Digital Marketing Tips For Graphic Designers
As a graphic designer, a job that depends solely on making stuff that grabs your audience’s eyeballs, it is essential to make the right decisions when it comes to promoting your work. Graphic designing in itself is a challenging job that demands time and creativity. Adding a whole new arena to your job description can be hectic if you do not have the right tools and the correct knowledge. There are many ways to promote your excellent work, and it depends on the time you are willing to give and the budget that you can spare.
It is always wise to set aside a chunk of your profits and dedicate it solely to marketing. After all, if no one sees your work, all your design efforts will go to waste. You also have the option of hiring a digital marketer who can relieve some of the burdens and give you more time to focus on designing.
Here are a few digital marketing tips for graphic designers.
Set Your Goals
What are your goals with your work? This question needs introspection and you need to spend some time coming up with an answer. You need to decide:
- Who your target audience is.
- How much money you can spare for digital marketing.
- What kind of content appeals to the masses.
- Which digital marketing channels are popular amongst graphic designers.
- Who your competitors are.
- How much can you achieve within a certain timeframe?
Set realistic milestones and stick to them. Start with small steps and build on them. Tiny steps allow you to backtrack and correct any errors quickly without suffering much loss.
Content Marketing and SEO
Organic traffic comprises the people who visit your platforms without any paid promotion. Organic traffic is largely dependent on the kind of content your platform has. Content Marketing is deeply linked with SEO or search engine optimization. SEO is basically a set of practices that help websites rank higher in search engine searches. SEO includes making content with particular keywords which are phrases that are commonly searched on search engines. Along with this, you need to add meta tags into the HTML of your web pages as well. SEO is the first step to paid marketing as well. A website which is optimized for search engines performs better under paid campaigns.
SEO does not limit itself to text-based content only. Since you are a graphic designer, try to include easy-to-understand infographics and flowcharts. Make sure your content is easy to read. Use SEO tools such as Yoast to analyze your SEO scores and your readability scores.
SEO is easy to implement if you get the hang of it but it takes time to see obvious results. However, if your budget is low, SEO is a great option. SEO is free and even if you hire a digital marketer solely for SEO, the cost is manageable.
Paid promotions should be iterated
If you go for paid promotion on social media or Google, which you will do sooner or later, there is one thing to always keep in mind; rethinking your strategy from time to time is crucial. Run your campaigns in several modulated formats. Inject a moderate amount of money and analyze the results before jumping to the next campaign. Also, make sure that the content is up-to-date for each campaign. Even when you are running paid promotions on social media, research beforehand on trends in the graphic designing world.
Paid promotions can result in a monetary loss if not appropriately planned. The key to minimize this loss is to choose your target audience correctly, along with the timeframe, you decide to run your campaigns. Also, using small to moderate amounts of money will result in easy backtracking and quickly correcting your errors, if any.
Try out new formats
One of the biggest mistakes that people make is not adapting to the changing trends. Some old school things are obviously evergreen but small sub-modules of these practices are always changing. SEO, for example, is entirely different from what it was ten years ago. Similarly, paid marketing has also taken various forms and has come up with new channels. One of these channels is influencer marketing, where people with a large number of followers on social media promote your product/service. Make room for influencer marketing in your budget, and the results will be noticeable. Returns are quick with influencer marketing.
Check out this amazing guide from Osdigital World for more digital marketing tips.
Influencer marketing is just one of the many new things that have come up in digital marketing. Another aspect that is now a crucial part of SEO is voice search optimization. Content is optimized in a manner that your platform ranks high when people search using speech inputs. Make sure your platform is tweaked for voice inputs as well. The key is to keep up with the changing times.
Video content is also very useful in digital marketing. Videos of small duration are very constructive in grabbing eyeballs and increasing your reach. Video-based content also allows you to explain your product/service better. You can also opt for vector-based animations in your videos. Vector-based animations are trending these days and help you target a more sophisticated customer base.
User Experience might give you an edge
Since you are a talented graphic designer, use your talent to impress your audience with stunning designs and a smooth user interface. User Experience or UX comprises everything that determines the kind of experience the user has on your platform. This includes the overall design, placement of buttons, tabs, navbars, etc, the loading speed of your website and much more. Your graphic designing skills might give your platform an edge over generic websites. Make sure that your website is responsive for all devices. Almost half of the users on the internet are mobile phone users and if your website performs poorly on mobile phones, it is all lost cause.
Personalization is another crucial aspect closely linked with UI/UX. When your content is unique, it impresses users and makes them ‘feel at home’. It gives your platform a human touch.
Conclusion
What works and what doesn’t work is only determined by trying it out. However, a plan helps you avoid outrageous mistakes and might result in substantial monetary losses. As aforementioned, trying out small steps will give you experience without negative consequences. We wish you all the best for your graphic designing setup!
