Often times when we are creating an application, the data we use determines what we show to the user. For example, in a to-do application, we may have multiple to-do list items. In Vue, it is easy to display multiple data points through the v-for attribute in our Vue templates.
Let’s suppose we have some data we are storing on a single page component. Our .vue document looks a bit like this:
As we move closer to spring, we’re going to see a change in typography styles come with it. While we always need new serifs and sans serifs to design with, in the spring, it’s not uncommon to use more nature-inspired and whimsical fonts to usher in the warmer temps, wedding season, and holidays like Earth Day and Mother’s Day.
As such, the following list of best new fonts offers up a good range of fonts, from spring-inspired styles to more evergreen selections.
Alti is a geometrical sans serif font with a single style. Inspired by modernism and Art Deco, Alti combines extra-tall ascenders (see the lowercase “d”) with eccentric angles (the lowercase “e”) and balance (the capital “H”).
Antodits is a handwritten font that looks similar to something we might scribble on a Post-it note, a moving box, or a label. If you want to give logos, hero images, social media banners, and other graphics a casual hand-drawn feel, this would be a fun one to play with.
AW Conqueror Sans is a combination of geometric and humanist sans serif styles. There are 16 styles available, and the font designer recommends using them for different moods or tones. The AW Conqueror Sans family could be the one you use for various brands while giving each a unique style of their own.
Birra is an interesting family of fonts. Unlike the usual typography styles and weights we’re accustomed to (e.g., Thin, Heavy, Italic), Birra’s styles are inspired by different types of beer and the breweries they’re found in — Stout, Saison, Pils, and more.
Boby Marlyn Script is a delicate cursive font in just one style. The designer suggests using it for romantic themes, so it would go nicely with matters related to wedding planning, florist shops, relationship retreats, and parenting blogs. It could also work well on marketing images and banners around holidays like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.
The release of Delvard has brought us three new fonts: Delvard Serif Display, Delvard Serif Subhead, and Delvard Serif Text. There are 24 styles in this collection of art nouveau-inspired serifs, so there’s a lot you can do with this creative and legible font.
Evoque Text is a humanist serif family of 14 fonts. While there are bold styles that would work effectively in headlines, this font was explicitly designed to give website visitors a comfortable reading experience over long passages.
Forme Grotesque and Forme Grotesque Arabic is a sans serif font inspired by 19th century British Grotesque font styles. Forme Grotesque is a beautiful multilingual font that would be a great addition to various websites.
Gamer Station comes in two styles: Regular and Outline. This cartoon-inspired typography would be a good one to use on websites that sell kids’ products and experiences — books, toys, entertainment centers, etc. It could also be instrumental in gaming app design.
Hyperpolar is a retro all-caps font inspired by 1950s crime stories. While the gritty vibe is most obvious in the Brush styles, the Regular and Outline styles take a more subdued approach. If you’re looking to add drama or intrigue to your logo, headers, or marketing graphics, you have obvious and subtle ways of playing it up with this font.
LargePoint is a bold sans serif font in two styles — Sharp and Rounded — with eight weights apiece. While the font was initially designed for a sports brand, it looks great in editorial headlines. So, if you’re designing a news site, blog, or literary publication that pushes out high-impact stories, consider using this font to style your headlines.
Monttocks Script Font is an elegant handwritten font that comes in two styles. The tight cursive lettering looks authentic, which could be an excellent way to add a personal touch to websites representing female entrepreneurs or small business owners. (Check out Marie Forleo’s site, and you’ll see what I mean.)
Räder is a sans serif font inspired by vintage road signage. Unlike today’s signage, old road signs prioritized both beauty and clarity of message. Because of its roots, this font and its 16 weights would be an effective way to design attention-grabbing headers.
Rosales is a versatile humanist font. It comes with eight weights, eight italic variants, and two alternative sets of capital letters if you prefer something more stylistic than the basic sans serif. Because of the great variety in character sets and styles, Rosales can be used to improve the look and legibility of text in any part of your website or app.
Yellow Sunflower is a calligraphy font that exudes warmth and friendliness. There’s only one style available, and it would work best in display settings and in conjunction with a neutral sans serif.
The post 15 Best New Fonts, March 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
The email channel is known for multiple advantages. It is convenient to implement practically, offers many options, and has a fantastic ROI of up to 4200%.
But we also face problems, the most disappointing of which is people ignore emails, not performing the desired action, or worst of all unsubscribing. Why does it happen?
The web is constantly progressing. It offers many tools like modern HTML template builders, ESP services, and other digital assistants that help us at all stages. But even the best tools are not enough; the secret of success still rests with us.
In this post we’ll cover the 7 cardinal sins of email marketing, to help you avoid them.
I can define this mistake as probably the worst. It’s worse than broken links, incorrect dates, or prices. Even more harmful than ugly design.
