Talk to any designer and chances are you’ll find
marketing and self-promotion located at the epicenter
of least desirable tasks. We prefer to spend
our time creating, rather than dealing with the
mundane aspects of updating portfolios, sending
thank-you letters or working on multitiered marketing
campaigns for ourselves. Instead of trying to
correct this professional apathy, it might be better to
embrace this tendency.
TECHNOLOGY IS ON YOUR SIDE
In the past decade, numerous advancements have
been made in web applications and messaging capabilities
that can help designers easily and quickly
market their work—and best of all, most of them
are free. Digital tools allow you to update news on
your website with a text message from a mobile
phone, share knowledge and opinions with a target
audience through blog commenting or upload a
portfolio to a worldwide photo network with the
click of a mouse. The trick is to find the right technologies
to work for you and your workflow. Make
your marketing efforts a habit—one that is fun and
the least disruptive to your daily routine.
PRESENT THE PERFECT IMAGE
With the multitude of web applications available to
designers, getting your portfolio online no longer
has to be a tedious process. Perhaps one of the best
tools available for designers is Yahoo’s photo-sharing
service Flickr. The beauty of this web application is
in its simplicity. You can post images to Flickr using
its web interface, send an image from e-mail, message
a photo from a phone or upload images directly
from photo applications like iPhoto.
The advantages to Flickr are numerous, but the
greatest ones are: the ability to act as a digital archive
of your work, a built-in community of potential clientele
and influence makers and the numerous possible
ways to post images from Flickr on your own
website. You can also think of Flickr as a great tool to
let clients know more about your work ethic and corporate
culture, giving them a chance to connect with
you on another level.
“We continuously post imagery of our everyday
culture to Flickr,” says Jens Karlsson, creative director
at Your Majesty (www.your-majesty.com). “Shots that
turn out great we post to groups on Flickr, which
gives us exposure and more visitors.”
While Flickr is an easy and quick way of posting
a portfolio, numerous portfolio-hosting portals
are available—such as Design Related, Designer ID
and Coroflot. While these may not be the quickest to
work with, they do provide designers with the advantages
of exposure to a community of other designers,
portfolio hosting without the need for your own
server and job boards to entice employers and clients.
TWEET YOUR NEWS
Teenagers have long known the power of text messaging,
whether it was a written note passed in class
or an SMS from a cell phone. Now internet start-ups
have taken notice and provide text messaging for
everyone on a much larger scale. The web application
Twitter—an interesting marketing development
in 2007—allows messages to be sent out to a large
online audience. Twitter provides users with the
ability to publish a brief message—only 140 characters—to a personal Twitter page.
Here’s how it works: Create an account and
decide what other Twitter users you would like to
monitor. You’ll then be updated via Twitter anytime
a user you are following posts a message. Likewise,
users will seek you out and follow you if they are
interested. This Tweeting process has created a new
medium of communication that opens up conversations
more than instant messaging or chat rooms can.
Essentially, Twitter allows an ongoing conversation
between you, the people you monitor and the people
monitoring you.
D. Keith Robinson, principal and creative director
of Blue Flavor (www.blueflavor.com), says he’s
had success using Twitter, “Whenever I write a new
article, launch a new site or want to announce some
exciting news about myself or Blue Flavor, I turn to
Twitter first [since] I know I can create an instant
buzz among the right people [who’ll] help take that
buzz to a wider audience.”
Robinson adds, “Sure, I could have done it
without Twitter, but it would have been more work
for me, and the reaction would have taken much
longer. Twitter is much more casual in that I can
dip in whenever I want and don’t ever feel overwhelmed
by it.”
SHARE YOUR OPINION
Commenting on blogs, discussion forums and news
sites are other ways you can quickly gain exposure
to the clientele you are trying to reach. When commenting,
make sure you are choosing blogs and
news sites that would be read by your prospective
clients, rather than ones they would avoid.
“Find posts you know or care about on design
or other blogs and leave an insightful comment,”
says identity designer Mike Rohde of MakaluMedia
(www.makalumedia.com). “You’ll get exposure with
new people who will likely check out your website
and work. Make sure you leave a URL for your blog
or portfolio so readers can follow it.”
