All The Ways I Market My Design Business
Today I’m sharing all the different platforms and strategies I use to promote my brand and website design business.
If you’re feeling nosy, this will give you a good insight into the behind the scenes of byRosanna Design and all the activities I do to get customers in my business. Whether you run your own design business, or you’re a creative who’s interested in what marketing activities you could be doing, hopefully you’ll find this blog post helpful for some inspiration and ideas!
Prefer to watch? Check this out on YouTube
Content marketing is king!
For me, Content Marketing is where it’s at in terms of how I both see results, and prefer to market my business. It’s really important that when you consider the strategies and platforms you’re going to use for marketing your business that you actually ENJOY doing them!
Initially when you start off doing something new, you won’t know whether you like it or not, which is why it IS good to try new things. But if you absolutely can’t stand writing, for example, maybe look into swapping a blog for a YouTube channel or podcast. If you hate doing something, chances are you’re probably not going to do it to the best of your ability, and your audience will pick up on your vibes too.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is creating and sharing online material (eg. blog posts, videos, social posts etc.) that doesn’t necessarily directly promote your business. It is instead used to deliver value and inspiration, to help attract the right audience and get them interested in your brand.
Blogging
Blogging was the very first marketing activity I started doing for my business when I started in 2015. Yes I posted occasionally to Facebook and Instagram, but that was mainly to share my blog posts. I’d written a few blogs when I was younger and basically spent a year or two learning and teaching myself how to blog effectively for my business - keeping my audience and SEO in mind.
You can see some of my early posts in my Archives page!
My blogging skills have vastly improved since then, but from the get go I have always approached creating blog posts strategically. It takes a lot of time to write good quality posts, and so you need to have a purpose for each post for it to be worth your while.
Check out my Blogging With Purpose online course (£40) if you want to learn how to blog intentionally for your business too!
Blogging has helped me get to the first page of Google for several key phrases that my target audience search for, and therefore brings me several client enquiries each month (I ask in my contact form where people found out about me, so I know where they’ve come from!).
As well as this, it establishes me as an expert, giving me credibility, and also gives me lots of content to share to my email list and Pinterest account, as mentioned below…
Once I’d set up a blog, I started teaching myself about how to use Pinterest as a marketing tool for my business. I’d used it lots before to pin recipes and design inspiration for my clients, but the more I learned, the more I discovered what a powerful tool it could be to get traffic and readers to my blog!
Today, Pinterest makes up nearly 50% of my total website traffic, and ended up helping me grow an email list of over 10,000 subscribers by sharing my ‘opt-in freebie’ on there. I also get new client enquiries via Pinterest from people who go on there and see pins of my logo designs and website designs too.
Further info:
Why Use Pinterest as a Marketing Tool for Your Business
5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Pinterest Growth
Learn how to market your business with Pinterest in my online course (£70)
Email Marketing
So while I was figuring out Pinterest, I started an email newsletter and created some ‘opt in incentives’ to encourage my blog readers to sign up and join my list (and in exchange they’d get a PDF workbook or free template or something like that!). Using a combination of a great opt-in incentive plus the power or Pinterest, I ended up growing an email list of over 10,000 subscribers!
Over the years, I decided to start my list again for a variety of reasons (explained in this post) and I now use Flodesk for all my email marketing and I love it! I send out a weekly email newsletter with resources and inspiration for creative freelancers, with automated sequences and promotional emails too that consistently get me sales to my education products.
Further reading:
Why I switched from Mailchimp to Flodesk
The Ultimate Guide to Flodesk
5 Things You Should Be Doing with Your Email List
Learn how to start, grow & nurture an email list with Flodesk in my online course (£58)
Instagram / Instagram stories
I’ve used Instagram sporadically over the past 5 years, but for the last year or so I’ve used my account consistently to deliver great value business and marketing content to my audience, and connect with them to build more personal relationships.
One feature that I have been obsessed with and see a lot of engagement with is Instagram Stories! I post regularly throughout each day giving my audience insights into what I do, sharing valuable tips and content, and announcing new launches and promotions.
I also go Live regularly on Instagram again to share valuable tips and build a rapport with my audience.
Further reading:
Join my FREE Instagram for Business online course!
4 Tips to Improve Your Instagram Engagement
Learn how to use Instagram Stories strategically for your business with my online course (£40)
YouTube / IGTV
Recently over the past 6 months, I have also started creating regular video content to share to YouTube (like the video at the top of this post!). I know that some of my audience prefer to watch instead of read nowadays, and it’s also much easier to share technical tutorials via video rather than screenshots.
I’m still testing whether this is a good platform for my business in terms of bringing in clients & customers, but it’s great because I can easily repurpose the videos to share to IGTV and get some engagement on Instagram too.
Podcast
I’m now coming up to my 4th season of The Freelance Fix Podcast (launching next week!) which I have been loving over the past 2 years. Podcasting is a great way to forge a deeper connection with your audience, because there’s something much more personal about listening to someone’s voice than reading some text on a screen…
I also find people sometimes don’t have time to sit and read a whole blog post, whereas they can listen to a podcast episode while filling dead time while they’re cleaning, driving, walking the dog, or generally multi-tasking.
So far I’m finding it great for building stronger relationships with my existing audience, although I have had a couple of clients find me via podcast recommendation too!
A note on word of mouth & referrals
It’s important to point out that nowadays, as well as creating consistent content for these platforms, I also get a lot of clients come to me via Word of Mouth and referrals from previous clients and service partners. Once you’ve been in your business for a while and built up a portfolio, this will start to become a large source of new clients for you too, but you need to have the initial marketing in place to GET those clients in the first place!
Learn more about how referrals can help grow your business in this blog post.
