By: Sarah Rushakoff

One of my favorite things about marketing is putting myself in the shoes of the intended audience. What will catch their eye? What will they find important? How will their attention travel through the information we want them to see?

This blog is for you if you always dread creating the visual promos for your projects, or if you want your promotional materials to be more effective, or if you often find yourself revising over and over, trying to meet unclear expectations, or if you just want some guidance from someone with over 20 years in marketing and design! I want to help you develop a design process that feels easier and more satisfying.

Everyone’s process will be different, but I’ll share some steps that should help streamline any design project for marketing. This month, we'll walk through defining your client and target audience.

YOUR CLIENT AND AUDIENCE

It may sound obvious, but identifying your client is an essential step. My client could be a company I’m working with, or another department within my own company. If I’m working with a group of people, I narrow it down by asking who has approval/veto power for this project. That way, I know exactly who will be giving me direction. If I hear from anyone else, I can gently direct them back to my main contact, so I'm not wrangling (often contradictory) feedback from a bunch of people.

Sometimes, my client is me! When I’m doing a project where I have complete artistic control and approval, I find it helpful to think of myself as two different people: the client and the designer. When I’m wearing my client hat, I think about my overall goals for the project. Wearing my designer hat, I think  about using the materials I have to communicate clearly. Let’s blame my background in theatre—and my neurodivergent brain!—for the need to create characters for myself to play in order to function in different roles. That’s a whole ‘nother blog, y’all.

Anyway, if I had a dollar for every time a client tells me the audience is “everyone!” I’d have a lot of dollars. Narrowing down the audience is the responsibility of everyone on the marketing team, but as the designer I’ve often had to poke around to be sure. Knowing my audience helps me determine what elements and tactics to use.

We can use numerous demographic categories to identify an audience, casting a wide net by targeting certain ages, income brackets, or education levels. Need to narrow it down? We might want to reach only past customers, all the people who signed up for a mailing list, or, I dunno, folks who said they like the Beatles.

When I can envision what the client expects and how the target audience will take in the information, I can mindfully shape the visual message according to what I discover by changing my perspective.

I hope to see you back here next month, when we’ll talk about gathering materials for your design and choosing the right tools to create it.