The Graphic Designer's Guide to Creative Marketing: Finding & Keeping Your Best Clients [Paperback]

Linda Cooper Bowen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 22, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0471293148 | ISBN-13: 978-0471293149 | Edition: 1

You know you've got the talent, now let them know it-your complete guide to finding, winning, and keeping good clients Written by a graphic designer and successful marketing consultant, this book is the most complete guide available to marketing your services, with clear, practical, step-by-step instructions on every aspect of graphic design marketing, including:
* Developing and implementing a marketing plan
* Researching prospective clients
* Creating effective marketing materials
* Cold calling and follow-ups
* Effective communication
* Dressing for success
* Resumes, cover letters, and portfolios
* Proposals, bids, and contracts
* Keeping good clients-account management
Also included are sample business forms, contracts, proposals, letters, and checklists, along with stunning full-color examples of successful self-promotion campaigns for every budget. Throughout the book, there are fascinating and instructive interviews with clients as well as graphic designers from across the country who share what they've learned about marketing and managing graphic design services.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Bowen's advice is reality-based, kick-from-behind writing. In addition to clear commentary about marketing methods, it provides checklists and documentation systems, sample proposals, contracts, correspondence examples, phone contact scripts and questions to ask prospective clients--all of the language of successful marketing. Putting her ideas into effect can give you the presence of a fully professional designer in the target client's mind. She also talks strongly about the need for good account management, after you've hooked a good client, and the pleasure of ongoing projects.

There are interviews with working designers from the design jungles of New York and California and conversations with smaller market places across the nationabout marketing as a state of mind to suit your preferred workplace. A color section of the book pictures some pretty self-promotion pieces, mostly mail out tchotchkes. All of these self-promotion packages are joyfully colorful and playful.

Creative Marketing is itself a useful package of helpful advice about a vital part of the graphic designer's business plans and a life of creative well-being. -- Byron Ferris, Communication Arts, Design Annual 1999

From the Inside Flap

Don't be afraid of the M word. Marketing is not an option, it's a necessity. Finding and keeping good clients is the key to a thriving graphic design career, and your success is dependent not on talent alone but on effective marketing and management skills. Today's increasingly competitive environment demand that designers have a practical grasp of marketing principles in order to create new business. You will discover what makes your practice unique and how to develop a special niche in the marketplace. In this comprehensive guide to creative marketing, you will learn real-world strategies and systems that not only work, but are rewarding and fun.

The purpose of this book id twofold: to help you develop a solid understanding of all aspects of marketing graphic design services, and to equip you with the necessary tools you can immediately out to work in your own business. Written by Linda Cooper Bowen, a former graphic designer and successful design marketing consultant with nearly two decades in the business, The Graphic Designers Guide to Creative Marketing is based on her own experiences as well as those of many outstanding design professionals and their clients who share candid comments, tips, and insights.

Writing in an informal, motivational style, Bowen covers everything you need to know, from how to develop and execute effective marketing plans to knowing what to wear to meetings with prospective clients. In addition to clear, step-by-step instructions, she also provides a gold mine of useful forms, documents, and checklists, including sample proposals, contracts, correspondence, telephone scripts, client survey questionnaires, plus a full-color section showing a wide range of successful marketing and self-promotion campaigns-from modest, low budget mailings to lavish, high-quality packages.

No matter what your level of experience - student to working professional, in-house, freelance, or small studio - the Graphic Designer's Guide to Creative marketing is a valuable professional resource you won't want to be without.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (February 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471293148
• ISBN-13: 978-0471293149
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #941,754 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A practical, chatty, well-informed guide to selling design., June 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Graphic Designer's Guide to Creative Marketing: Finding & Keeping Your Best Clients (Paperback)

Cooper-Bowen, much-published writer on the business of graphic design, usually addresses designers who are more comfortable with art than with profit-making. This book is no exception, but from that don't assume that the contents are either condescending or superficial. You should also not assume, if you already think of your practice as a sophisticated business, that this text will tell you nothing new. While we're not talking advanced economics here, the best advice Creative Marketing offers may be its frank assessment of when to rely on outside experts, and when to trust yourself. In plain language, the book tells you all the things you never learned in school about building a design business, with as much consideration for the artistic and personal rewards as the financial. Far from trying to force designers to fit a cold, big-business model, Cooper-Bowen's approach has everything to do with knowing exactly who you are. She encourages directness, individuality, and honesty as the best tools for long-term success. She presents experience-based (as opposed to theoretical) outlines for business plans, marketing plans, prospecting, and sales: explicit, 1-2-3 checklists structure a process most of us approach intuitively. That structure can help you stay objective as you define your own strengths, weakness, and goals-one of the hardest tasks of entrepreneuring. These nuts-and-bolts proceedures are illustrated by case studies of actual studios, showing Cooper-Bowen's ideas in action. The situations and personalities sound very familiar, and the solutions may elicit a few sighs of relief from those who've been struggling to remake themselves in some corporate mold. Creative Marketing gives great attention to personal and written communication, an area in which many visual communicators tend not to shine. Her clear guidelines for good letter, telephone, and personal presentation, backed by relevant and convincing examples, set realistic goals for effectively polishing your own image. Although I have to admit that, as an editor, I wish the author had given her own text-particularly her punctuation-another round of revision, the content itself is unusually realistic, and so precisely tailored to its audience as to be well worth the small investment for any small studio owner who suspects they could be doing better. I wish I'd read a book like this-and taken its advice-when I was struggling to make my freelance business fly. (from Nancy Bernard, Managing Editor of Critique Magazine.)

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The ABCs of marketing for every design professional, July 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Graphic Designer's Guide to Creative Marketing: Finding & Keeping Your Best Clients (Paperback)

Linda Cooper Bowen's guide to creative marketing is an essential step-by-step tool for any design professional -- at any level -- seeking to generate new business and improve their image. With such diverse and relevant topics as the role of the marketing manager, positioning your image, and successful promotion programs, she presents solid methods and easy ways to grow even an established design studio. I particularly appreciate the chapter on finding (and keeping) the best clients. It's the most important part of my own job, and I can sense the ways my firm will benefit from Cooper Bowen's expertise.