Monday 26 Jun 2006
Creatives earn their keep from promoting their clients’ brands. However, to win clients and get ahead in the industry, a design company must ensure that it promotes itself effectively too.
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Most established designers will tell you that word of mouth is the best promotion for yourself or your business. Creating exceptional work gets the key industry people talking about you, enquiring about you, and wanting to work with you.
But you have to win work in the first place before you can create eye-catching content, and getting your name known in the industry is vital for maintaining a healthy flow of projects into your in-tray.
If managed correctly, PR can be a consistent method of creating, raising, and nurturing relevant attention – but many design firms aren’t in the financial position to hire a PR representative. You may need to investigate other promotional avenues.
Getting in touch
One method involves simply picking up the phone. According to Scott Bedford, creative director at interactive agency Syzygy, cold calling can be an effective way of getting in front of a potential client or employer, but you need to make sure you call the right people.
“Ideally you want to attract those who are definitely in the market for an agency and not those simply window shopping,” he says.
“In my experience, cold calling is a waste of time,” says Lars Hemming Jorgensen, creative director of Large Design. “It’s a numbers game as it’s about timing. The meetings that cold calling generates are often irrelevant.”
Cold calling therefore requires a regimented and systematic approach. Gemma O’Keefe, head of marketing at mad.co.uk, stresses the importance of delivering clear and meaningful messages that express what makes your creative company different.
“This can be difficult when trying to convey your creative credentials,” says O’Keefe. “As in any cold-calling situation, you will have a maximum of 60 seconds to capture the imagination of your audience.”
The cold call is a double-edged sword as a strategy for digital and advertising agencies, as it can generate negative feelings if not conducted properly.
“If you’re simply cold calling anybody with a marketing title, with nothing relevant to talk about, you may end up having the reverse effect on your company,” says Natasha Knight, digital manager at Milton Bayer Communications.
“Once you know you have the right person, you need to back up the call with marketing material. Have something to send the person following the initial call. This gives you a reason to call again and a conversation starter.” A mailout, rather than a cold call, is a popular technique among creative companies.
“These give you a chance to engage your reader, but they can get expensive and are a lot of work unless you use a third party to manage the campaign,” says Ané-Mari Peter, MD at Web agency on-IDLE.
Target practice
As with cold calling, you need to make sure your mailout reaches the right people within the targeted organization. “Mailshots – whether electronic or printed – need to be followed up by a telephone call within a few days of being sent,” says Nick Bowman, director of Mandarin – a PR agency that specializes in creative businesses.
“Logically, there’s no point sending 250 emails and then trying to speak with only 10 or 20 recipients.”
The people who are responsible for commissioning creative work are constantly inundated with email and post, so your mailed promotional material will have to stand out from the crowd.
“This not only requires exemplary design, but quality data showing the delivery of highly targeted campaigns,” says Gemma O’Keefe. “By making your content personalized to your audience you will be able to deliver a variety of creative executions and specific calls to action.
“It’s important to spend as much time in the development of this material as would be spent on producing material for a client.”
Linked up
Design group ISO has found targeted email shots useful. “We find that people such as advertising creatives are always willing to click on a link and watch a short clip of your latest work,” says director Damien Smith.
“It’s more successful than expecting someone to break away from their desk and watch a DVD or tape.” Virals are a good method of spreading the word, if targeted correctly.
“If your viral campaign is picked by the podcasters and viral sites, attention is guaranteed,” says Ané-Mari Peter. “Whether or not that will translate into sales is quite another matter.”
According to many creative companies, an email newsletter is more effective when it comes to raising your profile. Milton Bayer Digital has been running a monthly email for about a year.
“We’re experienced in creating email strategies and managing campaigns and so we need to showcase our skills to potential clients,” says Natasha Knight.
“This includes getting our HTML emails through spam filters, achieving an open rate of around 90 per cent, and click through rates of 40 per cent. We achieve this by ensuring content is relevant, with subject lines that appeal to the recipients.”
Design collective D-Fuse emails out a newsletter monthly to around 8,000 subscribers. “We get feedback on who’s subscribing and who has recommended the newsletter,” says founder member Mike Faulkner.
“As soon as we email out we always get a lot of people coming back to talk to us about stuff and maybe offering us events to do.”
