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‘Marketing’ is the business way of saying making people like you enough to buy your product/hire you/give you money.
When you’re a freelance creative, talent doesn’t sell itself. To have clients, your clients have to know you exist — so you have to do a bit of marketing.
The highest-paid freelancers figured this out a long time ago: Clients don’t come to you because you’re good.
So why pick you?
And what will keep them coming?
And how do you do it without feeling icky?
I wrote a short ebook explaining all of that and a little bit more.
P.S. Feel free to share this with your friends. It’s the surprise that keeps on giving.
Ran Segall, Head of Product, Co-Founder at The nuSchool
Ran is a freelance full-stack designer working with Startups.
He also runs Flux – a vlog where he shares his journey, struggles,
and lessons he’s learning as he builds his design career and business.
I freelanced through school, between jobs, and in the evenings, building my portfolio, my network, and my savings account.
Getting to be a full-time freelancer took a few — thirteen, to be exact — years of preparing myself.
If I had started full-time freelancing thirteen years ago, I would have zero clients. OK, maybe I would have one.
But that’s not enough – freelancers should have many clients. Or at least, enough clients to pay rent. And maybe eat a nice dinner every so often.
But how do you get to that point? Why do some freelancers have as many clients as they want, and others aren’t sure where the money will come from next month?
The Start Of My Marketing Hustle
For the last two years, I’ve been freelancing full-time, and it’s been going well. Really well, like, so well that I have to turn down 90% of the clients that approach me well – just because I don’t have the time to work with them.
But that didn’t happen overnight. And when I look back, trying to understand what got me to this point – I can see a pattern. And I want to share it with you so you can skip a few years of “not enough clients”.
When I just started, people told me you should be marketing! – but that wasn’t what I expected, and definitely not part of my dream career as a designer.
And yet, I found myself working on marketing and networking all the time. Because it works.
It doesn’t have to take thirteen years, but it will always take time and effort.
When I started playing the networking game, it felt sleazy. I was playing a game that I didn’t want to play.
All of the successful freelancers I met said I had to network, though, which made me picture shaking sweaty palms and handing out business cards. Heads up: It’s not like that.
I mean, it can be like that, but it doesn’t have to be. Because, from what I’ve learned, networking is mostly about being nice.
Parties, coffee, and Facebook groups were enough. And they weren’t painful — they just took energy. And guess what? After thirteen years of this, I can tell you in retrospect where 99% of my clients came from.
My clients didn’t come from Dribbble (I don’t have one).
My clients didn’t come from my online portfolio (that I spent ~2 hours building).
My clients came from referrals from the network I built over those years of coffee chats, blog posts, and participating in Facebook groups.
Here’s how you can start building your network today:
Join industry Facebook groups and participate. Share articles, share work, leave comments, send messages, make friends. Don’t be shy.
Invite people out to coffee! You’re not too busy, and neither are they.
Go outside once in a while. You never know who you’ll find. Whether it’s the dog park, your best friend’s birthday, or a high school reunion, your future client could be sitting right next to you — but you’ll never know if you don’t talk to them.
Go to meetups. Meet people who do the things you do — or want to do. Network within your industry and the industry you want to be in. Make a name and place for yourself.
Share. Share things people have written, and share what you’re writing. That means you have to write too. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to happen.
Make a story for yourself and stick to it. If you want to work with startups, find the startup people; if you want to work with fashion brands, go to their stores. Find the people you want to work with and make them a part of your network.
I know what you’re thinking – that’s so much work!
But you’re not here to take the easy way out — you’re here to build a long-lasting career.
As someone who’s been doing this for years, I can assure you – it wasn’t easy.
Easy was staying home with my wife, or going for whiskey with my friends.
This was all what I took upon myself because I wanted to build a business of my own — pretty much the opposite of easy anything.
Because, it’s important to remember, you’re not a freelancer because it’s easy. You’re a freelancer because you want it.
The Next Step (Shameless plug)
For some freelancers, marketing is the hard part of freelancing.
I’m not talking about creating a Facebook page – anyone can do that. That’s easy. I’m talking about the things you haven’t thought of, or you’re scared to try, or you want to but don’t know how.
