Marketing is an essential tool for anyone who was their own business but it can seem like a huge mountain for people who are really creative and maybe don’t really have that drive to do the business side or the marketing side of their business. I know so many people feel really confident with creating designs, but they just don’t know how to start putting their designs out there in the marketplace.

Why it’s Important to Market Your Design Business

There are a couple of different ways you can go about marketing your business and keep in mind that if you are wanting to set up your own business from home and you want to be successful, then marketing has to be part of your weekly tasks. You can’t expect to put up a website or a couple of posts on Instagram and that you’ll receive lots of work flooding towards you. So we’re going to think about a couple of different ways that you can start marketing yourself and your business.

Approaching Clients

First of all, if you are creating designs and you want to approach clients to license or buy your designs then you are going to need a proactive approach to getting your work in front of clients. Therefore, that’s going to be your marketing strategy. You’ll need to begin by working out a list of clients that fit the sort of work that you create and then work out a really systemized and repeatable way that you can approach them and follow up with them about your work. So that’s the first way of marketing your work and it will involve research, time and commitment.

Selling Your Own Work

The second way of marketing your work is putting your work out there in the marketplace. So this is going to include things like putting your designs on print, or on your website. Now you can’t expect to just put your designs on those sites or on your own website and then have a flood of your work being sold. You also need to market your designs. There are a couple of things to think about if you want to sell your designs in that way, or if you have designs on your own products that you want to sell.

Website

Firstly, having your own website is a really great way to promote your work and seem professional as a designer but when you’re creating your website you need to think about how you set up your website to get the maximum out of it. You need to start by simply making your website easy to use. There’s nothing worse when you hop on a website and you don’t really know what the person or company expects you to do or you don’t know the next steps to take. When people land on your website they should know exactly what you do, what you sell and how they can work with you. They should understand exactly how to navigate their way through the website. You want it to clear and easy to use rather than fancy because fancy and difficult to use will just lose people. Also, make sure it’s really clear for people to learn a little bit more about you and know how they can contact you. People will often go to your about page to find out a bit more about your or your company and what it is that you do so make sure that you include an about page that explains a bit about what it is that you do or your mission for your business. You can have, obviously if you’re doing design work or you’ve got products or you’re going to have those pages on there as well.

Social Media Strategy

The other thing that you do need to think about when marketing your business is having a strong social media strategy that will drive customers/clients to your website or allow them to contact you. I know that using social media platforms can seem really overwhelming so my biggest advice would be to pick one and run with it. Once you feel really comfortable with the first social channel, you can slowly start adding in others. If you try using too many platforms at once in the beginning, it can seem way too overwhelming and you will probably find that you won’t be doing anything successfully. So I would advise pick one platform, do that well and once you feel comfortable you can add in more. If you have an online business or if you want to be able to set up your business from home, social media is now an essential tool. Whether you enjoy it or not, it’s something that is essential and that you do have to get good at using and learning how to use it.

The other thing to remember about social media is that it changes all the time. The way that you use each platform, the algorithms will be continuously changing soo you do need to keep up to date with the latest changes to ensure you are using each platform to its fullest potential. Um, and unfortunately if you do want to get your work out there, you do have to start using those. The biggest and most important thing that you need to think about no matter the social media platform you are using is consistency. Consistency is going to get you the results.

Unfortunately, even if it’s not part of something that you enjoy, doing, marketing is something that is essential for your online business.