Graphic designers operate in a highly creative environment where they have to constantly communicate ideas, create visually appealing concepts, and develop designs for various purposes, including advertising, marketing, and public sensitization. To excel as a graphic designer, you need to learn and stay on the lookout for inspiration. It also helps to operate outside of your comfort zone in order to hone your skills and explore new tricks.

However, the path to success ends with finding people to buy your product. When you find clients, you need to strategize on how to retain them. It is important to note that people often buy products because of the benefits. The sales and marketing challenges experienced by freelance graphic designers and those contracted by the agencies are similar. According to Shutterstock, graphic designers can market their business and close sale using the following strategies:

1. Choose a design niche 
When you want to sell your work, you need to identify your areas of strength and concentrate your efforts in those areas. This could be an area that your business does better compared to the competition; for instance print advertising, typography or logo design. Carving out a niche makes it easy attract clients that match your profile.

2. Optimize your website
When it comes to realizing sales and marketing goals, you can make your website more functional through optimization. For starters, the site needs to be mobile friendly because 50% of all online searches are now performed through mobile devices. However, the focus on adaptive or responsive web design should not be done at the expense of desktop users since the majority of sales still originate from desktop users. To retool your online sales strategy, you must incorporate location-specific tags. You can target the local traffic by adding meta-descriptions with tags that feature the name of your state and city.

3. Maintain a blog
Creating a blog that is regularly updated is a powerful strategy required of any serious graphic designer. When creating a blog post, make it is useful and actionable in order to inform and drive sales. To alert prospects and business owners about your offerings, consider funneling back or adding backlinks to your website. The strategy will go a long way to build trust and place you at an advantage when prospects and returning clients want to hire graphic designers.

4. Use MailChimp to reach out 
The internet is literally littered with tools that can be used to market a business and make conversions. MailChimp is a highly intuitive email marketing strategy with a broad industry appeal. With your MailChimp account up and running, you should be in a better position to send periodical newsletters to keep your clients updated on new developments. Besides emailing clients, you can use MailChimp to boost conversions by adding an email sign up placeholder on your blog or website.

5. Share your work extensively
Your graphics design portfolio should ideally be found everywhere, on various platforms from your website to design studio. Casting your net far and wide will help you capture the attention of both big and small clients searching for graphic design services across various channels. Social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook and creative design-oriented sites like Behance and Dribbble should feature prominently in your online strategy.

6. Set the right place
Even with cutting-edge designs and top-notch marketing, you still need to set the right price to get the prospects to actually buy your product. If you are new to the industry, you can get your pricing right by performing market research on the competitors before setting the price. If your product is highly valued or pricey, be ready to over-deliver on quality to justify the sale. Depending on the product and how you present it versus the competition, the notion of perceived value can also be used to determine the price.

West Coast Graphics Design Expert
Mark Alvarado is a prominent graphic designer based in Palo Alto, California. The highly experienced UCLA alumnus uses his marketing skills to develop compelling advertising and promotional campaigns for various startup clients in the media, hospitality, healthcare, advertising, and marketing industries. The whole design process requires serious consulting, creativity and effective execution using both digital and print formats. Mark’s graphic design services and an exhibition of some of his best works are available on his website. Mark Alvarado is widely traveled and a big fan of archery, a hobby he developed at a young age. Some of the countries he has been to include Germany and Austria, and also plan on going to Greece to enjoy the much-touted beautiful scenery.