Ran is head of product, designer and co-founder at the nuSchool. He's also a freelance designer working with Startups, the a mentor at The Designer's Pricing Class. He's now working on a new class - Marketing For Honest Freelancers.
The hardest thing about running your own creative business is [fill in the blank here].
Being a freelancer has this very romantic narrative of being your own boss. Making your own hours. Total creative freedom.
But what about the hard parts?
Maybe it is romantic in all of those ways and more, but we all still struggle somewhere.
Some people struggle to stay focused. Some people can’t balance life and work.
Some people get discouraged or overwhelmed easily.
For me, I struggle with boredom.
I get bored easily, and then I can’t work. I dread the end of projects, when all that’s left are the brain-melting tiny details — checking how the website looks on Firefox on Windows 95, changing fonts, adding links, horrifically boring touch-ups.
This is when I get an urge to do the dishes, or change the lightbulb, or call an old friend from high school to catch up. Anything is better than the small things.
Why should you do the hard things anyway?
The only way to become the healthier/smarter/happier/more productive/XYZ person you want to be is through doing hard work.
Sometimes the work is embarrassing, or depressing, or seemingly impossible.
And no matter how hard you wish, it never does itself.
So why push forward?
Because, I promise, the results are worth it.
You won’t become the best creative by working with easy clients.
You won’t become more productive by keeping a small workload.
You won’t become healthier by eating whatever takeout delivers cheapest and fastest.
Growth is the most satisfying feeling in the world, and you can only grow if you push yourself — if you figure out what’s hard for you, and you do it.
If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say something like, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous that it doesn’t even mean anything.
A more interesting question, a question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out…
The hard work we dread doing is what gets us the things we want.
And the hard work is worth it.
I want to share with you the hard things we’ve done lately at the nuSchool, why these were hard for us, and what happened in the end.
Launching a side project? It’s hard.
Last week we launched Photype. It’s a side project we put almost three months of work into, while keeping up with our regular stuff.
Why was it so hard?
Side projects are always hard to do. It’s low priority, so it’s easy to push it off another week, or month…any time that isn’t now.
And since we’re serious people (sometimes), we couldn’t just do what we want. We still did full-on market research, interviewed some of you guys to better understand the process of your work with stock photos, and had six (!) different versions of Photype before the launch.
Our CTO Ayal almost killed me a few times during those revisions.
Just kidding. (Not kidding.)
But you see, we planned to work on it for three weeks, which eventually turned into nine weeks. We almost decided not to launch it, but in the end we pushed each other to make it happen.
And then Photype exploded.
A week before we expected to launch, someone put us up on Product Hunt.
Flattering, but stressful. It was a big opportunity — and it paid off.
We built Photype because we love the design community — so seeing Photype appear on The Next Web and twenty other blogs in different languages was incredible.
Not only were happy people loving and using Photype, it was also great for The nuSchool brand.
Hard – but worth it.
Creating a new course in less than a month? It’s hard.
We get emails all the time from nuSchoolers struggling with marketing.
Someone somewhere convinced us that talent would sell itself. It doesn’t. Now the world is filled with talented creatives sitting at home, boosting Facebook posts and waiting for clients to come to them.
That doesn’t work — it’s a waste of time and it’s depressing as fuck. So we made a course that addresses those issues, based on what I learned over fifteen years of working as a freelance designer.
Just like Photype, making the course wasn’t easy. We thought we could shoot it all in a day — wrong. We thought we could finish the course in two weeks — nope.
We even got stuck in an elevator on shooting day one. This wasn’t an easy process. You can see our distress in the video.
But still, our first class took over four months to produce, and we wanted to do this one better — and we did.
Hard – but worth it.
Forcing yourself to do the hard things
At the nuSchool, we believe in self-improvement.
A good week or month for us is when we’ve tried doing something hard — not because we’re masochists, but because doing what’s hard for us is the fastest way to improve and make big leaps in our career, experience, and life.
Sometimes it sucks.
Doing the hard thing can bring you down. Especially if you fail to do it eventually. But when it works, hell, that’s the best feeling ever.
And the best thing about doing the hard things is that eventually these things become easy.
And you become the person you want to be.
What’s Next? (Shameless plug)
For some freelancers marketing is the hard thing. I’m not talking about creating a Facebook page – anyone can do that. That’s easy.