Faulkner says you need to sift through the feedback to ensure you follow up the useful leads, though. “You can spend too much time following up the wrong leads and sometimes miss out on the good ones,” he explains.
The use of a Web site for promotion is essential. “Not to have any Web presence is bizarre,” says Rachel Hawkes, account director at Elemental Communications.
“Designers possess the knowledge, experience, and skills to build a presence online and this is going to be cost effective, because it can be delivered in-house, or by the individual. Build search enginefriendly Web sites, microsites, and portfolios because this is where your clients research.”
However, it’s important that your Web site is accessible for the people who need to use it. Milton Bayer Creative MD Don Mammatt says the Web sites of creative companies are often seen as a designer’s plaything, rather than an informative promotional tool.
“Creatives can’t help showing off, and programmers like to do things they’re not allowed to do with clients. The end result is it fails to deliver a concise and informative message.”
Junk mail
Many design companies produce info packs as a matter of course. However, Max Du Bois, executive director of Spencer Du Bois, advises that these should be tailored to fit the client.
“If it isn’t, it’s just bin fodder,” he says. “Contacts tend to be short on time, so don’t send one cold. Find out their buying criteria for content, or how to make the content relevant, and then their buying cycle for timing.”
Some companies, especially those involved in motion graphics or animation, produce showreels of past work to entice prospective clients. It’s important that these are targeted, too.
“Never send showreels out blind,” says Damien Smith. “It can get expensive and more often than not they end up unwatched and unloved.
“When we are asked for a reel we always try and find out more about the project and then tailor a customized reel to that client’s requirements – there’s no point sending a selection of 2D cut- &-paste work to a client looking to commission realistic 3D animation.”
A showreel is a useful tool at an introductory meeting, because it instantly breaks the ice. “A lot of our work is CMS and email and so it was a must for us to use our showreel to present our full creative and animation skills,” says Natasha Knight.
“Since creating the showreel we have been awarded new briefs in initial meetings. This didn’t happen before, we used to leave the meeting having shown a few examples online, and send further examples through to win the brief. Now we have everything we could possibly need in one presentation, promoting our strengths, personality, and ability.”
Close contact
Postcards, posters, and flyers are ideal for design companies because they can showcase some design flair and catch the eye. “Our compliments slips double as postcards, and I’ve noticed that clients keep them,” says Ané-Mari Peter. “I often leave them in larger agencies with other brochureware and have had calls in response to them.”
D-Fuse uses a tracking method with its promo postcards. “Every time we have a good project, we print up a new set of ten thousand postcards,” says Mike Faulkner.
“We number each set and dish them out everywhere. We put specific email addresses on each set, so it’s a good way of monitoring where people are coming to you from. An art collector in New York recently picked one up and contacted us, looking for some of our work.”
The wider world
Despite the dreadfully corporate term, networking is vital if you want to establish yourself as a major player in the creative industries. Working the creative network can take a variety of forms.
Developing relationships with non-competing partners often opens up new business channels, for example. Attending (or even hosting) events for the purpose of meeting and talking to industry people is another key – if daunting – activity.
“Don’t be too shy at networking events,” says Nicholas Mann, MD of Interdirect. “It might feel like your first day at school every time you go to one, but there are many others in the same boat. And you’ll be amazed how quickly you get to know people. But don’t only talk to friendly faces. You’re there to meet new people.”
“Never network at an event unless the delegates have gone specifically to find agencies,” warns Max Du Bois, executive director of Spencer Du Bois.
“The delegates are often there for the talk, or to network with their own kind. Be at an event because it interests you. Talk to people that interest you. Be interesting. Don’t choose an angle for the sake of business – it’s so obvious and puts everyone off.”
Don Mammatt feels the best way to network is to send people who know the business well, but not so well that they bore people to death.
“You need people who can do more listening than talking, otherwise they will have no way of knowing how they can tailor your creative services to a prospective client,” he says.
“There’s all sorts of ways of getting attention,” says Max Du Bois. “But if you’re building your business you don’t want attention, you want a relationship that leads to something tangible. You need to understand how your work will add value to your target.”
Michael Burns
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Question of the day!
Neil Bennett
Editor
Do you share your creations online?