FullBleed

In Part I of Marketing for Designers, ADCMW’s own long-time member Deane Nettles shares how he has learned to leverage the web as a foundation toward promoting his creative work. Stay tuned for Part II, which will include his recommendations on how he has used social media tools to build upon his website and email marketing efforts.

Let’s presume that there is an inside world and an outside world. The inside world is your studio where you live, and the outside world is where your clients live. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’ve built up a client base. Those clients recommend you to other people, and there is this buzz in the outside world … which provides you with new business.

But, to build buzz in the online world, where do you even start? Here’s the answer: with a website.

You need a quality website that forms the basis of your entire online marketing and email strategy, from which you can build a wider-reaching social media campaign (which I’ll talk about in Part II) if you so choose. I think the trick is to come up with a comprehensive identity that (1) attracts your target market, (2) promotes your work in a meaningful way, (3) is useful across a variety of media, and (4) allows you to collect contact information from visitors, so you can continue to promote your work to them.

YOU CAN’T BEAT A WEBSITE

In a recent article, Harvard Business School Professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski said that people on the web mostly look at pictures. So, as a creative, you need to be on the web and using pictures to promote your work — and use them big.

A website serves as an online portfolio of your work and an official source of information about your business. You can’t beat a website for displaying a body of information in an ordered fashion. The disadvantage is that, unless your viewers click the “contact” button, websites are one-sided. People come in, they look, they leave without a trace. And designer’s websites don’t change often, so unless carefully strateg-ized, there’s no reason for viewers to come back regularly.

However you design your site, be sure to make it easy to edit; you want to update the portfolio at least a couple of times a year, and your site should be completely redesigned every two to three years. Your work and your target audience can change a lot in that time, and your site should reflect this.

STRATEGY:
Tell your story to your target market using compelling words, images, and rich media (like video) that reinforces your work rather than distracts from it.

POSITIVES:
They’re the number one marketing tool on Earth, and they’re perfect for creating and promoting a cohesive story about your work.

NEGATIVES:
It’s generally time consuming to keep it fresh with work, and feedback can often be limited.

YOU REALLY CAN’T BEAT A WORDPRESS SITE

So, you know that you need a website. How do you get one? There are so many free or low-cost technologies out there — and freelancers and firms galore who can help you. (Just check Craigslist alone, for starters).

Wordpress is one of several blogging platforms that anyone can sign up for free to use. You can be up-and-running with your own website in a matter of minutes using any of the platform’s free themes. It has a web-based interface for editing content, and there are tons of great customized themes (from themeforest.com, for example) that are already cross-browser compatible (able to render correctly across a variety of internet browsers). Those themes are additional costs, but inexpensive — some are less than $10 and will give you features to easily manage a more design-heavy portfolio.

If you’re more aggressive or want a custom theme, you can paste your own cascading style sheets (CSS) into Wordpress, though (as these things go), the more custom efforts may require a web-savvy developer or designer. (In fact, the FullBleed site is currently built in a custom Wordpress system.)

I think the top advantages of Wordpress is that it’s affordable, has an actively contributing open-source community, and anyone in your office can make changes to your site from anywhere in the world.

STRATEGY:
Create a website that is easy to edit.

POSITIVES:
Versatility, ease of updating, integration of your site and blog in one, manage access to site, and collect contact information.

NEGATIVES:
Not fully editable by you unless you are knowledgeable in both CSS and PHP.

NEWSLETTERS CAN KEEP INTEREST

Via your new website, you can require visitors to provide their email addresses. And one way to entice them to register is to offer an e-mail newsletter that includes information they can’t get anywhere else. If your potential clients are marketing firms, you could talk about new marketing strategies. If you work in a niche market, you could talk about new ideas in that market. You could talk about exciting new projects for your clients and how you are helping them meet their goals. You could talk about new photography capabilities you have. Newsletters tend to be serious, and they tend to be focused. They have to be written, designed, and managed. I receive one from a tech company and read it religiously because they teach me things.

If you have a regular or heavy email marketing campaign that includes newsletters, you can explore a host of email platforms like Constant Contact provides — robust, auto-contact management. Plus, they will allow you to view the trends of your email campaigns — who is opening the emails, who clicked through to the website (which should always be referenced in the email message, of course), and who unsubscribed. You can learn from these reporting features … but of course these providers typically come with a heftier price tag.

STRATEGY:
Show off your expertise, keep people informed.

POSITIVES:
If your content is good and your clients use e-mail, they will read it when you send it.

NEGATIVES:
Writing style and content needs to match your audience. Generally contain more than one story, so requires commitment to produce.

Next month, I’ll cover blogs and social media tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter, and how to write for social media marketing efforts.