I’m talking about the HARD things you can do – which will get you more clients than you can handle in the long run.
In case you want to learn the hard things I’ve done to market myself until I got fully booked – I’ve got something for you.
Next Tuesday, February 9, I’m launching a class – Marketing For Honest Freelancers. Subscribe here for more details (and the subscriber-only special price):
Post by Ran Segall
Ran is head of product, designer and co-founder at the nuSchool. He's also a freelance designer working with Startups, the a mentor at The Designer's Pricing Class. He's now working on a new class - Marketing For Honest Freelancers.
Marketing is the business way of saying make people like you enough to buy your product/hire you/give you money.
When you’re a freelance creative, talent doesn’t sell itself. To have clients, your clients have to know you exist — so you have to do a bit of marketing.
The highest-paid freelancers figured this out a long time ago: Clients don’t come to you because you’re good. Clients come to you because they feel like they know, like, and trust you.
The know-like-trust theory is as old as time, or at least retail shops. The basic theory is that customers become loyal, repeat customers when they feel like they know, like, and trust your brand as they would a close friend.
It’s true for cereal, clothing, and freelancers: People buy on emotion. They spend money to feel good. Your advantage over your competition isn’t just your rates or skills; it’s your smile, energy, and quick response times that make you pleasant to work with and be around.
And you know what I like about it? It ain’t no sleazy marketing – it’s Honest Marketing.
Your advantage over your competition isn’t just your rates or skills; it’s your smile, energy, and quick response times that make you pleasant to work with and be around. And you know what I like about it? It ain’t no sleazy marketing – it’s Honest Marketing.
Developing feels with potential clients isn’t easy, but it’s possible. I’ve broken it down into steps, tips, and tricks.
Know
Would your clients and potential clients recognize you if they saw you walking down the street?
Do your potential clients know who you are when they hear your name?
For people to like you, they have to know you. Duh.
Create content. Whether you’re a writer, a talker, an illustrator, or some other kind of communicator, create some content and get it on the Internet.
I have a blog and a vlog where I can write and talk about design-related topics that excite me. These channels not only give me a space to interact with clients/potential clients and other designers in a less formal context, but they also give me street cred in the industry.
Create a product. Instead of saying to yourself, ugh I wish XYZ existed and made my life simpler, make the thing! In 2013, I was looking for a side project, and I love biographies/inspiring quotes — so I made a daily inspiration app, Muz.
Creating Muz not only gave me experience building an app, but it also exposed me to designers, developers, and other app-minded people who could expand my network and one day be my clients.
It’s been two years, and I’m still getting invited to talk about my Muz experience — and the app is still getting downloaded.
Network. Get to know other people. Whether you’re doing this virtually or IRL, the more people who know you on a personal level, the more people will trust you to work with them — and their whole network.
Like
Getting your clients to like/love you is like the fun part of dating, the first few dates when you’re at your funniest, wittiest, and kindest. Making relationships is the same, whether you’re online or IRL: Be loveable and the people will love you.
Be your best you. Be the you that your parents think you are; that means, wear clean clothes and don’t curse (much), but don’t be afraid to be a little bit weird. We’re all into weird.
Be personal. Share something with your audience! Help your clients relate to you. The law of reciprocity plays out big time here: If you give your clients information about yourself, they’ll want to share back with you. That’s how friendships are born.
Be nice. Ask people how they’re doing, remember details, make jokes, smile, don’t badmouth people, don’t be annoying. Basically, be a considerate human that people like being around.
Be generous. In Hebrew there’s a concept called firgun, which means to make someone feel good without an ulterior motive. Compliment, share, reach out, and make introductions just because it’s a nice thing to do. Making someone’s day is a really quick way to win their heart.
Trust
Earn trust. Duh. If you say you’re going to post a blog post every day, do it. Don’t make promises you can’t keep; be consistent in producing high-quality work on-schedule and your clients will adore you.
Apologize when you have to. We all make mistakes; taking responsibility for them is what makes people willing to move on. If you make a mistake, don’t run away — say you’re sorry, fix the mistake, and learn from it. Move forward.
Be visible (literally and figuratively). People like people better than eggs. Anywhere you have a profile, have a profile picture — preferably you, preferably smiling, preferably well-lit and happy vibes.
