How To Design Your Own Marketing Materials Faster
By: Marilyn Wo
Tags: Branding, Entrepreneur, Startup, Design, Marketing

How To Design Your Own Marketing Materials Faster

For those who love to DIY and don’t wish to outsource graphic design

As I speak with many prospects in the efforts to grow my graphic design business, I’ve come across many businesses that prefer to outsource design work as well as many people who’d rather do it themselves.

There’s no need to hire a graphic designer if you wish to learn to design and create your own marketing materials. On the one hand, it’s one way to keep your business costs lower. On the other, you can truly pick up these skills on your own. I used to be you, completely self-taught. Which means, you can do it too.

Although I have a team of designers now, I used to spend hours fixing photos, pixels, colours, arranging text to fit images and making thousands of redo and undo actions on Photoshop, Indesign and Illustrator.

Designing stuff to me is like sipping tea and doing nothing. Like meditation, it is that therapeutic. I could do it for days at one stretch. It could be the same for you. Dabbling with design tools takes time, but you may prefer doing it yourself because you simply enjoy the process.

Even with countless advice saying you should outsource design work to save you more time and sanity to grow your business, you just want that freedom and control to be able to shift things around whenever you want. I get that.

But you are not a designer by profession. You have a business to run, and you want to get things done fast, not freaking four hours trying to be someone you are not and to find your day gone, never to get it back again. You want to quickly learn the ropes to know where to put things together so that your designs pop.

You are your worst client and perfectionism gets in the way…a lot!

Chances are you could be a startup founder, content creator or a marketing professional who simply needs to churn out branded designs to promote your content and business on an ongoing basis.

You know you need to pretty up your materials because no matter how great your content is, nobody is going to take a second look at them unless they look awesome. That’s also one reason why Canva exists and many people like you are loving it.

Truth is, you don’t need to have design talent if there’s such a thing at all. Though it isn’t that easy if you are not a born designer, artist or if you can’t draw. It’s not impossible if you do the prep work before you start designing your own marketing materials:

#1: Put yourself in your audience’s shoes

Photo by Hermes Rivera on Unsplash

If you are just getting started, who do you work with? If you have an existing business, who are you currently working with and who do you serve? If there’s rule #0, it could be “identify your audience”. Do good research at this point and you will save hours each day down the road.

When you are creating marketing materials, you may be giving away valuable information, telling a story and something that has to be effective in getting attention. It should not just be attractive to your eyes, but to those whom you wish to work with and those who will benefit from your products and services. Most likely you don’t serve everybody, hence you should create something that’s for your target audience only.

In the early days, I used to design for everybody and that cost me at least two hours every day changing the design multiple times. I was never satisfied with the design because when I got inspired by a nice design I saw somewhere, I adapted it to my own marketing materials. Then I got inspired by another and changed the designs.

#2: Create a brand guide of your audience

University of the Arts Helsinki via Behance

A brand guide does not have to be complicated or too elaborate. You may call it a style guide or a brand style guide. It’s commonly known to be distributed to contributors who are working on your materials and need references on how to create content for you.

Even if you are working on your designs alone, you need one because you want to bring your message across in one tone today and the same tone on another day. You want your marketing materials to be consistent all the time across all channels. This guide is your reference to have the end in mind first before you design anything.

Without a brand guide, you’re like a lost captain of a ship with no compass out in the open sea. In the case of design, without this guide, you have to spend time thinking about what colours, fonts or illustrations to use every time you want to create something. That slows you down even before you start working on your designs.

With a brand guide, all you need to do is create it once with your target audience in mind. Every time you design something to show your target audience, be it a lead magnet, blog post featured image or social media image, you already have a guide to refer to.

#3: Improve your workflow

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

You may need to design an email newsletter today and a workbook tomorrow. They may be different items used for a different medium, but their graphic elements, images, textures and layout can be repurposed.

All designs may have different text or images, but there’s always a common workflow to create each of them, which you will want to improve upon to design anything faster.

Here are ways to improve some common workflows: