One of the first questions I ask my client is who are you targeting (Who is your ideal client?) and what are you offering them (what is your ideal project?)?
I’ll share my own answer of my ideal client and project.
The Sweet Spot: Media, Message & Market
As a graphic designer, I’ve always looked at the bigger picture of what I am doing. I’m not just creating a pretty looking logo, website or brochure to make your business look professional; I’m developing a piece that is intended to help your business grow by attracting ideal new clients.
This involves not only the visual image (media), but also the message and the right audience (market).
Anyone error in these three areas and an otherwise well developed campaign can flop, but hit all of them right and you have the sweet spot of a successful campaign or project that compels your ideal client to reach out and work with you because you are able to solve their exact challenge or problem.
I look at this as a puzzle to be solved. How can I get into the heads of your ideal clients and know what they are thinking? What pain they have in their lives that you have the exact solution to?
To many, this is marketing, but I consider it such an integral part of any project that I don’t separate it out from the original design project. Here’s a little break down between Marketing and Branding.
What is Marketing?
- The process of promoting the value of a product or service in order to get someone to buy it.
- Marketing is the message you use to promote you product or service; what you say and how you say it to explain how awesome your product or service is and why people should pay for it.
What is Branding?
- A brand is a set of associations that a person (or group of people) makes with a company, product, service, individual or organization.
- If a brand results from a set of associations and perceptions in people’s minds, then branding is an attempt to harness, generate, influence and control these associations to help the business perform better.
Why Are Both Important?
- Branding alone does not make someone buy your product or service, but it does help you stand out from the competition.
- Marketing can be used to push or pull customers to buy your product or service, but it is not what differentiates you from your competitors.
Who is my ideal client?
I love to work with new or emerging business owners who are running their own practice, or building to a business of 10 or fewer.
They struggle with marketing their business effectively.
They would like to get a lot more new and recurring clients, without having to work so hard.
What is my ideal project?
Working with my clients as part of their team to really understand the minds of their ideal clients, then developing creative and innovative ways to have them visible everywhere so that their clients just have to contact them to schedule a meeting.
From there, then developing the message, content and graphics to bring those marketing pieces to life.
Essentially, I love the strategy process to develop a marketing campaign and then taking those ideas into print and digital branding.
Examples of this include (but are not limited to):
- Designing a website for a new business and creating the homepage content that will then be transferred to their print brochures
- Creating a more effective business card with actual pain points of clients
- Redesigning a website for an existing business who now better understands their clients and wants to add more features
- Developing a campaign brand for a seasonal sale or product launch
