the addresses on your database. A week after drop-date, send each of your contacts a personalized email asking if they use freelancers and requesting a meeting to discuss your offer. Include a link to your website so contacts can view your portfolio. If you don’t have a website, ask your contact to reply for samples of your work, then send a maximum of three pdfs or jpegs that total under 2MB (anything over this will be deleted when inboxes get crammed).

There are three things to consider when you are sending emails to prospective clients on your database. First, always send personalized emails to one contact at a time. Never send a round-robin. Second, keep your first email short and polite, asking for permission to send over some samples. Never attach visuals to your introductory email, your email will be deleted as spam. Third, set up an automatic email signature, so your prospective clients can quickly access your contact details. Although most people use business cards to find vendor addresses, some people use email to look up contacts.

Follow up your email with a phone call the next day to get the contacts’ feedback to your samples. Ask if the department uses freelancers and what creative requirements the department has. If your contact regularly uses freelancers, request a meeting to discuss your full portfolio. If your contact doesn’t use freelancers, ask for another contact within the organization who does. Use your database to keep track of all the people you have contacted and when you contacted them, so you know which people to follow up on and when.

Contact plenty of people, and the law of averages states you’ll get plenty of meetings booked.

Present yourself as client-focused whilst pitching
The key to a successful pitching meeting is to be well-prepared and client-focused. Before you travel to the company office, examine the company’s website so you know what kind of brief your contact is likely to give you. Tailor your portfolio for the company by ordering your most relevant work first (a good reason why you should use retractable sleeves in your portfolio, allocating one project to one sleeve).

At the meeting, make sure your pitch is relevant. Ask to see the company’s existing publicity, then talk about your most similar graphic design assignments.
Give your prospective client enough information to help them see what you can do for them. With each item of work you present, summarize the original brief, say how you creatively interpreted the brief, and give a sense of how effective the project was. Don’t go into a full project analysis unless asked, and don’t assume your prospective client will want to know the intricacies of your portfolio.

At the end of your meeting, ask if you can meet colleagues in the same department, ask for contacts in other departments, and hand out plenty of business cards. When you get home, send a thank-you email to your contact, reminding them of your availability, and update your activities in your database so you know when next to contact them.

Be persistent
It’s important to remain visible. Promotions controllers are more likely to outsource work to people they meet in person. Pretend that you will be in the area one day and ask to ‘pop in’ for a brief chat—you may have more luck arranging informal ad-hoc meetings than formal put-it-in-your-diary meetings. When you visit a company, remember to take your portfolio and plenty of business cards. You never know who you might meet.

You’ll find that prospective clients often say things like “I have no projects at the moment, but I’ll keep you in mind”. Don’t get frustrated, and certainly don’t beg for work on the phone. Just make a note in your database to keep track of responses, then send reminder emails to contacts every month, just so they really do keep you in mind. Give them a phone call every couple of months; sooner or later they will give you work.

Summary: how to frugally market your business
There are three rules of thumb for finding work:

1. Target as many contacts as possible by email, phone, and mail. The law of averages suggests you will find work, eventually.
2. Be persistent, follow up on all leads and focus on getting meeting time with contacts. Remember people trust faces not names.
3. Brush up on your copywriting skills so you can write persuasive mailer postcards and boost your chances of getting meeting time with potential clients.