Then you can put those profiles to work and start participating in conversations!
For people to trust you, you have to give them proof of trustworthiness. Show the world that you have opinions and they’re not-totally-whacko by participating in forums and groups, going to (and speaking at, if possible) conferences and events, and creating/sharing content.
Share testimonials. Do other people trust you? Awesome, that’s a good start. When people already trust you, it’s easier to get others to trust you. That’s how the world works. Call the people who have already worked with you and ask them to tell the world about it.
Then your potential clients can say to themselves and each other, Look! Ryan Smith says Freelancer X is a pleasure to work with! Let’s sign!
Win
When you’ve done all of these things, when you’ve smiled and participated and chewed with your mouth closed, the clients you have and the clients you want should be able to close their eyes and picture you, smiling, doing great work.
And that will make them smile. And then they will give you all of the money.
You can’t control your competition; you can only guarantee that you’re always the best you can be. That means not only do you provide the best work that you can create, but you’re a pleasure to work with, and people want to know you better. That’s what keeps them coming back.
The Next Step (Shameless plug)
For some freelancers, marketing is the hard part of freelancing.
I’m not talking about creating a Facebook page – anyone can do that. That’s easy. I’m talking about the things you haven’t thought of, or you’re scared to try, or you want to but don’t know how.
Ran is head of product, designer and co-founder at the nuSchool. He's also a freelance designer working with Startups, the a mentor at The Designer's Pricing Class. He's now working on a new class - Marketing For Honest Freelancers.
“Hello Everybody! Actually, why should I say everybody? You’re not everybody. Actually, most people are not here. Most people are in China, actually. Actually, most people are dead, did you know that?”
What that entrepreneur tried to express is that her audience consists of both women and men — but that still doesn’t mean it’s “everybody”. A few minutes into our talk, we realized “everybody” is 20-60 years old, living in Manhattan, with high socioeconomic status, and into yoga and other wellness activities.
I guess there are no more than 150,000 of them — but for sure not everyone, and not even close.
But it’s for everyone!
Entrepreneurs love to imagine that their product is a good fit for everyone, just like Google and Facebook are for everyone. They tend to forget that no product or company starts with the mainstream.
Every product, including Facebook, starts as a niche product with a few first users (often called “the early adopters”). If the product isn’t a great fit for those first users, if it isn’t cool and valuable enough for them, they will never use it and the product won’t get to the mainstream ever.
When entrepreneurs try to get everyone, they dilute their brand — and reduce the chance to actually excite someone.
Cue your work
Our work as creatives is to help entrepreneurs focus and define their target market. Whether it’s a restaurant or an app, both have a target audience, and it’s not everyone.
The better job we are at defining target markets, the better we can design. We can learn who their audience is and how they talk, behave, and live — what is the visual and virtual world they live in, what moves and influences them. With that, we can improve our client’s chance to succeed.
Cue you
Now let’s talk about you. Yes, you.
You have to decide and understand who YOUR target market is. Too many creatives I meet think that their potential audience is everyone. If you can pay, you’re in.
That’s a huge mistake.
As your target audience grows, you dilute your own brand — and, as we learned above, you decrease your chances of actually exciting anyone enough to work with you.
The more specific you are about who your client is, the easier it is to market yourself.
I, for example, love working with technologies companies. And, to be even more specific, my target market is startups. Once I was able to define that, life got easier.
Clients that are outside of the startup world aren’t a potential client for me. I can learn where startup people hang out, speak their language, read the blogs they read, go to events they go to – and build my network this way. They see me as an expert in this niche, and refer me to each other.
Many people, both clients and freelance creatives, are afraid to make this choice about choosing their target audience. It’s scary to limit yourself!
It makes you say: That’s who I am and these are the people I want to work with.
That’s not an easy thing to say. What if you’re wrong? What if tomorrow there’s a client that I miss because they’re not in this audience?
Like all good things in life, you can’t dance at two weddings. Want to be great? Be great for someone specific — and decide who you’re not good for at all.
Post by Ran Segall
Ran is head of product, designer and co-founder at the nuSchool. He's also a freelance designer working with Startups, the a mentor at The Designer's Pricing Class. He's now working on a new class Marketing For Honest Freelancers.