There is also a web application called
CoComment to help keep track of the conversations
you participate in. After setting up an account,
CoComment can automatically record the discussion
threads you’ve commented on and let you know
when someone has responded to your comment.
It’s the perfect tool to see what websites have been
responsive so you can concentrate on continuing the
conversation there, rather than wasting time with
dead discussions.
LIFESTREAM YOUR WORK
By now, you’ve probably heard numerous times
about the advantages of having a blog, but what
about a “lifestream”? Don’t bother looking it up
in the dictionary, you won’t find it there. The new
trend can best be defined by Wordspy.com as “an
online record of a person’s daily activities, either
via direct video feed or via aggregating the person’s
online content such as blog posts, social network
updates and online photos.”
Essentially, a lifestream is a one-stop semiautomated
website containing all of the regularly
updated information streams you operate. An
increasingly popular lifestreaming web application
is Tumblr.com. Tumblr has the capability to show
photos from a Flickr account, news updates from a
Twitter feed and an array of other tools allowing you
to post information directly to a Tumblr page from
the web, e-mail or phone. You can even use your own
domain name with Tumblr at no extra cost.
The best way to utilize Tumblr is by creating
a website that is only dedicated to your design
work—not your personal life. Clients rarely want to
know how drunk you got last night or your interest in Icelandic silent films. If you want a lifestream
for yourself as well, then set that up separately—but
remember your name is only a Google search away.
TELL YOUR STORY
With your lifestream all ready to go, now you can
start creating posts to promote your work and explain
your process. “One of the most effective ways I have
found success [marketing our services] is to write
about projects—so there is a live, public accounting
of the project, as well as a published document that
sort of binds us with the client, bringing us closer
together in a very subtle way,” says Craig Elimeliah,
director of Online Services at Touro College (www.touro.edu).
The beauty is no one knows the insides of a
project like a designer. Use this to your advantage
and explain to your target audience the fundamentals
of what each project entailed. You can start your next
project by taking a few minutes each week to embellish
the following points:
- Define the original problem or need for
the project
- List the project’s objectives
- Outline the process you used to reach a solution
- Provide visual examples of the completed project
Once the above list is completed, you’ll have a great
post for your lifestream or a starting point for a full
case study.
Sharing your story can also extend to voicemail
or e-mail messages. At the beginning of an outgoing
voice message, let callers know in one quick sentence
about a project you’ve recently completed and where
they can see more of it, or add a line to your e-mail
signature that gives recipients a direct URL to a
recent case study or project.
HELP YOUR FRIENDS
Perhaps the most obvious—yet often overlooked—way to market your work is by helping other people
achieve success too. It’s also usually the most
rewarding for many people, both professionally
and personally.
Helping others have success might sound like a
task that would take an enormous amount of time
and a great deal of responsibility, but the reality is
you’ve probably already been doing a smaller version
of this marketing technique and didn’t even realize it.
Take the passion you have to help others and extend
it, without expectations, to help friends and colleagues
succeed in their business endeavors.
“An unexpected plus continues to be the friendships
I’ve developed over the years,” says Catherine
Morley, editor of Business of Design Online (www.businessofdesignonline.com). “[These friendships]
weren’t planned as a marketing tool, they just are. We
support each other because we honestly believe in the
different projects put forward. It’s not a forced strategy;
in fact, it’s not a strategy at all. It’s a community
of like minds pushing in the same direction—with
pretty much the same goals.”
This type of mentality can also be applied to
relationships with clients. As Eric Karjaluoto, principal
of smashLAB (www.smashlab.com), points out,
it is usually easier to start a conversation than give
a sales pitch. “I’m still a big fan of personal e-mails
to check in with past clients and make contact with
potential ones.” Karjaluoto further explains, “In my
messages I like to ask what [others] are trying to
achieve through their efforts. It’s easy to get caught
up in selling ourselves, which can lead us to miss a
critical part of the dialogue. When we understand
others’ needs, it’s much easier to see how we might
be able to help them.”
CHOOSE ONE OR ALL
Now that you’ve heard some of the suggested lazy
marketing methods available to you, it’s time to
put them into action. Choose methods that will fit
into your lifestyle and you will enjoy implementing.
After all, the best way to ensure you keep marketing
your work is to make it fun.
