11 Ways to Market Your Design Company Offline

There are plenty of ways to advertise and market yourself over the internet. It’s easy to forget that for print designers, real-world offline advertising is still vital to your business.

1. Business Cards

The most obvious marketing tool should be your first printed material. The business card is essential for passing along your contact information to potential clients, peers, and vendors. Unlike other businesses, a design firm represents the work they do by their card design. Make it great – but also make it practical. An impressive looking card might not do its job if it’s too hard to read, over-sized, or too thick for a business card holder.

2. Company Brochures / Capabilities Brochure

Brochures can be designed any way you like, and can fit any budget, but they will all serve the same purpose: to represent the quality, skills and capabilities of your business. Brochures can give company background, give testimonials from past clients, show off past work, and describe services you provide. Brochures can be leave-behinds or mail-tos, or something to give visitors to your studio. They can be two panels or 16 pages. Once you’ve figured out your marketing message, you can determine what kind of brochure to make.

3. Mini-Portfolios

You wouldn’t leave your full portfolio with a client, but you might leave a mini-portfolio designed with that in mind. It’s something small enough to send through the mail, and cheap enough that you can leave it with a potential client. A versatile mini-port is a simple custom folder with separate printed inserts (chosen with the clients in mind) showcasing your work. Leave a mini-port when you are under consideration for work.

4. Designer Biographies

If you have a staff, write interesting and personable biographies about them so that clients can relate to your company. Hire a writer if necessary. Bios can be included on your web site, but there’s no reason you can’t print a “Get to know us” staff sheet to show off the breadth and depth of your company’s employees.

5. Press Releases

The best thing about press releases is that they can get you free advertising. If your release is interesting enough, you might even get an article. Use the third-person, present tense on your company letterhead. Follow the inverse-pyramid structure with the most important information at the top, so that it can be shortened without losing anything crucial. Include photos wherever possible to include the likelihood of bring printed.

First, determine in which publications you wish to appear. Visit their websites to determine where to send the press release, and follow any protocol given.

6. Traditional Advertising

Advertising is planning and buying an ad space that conveys your marketing message and includes a call to action. What publications do your ideal clients review? Those publications may be the place to advertise. However, traditional advertising can be expensive and there’s no way to measure results. Go for repetition.

I’ll expand on how to create the idea campaign in a future article.

7. Specialty Advertising

In essence, this means getting your name on something that your client has or wants. You’ve seen branded mugs, pens, and calendars, but you can come up with something more original. Make something that will sit on your client’s desks or dashboards and remind them what a great designer you are. Since specialty items are more expensive, they tend to go to existing clients or those clients you want to woo.

8. Hold an Open House

If you’ve got a decent office to work out of, come up with an excuse to get potential or existing clients to visit you. Prepare a seminar on file-preparation, introduction to FTP, lecture on investing, or just throw a seasonal party. Whatever the excuse, it’s a chance to show off your talent and build relationships.

9. Get Viral

On the internet, viral videos get people talking. Whether hilarious, outrageous, or crowd-pleasing, a successful video will get people talking, and word-of-mouth is almost always the best advertising. Viral videos don’t follow the same rules as they would in traditional media.

In the offline world, you can apply the same concept by doing something hilarious or outrageous. Doing something that doesn’t follow the rules. Be ambitious: get on the 6 o’clock news.

Think about Richard Branson.

10. Guerilla Style

Guerilla marketing is using unconventional or outrageous techniques to generate exposure for a company, product or service. The potential for upside can be tremendous, but a poorly executed guerrilla marketing campaign can alienate or offend your target market, so be careful. Also, check local laws.

Examples: poster pasting, windshield flyering, handbills, adding your flyer or sticker to newspaper boxes

11. The Phone Book

If you don’t have a business phone line, you’re missing out on some included advertising: the phone book listings! Usually the line listings are free, while the panel ads can be pricey. Check your local listings to see how you’ll fit in.