If you are one of those people who have a hard time facing the truth, you might want to stop reading right now. Not everyone is looking to hear the truth about themselves.
I found that out when I was in design school: I thought I was giving people feedback that will help them grow and improve, but a lot of people don’t care about improving. They just want to be patted on the back and hear that they are “so talented!” and are already doing great work.
So if you want to be congratulated and told how fabulous you are, you better call mom. This post might piss you off.
Still here?
Great.
Where are tho clients?
There are only two possible reasons people are not currently waiting in line to work with you and pay you shitloads of money:
Your work is not as good as you think it is, and it does not bring immense value to your clients.
Your work is great and valuable, but you do not know how to communicate that value to your clients.
I know you are telling yourself right now that your problem is problem #2. I fantasize about this at night too. The reality is – that for 98% of you out there (me included), the problem is #1.
The thing is, we live in a world where it’s so easy to get your work online and have all of your friends comment about how talented you are and LIKE your work (hey, liking is free!)
We sometimes get the feeling that we are all a bunch of superstar designers, and the only conclusion can be to ask, “how come my clients are so stupid that they don’t understand it and argue with me about prices?”
But the truth is we are not so talented. Actually, what people call “talent” is usually about making a really pretty design, which is not what our clients are willing to pay for. Most of us are not really solving our clients’ real problems, the ones that are so important to them that they are willing to wait in line and pay lots of money to solve.
Good design is valued more than ever
Maybe you’re thinking that most clients don’t value design and are not willing to spend money on good design. The reality is quite the opposite: there are many clients that value design and are willing to pay. They think the problem is that there simply aren’t enough good designers who can help them.
Companies like Facebook and Google are paying huge sums of money to recruit design talent, and the global competition for good designers is pushing design rates higher every year. If you do not currently have clients filling up your inbox begging to work with you, you have to ask yourself why that is.
Now, I know what you must be thinking: “I CAN do great work! If I can only get in front of those clients, I’m sure I could do great work!” (Just like it’s obvious that your driving abilities are above average, exactly like everybody else’s). But you are lying to yourself. Your problem is problem #1 and not problem #2.
Here’s the positive point about all of this: once you are aware of the fact that you are not as good as you think, and that you have a lot to learn and to improve, then solving your problem becomes much easier.
All you have to do is go learn and improve. Here’s where I would start:
Learn to listen. When your clients come in for a logo design, they have a deeper reason for doing the project – fear, ego, hope, etc. You need to help solve THAT problem.
Understand what your clients really value. It might not be your design skills. They might know nothing about design. Maybe it’s fast execution, or great service.
Become an expert in your client’s business. The more knowledgeable you are about their business, the more value you can bring, and also charge for.
Don’t worry about setting up your Facebook page or updating your portfolio right now. Some of the most sought-after designers don’t even have a portfolio, because they never need to look for a job – clients are already competing to work with them. Worry about becoming the best designer. The clients will find you.
Post by Ran Segall
Ran is head of product, designer and co-founder at the nuSchool. He's also a freelance designer working with Startups, the author of Value For Money and a mentor at The Designer's Pricing Class.
Albert Einstein famously said that genius is 1% talent and 99% hard work. That’s probably true, but I’ve noticed something else about hard work: first of all, it’s not easy to do. Secondly, most people try to avoid hard work at all cost, even the talented ones.
The thing about doing difficult things is that you need a ton of willpower to do them. We all tell ourselves we should start eating healthy tomorrow, or work out, or build ourselves a new website, or learn that new software or understand what all those words on our 401k mean. But most of us don’t actually do all those things, because they require so much willpower.
Over the years I’ve noticed that the people around me that actually get things done are simply the ones who manage to master enough willpower to do them. I’ve noticed that about myself too – some things that seem to me relatively simple, like getting up early or reading books, are really not that easy for others.
This realization made me wonder whether willpower is something you’re born with – meaning some people are just luckier than others – or is it a muscle you can develop and improve. I also realized that it doesn’t matter how hard people are trying to be better designers, if they don’t have enough willpower, they will never be able to achieve their dreams.
Then I did my favorite thing – I read a book about it, called The Willpower Instinct. It was super interesting and I’d like to share with you a few specific ideas from it that might help you with your own willpower challenges, whether they are about design, smoking or food.
