6 Marketing Strategies to Promote Your Graphic Design Business

As businesses are becoming more and more aware of connecting with their target audience, they rely on content marketing to create engaging texts and captivating visuals. Therefore, the demand for professional content marketers and graphic designers is on the rise.

But there are also many graphic designers with various skills, which can make it competitive to keep your graphic design business up and running. Therefore, it is vital to know some business growth hacks and learn how to present your graphic design skills and secure your career with a client base. 

Here in this article, you can learn the top marketing strategies to promote your graphic design business.  

How to organize your marketing strategy for promoting your graphic design business?

Consider these factors before you start practicing any marketing strategy for your graphic design profession:

1. Set goals

Spend some time thinking about your goals. Decide ‌how you want your graphic design career to move forward. For example, think about your preferences about the time you want to devote to your job. This is important because it can directly affect the number of clients you can work with and the amount of workload you will be able to handle. 

2. Define target audience

Dig deep and find out the industries that you are interested in. If you are a newbie, you can start by following your interests. In case you are seasoned, you already know which industries you are interested in and have some experience as well.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should always stick to one industry. It’s just that if you have specific design experience that can fit a particular industry, you have more opportunities if you limit your work to that niche. 

One of the advantages of being a graphic designer is that you can fit in so many industries. So, it’s totally up to you to decide about working in an industry that makes you feel accomplished and happy. 

3. Allocate budget

Marketing strategies are both free and paid. You can always adopt the free strategies at no cost, but if you want to invest in the paid strategies, you should decide how much you want to allocate. 

To decide on this, you should see if you have advertising funds. If you have just started your career, you may probably want to stick with free methods only. However, those who already work for some clients and want to grow their business even more may prefer to spend some money on their marketing efforts.

4. Manage your projects

Not knowing how to handle your various graphic design projects can result in not meeting the deadlines and therefore leaving the clients dissatisfied. To avoid that, you need to learn how to manage your projects before taking on any marketing effort. 

Luckily, the available agile project management tools such as Monday or Monday alternatives are here to help you with this issue. Using these tools, you can add each project to the intuitive interface, track their process with project time tracking, add deadlines, and always deliver the projects on time. This is also a perfect solution if you already have a client base and work with other freelancers to deliver the projects, so you can all make sure that you are on the same page. 

What are the best marketing strategies for your graphic design business?

After having found out about the factors mentioned above, you can better determine your approach towards marketing your business. 

Let’s now learn the top marketing strategies to promote your graphic design business. 

1. Social media marketing

Social media platforms are great marketing channels as they offer superb marketing tools for graphic designers. The reason is that social media platforms are often associated with sharing visual content such as images and informative video content creation, and graphic designers can already excel in that. Also, statistics show that as of July 2023, 4.88 billion, or 59.9% of the world’s population, were social media users.

Source: Statista

These facts can mean that it’s highly likely that your future clients are already there, waiting to be engaged by your content.

You can create an account on a social media platform that you think is more suitable to your target audience demographics and demonstrate your graphic design skills. Doing so can give a quick introduction of your style and expertise to your target audience when they take a look at your account. For example, Instagram is a widely popular visually appealing platform, you may consider this to captivate your audience’s attention and increase your Instagram likes to foster genuine engagement. Moreover, if you have an advertising budget, you can also consider running paid social media ads to increase your reach and grow your followers’ base/connections. 

2. Search engine marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing and optimization are probably the most integral part of online marketing. According to Marketsplash, SEM is the preferred choice for online advertising among small businesses, with 45% of them investing in this digital marketing strategy, making it the most widely adopted form of online promotion.

Using search engines allows you to display your page on the search engine results page (SERPs) and reach those who search for your targeted keywords. Google accounts for about 83% of the global search market, ensuring that your page will be shown to a large audience if it is well-optimized. 

Source: Statista

But what to include on your web pages? 

A website can be a great place to archive your portfolio, past experiences, current projects, or anything else that can showcase your graphic design skills. If you don’t have any previous experience, you can create infographics, one-pager documents, brochures, website designs, mailer images, etc. for the areas that you are interested in working in. 

To apply some SEO strategies, remember to include relevant keywords in the textual content and alt-texts of your website. This way, your target audience can find you by searching those keywords. 

Also, keep in mind that you need to promote your website so that it gets a higher rank on Google and appears as the top three results on the SERPs. You can refer to your webpage links on your social media channels, or other marketing channels that we will discuss further in the rest of this post. 

3. Networking

Growing your connections and getting in touch with the relevant people in the industry can be effective in building a reputation. You can do this either via social media or by hosting a business event. 

The more relevant people know you, the higher the chance of getting clients. If you are e-meeting these people, remember to share your website and social media channels with them so that they can see your work. If you are meeting them in person, make sure that you have a business card with all your online addresses and your professional logo on it. Needless to say, your business card can also reflect your graphic design skills. 

4. Email marketing

According to Statista, there are 4 billion daily email users. This number is expected to climb to 4.6 billion by 2025.

Source: Statista

Undoubtedly, email marketing is an effective marketing strategy to promote your graphic design business. However, there are two topics that you need to consider when it comes to email marketing:

• How to get email addresses 
• What to send to the recipients

You can use email marketing to develop relationships with current clients, and/or to reach out to your connections or potential clients. For the email addresses, you can rely on LinkedIn, as many people leave their email addresses on their LinkedIn accounts. You can also check out the websites of your connections and find the email addresses in their Contact section. 

For the content of your emails, you can promote your graphic design skills and the services that you provide. Luckily, being creative is a huge part of being a graphic designer, therefore it’s not difficult for you to craft a creative and enticing email. 

5. Referral marketing

Word-of-mouth can increase the effectiveness of marketing efforts by 54%. People trust word-of-mouth more than promotional ways of marketing your skills. As mentioned earlier, networking is important for promoting your business because it fosters referrals and word-of-mouth. The reason is that it rarely happens that people refer someone to others if they are uncertain about them. 

If you already have a client base, you can ask them for testimonials and publish their quotes on your website. Your website visitors can see these testimonials and be encouraged to collaborate with you in their upcoming projects. In case you are doing some freelance work on freelancing platforms, you can ask your clients to leave reviews on your profile.

6. Paid advertising

While you can do all the above-mentioned marketing strategies at almost no or very little cost, you can do paid advertising if you want quicker results. Using ads, you can reach a large target audience and make it more likely to win more clients. 

When running paid ads, keep in mind to measure your ad’s performance. Doing so allows you to see if your ad is working well or if you need to make adjustments to make it work. Think of changing the content, the industries you are targeting, and the budget any time you want according to the data you get from the ad analytics. 

Conclusion

As with developing any kind of business, building a graphic design business requires time and a lot of effort. But it would be worth it as it’s probably the best and most efficient way to showcase your graphic design talent. 

Remember that marketing strategies do not lead to results overnight and you need to be patient with the efforts you are making. Wish you the best of luck!