Let’s begin with the question that I had on my mind: whether willpower is something you’re born with or can work on. The answer, amazingly, is both. Yes, some people have it naturally easier to do difficult things. But they’re not perfect either and they find other things difficult. We can all increase our abilities significantly if we understand what affects our willpower.
According to the book, which is filled with scientific studies on the subject, willpower is a sort of reservoir in our brain. Sometimes it’s empty, and then we ‘sin’: we eat junk food, buy crap we don’t need to waste time instead of working on what we should be working on. And sometimes the reservoir is full and then we succeed in being ‘strong’ and not get tempted – then we get around to doing what we said we should do. We do hard work, invest in ourselves and in our long-term goals.
Here are some tips to increase your willpower:
Our willpower is affected by our physical state
And that means three things:
You need to sleep well.
You need to eat well.
You need to exercise.
If you’re not getting 6-7 hours of sleep a night, know that your willpower is going to be lower than it can be. Good sleep was always important to me and I’ve always hated all-nighters in school and in work, so I’m happy to learn that now science is backing up that it’s bad for you. If you don’t eat enough, skip meals or only eat non-nutritious junk, your willpower will be lowered. It’s true that there’s a bit of a loop here – you need willpower to eat well, and you need to eat well to have willpower – but that’s how it works. As for exercise, yes, it affects your willpower too. But you’ll surely be happy to know that you don’t have to go to the gym every day. Even an activity like walking for five minutes can help fill up your willpower reservoir.
Willpower is contagious
Studies show that willpower behaves like an epidemic: it can be contagious. Those researches show, for instance, that if you’re around obese people often, you’re in a higher risk group to become obese yourself.
Remember when we were children and mom used to say “so what if everyone’s doing it? If everyone jumped off the roof would you do it too?” Of course we’re taught to be individuals and we like to believe that we make rational decisions by ourselves, but studies show that’s really not how it works. In fact, if everyone did jump off the roof, you would probably join them.
If all the people in your office stuff their faces with cake and candy every day, there’s a good chance you’re eating them too. On the other hand, if they’re all health freaks, making salads every day, you might ‘catch’ it too.
I know that to be true from my own experience. When I was working for Any.do and wanted to develop an app in my free time, the work I was doing with another person who had already done it himself motivated me and filled me with willpower. It showed me that it was a possible thing to do, even though it’s so hard to get up earlier each morning or work on weekends.
If you’re aware of your willpower, you’ll have more of it
I recently read three books about different topics (marriage, child rearing and willpower) and all three mentioned studies that show that mindfulness brings with it immense improvement in results, whether you’re talking about a good marriage, raising a smart and happy child or dealing with willpower challenges.
Wikipedia defines mindfulness as “the intentional, accepting and non-judgemental focus of one’s attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment.” For instance, one of the most difficult things for me is the addiction to Facebook and to email reading. While I’m working, without even noticing I switch over to Facebook every few minutes, or open my Gmail and start answering emails. It’s hard to be productive in this way. But as I improve my mindfulness, I find myself working and telling myself – ah! There’s that urge to open Facebook. It comes because I’m feeling bored by what I’m doing right now. As soon as I become aware of that urge and think about it, many times it simply goes away. Not always, obviously, but often.
Self awareness is as much a skill as anything else we do, and that means it needs to be learned and practiced. A lot, if you want to be any good. The way to do that is meditation. It’s funny that three Western science books recommend an Eastern practice, but there you have it – studies show it actually works.
I’ve been practicing a daily 20-minute meditation session with HeadSpace for over a year, and it’s hard to quantify it and tell you exactly how useful it is, but apart from the fact that I’m really enjoying myself, I think it’s also significantly improved my willpower and my relationships with other people. (It takes a lot of willpower to shut up and not tell your wife you think she’s wrong when she’s pissed off.)
It’s easier to do things than to not-do things
There are a couple of different kinds of willpower challenges:
Things that I need willpower in order to see them through – go to the gym, eat healthy, focus on my work.
Things that I need willpower in order not to do them – open my Facebook while I’m working, eat junk food between meals, buy expensive things that I don’t actually need.
The book claims that it’s much easier to focus on things I want to do than on things I don’t want to do. Believe it or not, studies show that there’s no proof of diets being helpful in the long run. On the contrary, there is quite a lot of evidence that many times we get fat right after a diet, and that people that are always going up and down the scale are hurting their health in the long run. When we tell ourselves we’re not allowed to eat that croissant, we’re telling ourselves not to think about a white bear. And as everyone knows, once you tell someone not to think about a white bear, they can think of nothing but.
The way to deal with these challenges is to try and think about the things you can do instead, rather than disallowing the things you want to do. Trying to lose weight? Better push yourself to exercise and to cook healthy meals. Do that for a while and you’ll probably find yourself thinking less about croissants, and that urge will disappear by itself.
When I’m dealing with my addiction to Facebook and Gmail, I’m not trying to prevent myself from using them, but I do tell myself that I should finish task such-and-such first, and only then I’m allowed to go on Facebook.
To sum up,
Willpower is another one of those things that they don’t teach us about in any school, but has decisive influence on our lives. The fact that no one talks about it, or that everyone treats bad willpower like a force majeure is a mistake in my opinion. The better we get at understanding why we (and others) behave like we do, the higher our chances to get our lives to look like we want them to, and of course, the better designers we will become.
Post by Ran Segall
Ran is head of product, designer and co-founder at the nuSchool. He's also a mentor at The Designer's Pricing Class.
If you want to learn more lessons that no one taught us in school, go ahead and sign up for our free email-course. It has tons of valuable lessons – over 2,000 freelance designers have tried it already.
Before you come after me for being intentionally provocative with my title, and before you jump to explain that you specifically are not a liar (“not all designers!”), let me explain what I’m talking about.
Seth doesn’t mean to say that all marketing people are actually liars; what he says is, one, that marketers are storytellers, and two, that these stories have to be interesting, different and memorable for someone to even listen to them. (Had the book been named All Marketers are Storytellers it would probably be far less appealing and, as a result, far less popular.)
My intention in this post is to explain why I think all designers are actually marketers, i.e. liars, i.e. storytellers.
If you’re anything like me, or at least like me from a while ago, you’re probably now saying to yourself:
“Well I’m really no marketer. I’m not one of those detestable people who wear suits and shake hands and knock on people’s doors trying to sell, sell, sell. Yuck! I’m a designer. My work sells itself.”
And that’s wrong.
Super wrong.
As designers, we have so much marketing work to do that I’m almost tempted to tell you that we have to know marketing better than marketers do.
Before we even have clients, we need marketing for them to be able to find us; during the work we need to market our vision to the client; and of course, the work itself – the design – is also a marketing element: the website has to sell, the brand has to sell, the app needs to sell, and obviously the ad needs to sell.
So now that we’re on the same page, agreeing we all work in marketing even though we’ve never studied it, let’s see what we need to know about it.
Here is how to market yourself.
Marketing before doing any work
By ‘marketing before work’ I mean: what is the marketing work that we have to do to get clients to find us – and also to convince them they want to work with us?
Whenever I see a Facebook banner offering a marketing class for designers, I imagine the course is about building Facebook pages, or promoting websites.
But honestly, I haven’t met a single designer who gets clients from having a nice-looking Facebook page.
90% or more of the projects designers get are from word of mouth: from someone who got a recommendation from a former client of yours, or through a friend or family member.
Nothing beats a great recommendation from someone your trust, and I don’t know a single person looking for a designer / developer / architect / mover / barber / psychologist without first asking the people they know whether said professional is trustworthy.
That is to say – of course a website and a Facebook page are important, but only as stage two. No one will arrive at them independently (or through a Facebook sponsored post) and just decide to work with you. They might get a recommendation and then check out your page – but not the other way around.
In that case, what can we do to make sure we get more excited clients with positive recommendations? The answer is relatively simple: increase the amount of people that know and trust us and would happily vouch for us.
I’m not going to tell you to go to conventions and do some networking, simply because I myself don’t do it. I’m bad at it and it embarasses me.
Some people do it and it works for them. You need to find out what you’re comfortable with and your own way that you can enjoy.
Here are some things that I like to do:
I take part in hackathons. I do it because it’s fun and because there’s always beer and free food. As a byproduct I also get to meet a ton of people from the startup world and spend an evening or a weekend with them, at the end of which they know me, like me, and even think I’m a pretty darn good designer.
I connect with the rest of my client’s team. Even though I usually work with one specific person, I do enjoy meeting and getting to know the other people in the office, whether they are developers or accountants. The byproduct here is that they might remember me when they, or someone they know, need a designer.
I write a blog. I’m not writing posts only because I’m hoping to score more work. Still, a major byproduct of writing it is that people who read it are gradually learning to trust and know me.
None of these things are direct marketing actions, but they all have marketing results.
There’s no one way or one trick or tip that works for everyone. You have to learn for yourself what you find comfortable, but keep in mind the result you’re after: to keep growing the circle of people who know, like and trust you, and who can recommend you when such services are needed.
The second step after a recommendation is probably a Google search.
At this point you do need to have a website / Linkedin profile in order to impress the potential client. I don’t have anything to add here that you don’t already know: if your website looks bad / cheap / doesn’t even exist, that’s going to be the impression you make on the client too.
Marketing during work
The nice thing about being an employee in a design studio is that you can design as you like, and the creative director is the one who has to try and sell your work to the client. That part doesn’t concern you.
But wait – did you just realize what the difference is between you and your manager? You can design, and they can probably design too; but more importantly, they can also sell.
Too many designers, some of them super talented, remain throughout their career at the bottom of the design world’s pyramid for the simple reason that they don’t know – and what’s worse, don’t want to learn – how to sell their work.
If you think that the most challenging thing about being a designer is sitting in an office listening to cool music and trying to solve your current brief, I’m sorry to have to tell you this but you’ve been lied to.
The true challenge is sitting across from a person who knows absolutely nothing about design, showing them your gorgeous work and trying to sell them the idea and why it’s the right one for them.
Our real job has two parts: first, to allay the client’s fears (and their panic that a bad logo will ruin their business), and second, to sell them our solution.
Here are some pointers to help you deal with this challenge:
Come prepared. Do your homework. Get to know the client deeply, get to know their competitors, get to know the market. Know to bring up examples from the rest of the world that support the direction you’re going for. Have a good answer for everything. Be able to explain even the things you did intuitively. Know how to explain exactly why you chose that font over others.
Create an amazing presentation. When I was studying at Design School, they used to make us hang our work straight up, print it on cardboard and all sorts of crap because otherwise “when you present it to the client they can tell it’s not perfect and it will hurt the work.”
Well, truthfully, ever since my graduation I never once presented anything on any wall.
99% of the time I present work on a computer, with an overhead projector or on a television screen. But the point is still relevant – create an amazing, meticulously made presentation which takes the client step by step towards your solution, and it will help you immensely in selling the idea to the client.
Once the client sees how much work you’ve put in the presentation, they will learn from it just how much work you’ve put in the design itself.
Be adorable. Yep, that’s right. If the client loves you, it will be easier for them to buy what you’re selling.
Don’t confuse being nice and friendly with slaving around and doing everything they ask. That’s not what I’m talking about. But be friendly. Engage in smalltalk. Be human. Even your mighty client might lose sleep because their son is teething.
The design itself as a marketing element
Oh, the bitter truth. We work in a profession that convinces people to do things. Usually to buy things. When Tyler Durden says “advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need,” he probably means us too.
But let’s not be too gloomy about it. Let’s think about it this way: we’re convincing people to do things that are good for them, and helping to create a better world. Hurrah!
Either way, you have to know how to do it – and that, my friends, is marketing.
You’re designing a book cover so that someone will pick it up from the shelf and buy it. You’re designing a website so that someone will create an account…. and then buy something. You’re designing a menu so that someone will buy a dish. You’re designing an app – eventually someone is meant to buy something.
In order for us to create a good design which fills its purpose – i.e. convinced the user to do what we want them to do – we have to base our work on a lot of knowledge from other fields: psychology, economics, business and history are only some of the topics that will help us know how to do better work which will, in turn, sell better.
Want to be better designers and marketers? Start broadening your horizons.
Post by Ran Segall
Ran is the designer, head of product and co-founder at Bold & Creative. He's also a mentor at the Designer's Pricing Class.'
Learning from people who are smarter than you, is the sure way to become a better designer (and a better person). That’s exactly the reason why I took the time to fly to Berlin and attend the TYPO 2015 conference.