We lose a lot when postponing email strategy implementation. Beginners often focus all their attention on the content, social media activities, SEO issues… All that is important, right. But ignoring email campaigns is a hard fail.
Thousands of visitors never come again to your website. In other words, they leave the very first levels of the marketing funnel. While regular emailing keeps them engaged and prevents churn.
So delays here are only profitable for competitors. Don’t wait until you collect “enough” contacts. Start as soon as possible.
Frequency matters too. Don’t bomb people with emails; it annoys and causes unsubscribes. Email frequency is an individual parameter depending on many factors.
A fundamental axiom: people unsubscribe when emails are irrelevant. The same goes for neglected expectations. Even the best content with next-gen features won’t save the situation.
I mentioned the email frequency a bit above. Notice that if you announce the weekly emails but send them every day, this is an example of ignoring expectations. Be honest with readers.
Another typical issue is off-topic. If your subscribers are waiting for content related to smartphones, send them newsletters about smartphones, not dresses or domestic turtles :)
But in some cases, getting off-topic can be good. It all depends on the target audience, actual situation, and communication style.
Once again, relevance is vital. So we must avoid generic emails. Instead, especially if your contact list is extensive enough, apply all the possible parameters: age, gender, location, customers history, etc.
Where to get the respective data? A typical solution is to use update preferences forms in emails or on the website. Let clients choose the topics that are interesting for them.
Use surveys, sign-in forms, AI-based techniques of segmentation… Smart algorithms are great helpers that track clients’ behavior and then process the data for segmentation purposes.
The better we know our subscribers, the deeper we segment the contact list. It allows sending precisely targeted newsletters to respective segments.
As Hubspot stats say, personalized emails’ open rate is 26% higher, and their click-through rate is 14% better. But even besides index data, poor personalization is just nonsense today.
Clients are looking for content that matches their preferences, so marketers have to consider these expectations. Segmentation and dynamic range are essential here, but they are not the only techniques.
Everything is much more sophisticated here, in addition to personalized subjects and content. Another solution is to generate recommendations that include the previously browsed products.
AI-powered automation comes to help. Machines will upgrade the classical personalization to the next level called hyper-personalization.
It’s simply unacceptable to send non-responsive emails today. With so many people opening email on different devices, this is a huge fail.
The modern world is full of gadgets and devices. Email has been opened on smartphones more frequently than on desktop PCs and notebooks in recent years. Up to 70% of readers will read messages on mobiles very soon. No wonder that responsivity turned into a mobile priority.
Regarding layout and design, there are no problems: modern template editors are featured with automated responsivity. But mobile-first means not only layout/design adjustment for mobiles, full-width buttons, or larger fonts. We have to work with content too. Don’t overwrite text remember that recipients read inbox emails on the run.
Just imagine yourself reading emails in the cafe or cab. And ask yourself: is everything convenient? Would you take the desired action on the run?
People are quite skeptical of new brands. We need to do our best to attract them. So everything must be done professionally.
The best solution: be a perfectionist. If newsletters look amateurish, they are likely to repel.
Being amateurish will also ruin your brand identity and reduce customers’ trust. Pay close attention to design, stick to your corporate style, analyze each detail in the context of overall harmony.
Testing is vital. Before sending an email campaign, check it via Litmus or Email on Acid to be sure that message looks just as planned. These tools allow testing email rendering by +90 combinations of email clients, devices, and OS.
Knowledge is power. Always try and test your marketing strategies. Are you satisfied with your actual performance? Run A/B tests and focus on the most significant wins and failures.
Of course, threats are not limited to these seven failures. The last piece of advice: never ignore trends.
Accessibility? Don’t forget about clients with special requirements. Get whitelisted and incorporate these technologies in your campaigns.
And constantly strive for perfection. With this doctrine, you’ll win!
Featured image via Pexels.
The post 7 Worst Fails in Email Marketing first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
“Minimum Viable Product,” or “MVP,” is a concept of agile development and business growth. With a minimum viable product, you focus on creating the simplest, most basic version of your product, web application, or code possible.
Minimum viable products include just enough features to attract early adopters and validate your idea in the early stages of the development lifecycle. Choosing an MVP workflow can be particularly valuable in the software environment because it helps teams receive, learn from, and respond to feedback as quickly as possible.
The question is, how exactly do you define the “minimum” in MVP? How do you know if your MVP creation is basic enough while still being “viable”?
The concept of “Minimum Viable Product” comes from the Lean Start-up Methodology, introduced by Eric Ries. The purpose of MVP is to help companies quickly create versions of a product while collecting validated insights from customers for each iteration. Companies may choose to develop and release minimum viable products because they want to:
Aside from allowing your company to validate an idea for a product without building the entire concept from scratch, an MVP can also reduce the demand on a company’s time and resources. This is why so many smaller start-ups with limited budgets use the MVP and lean production strategy to keep costs as low as possible.
When you’re building a Minimum Viable Product, you’re concentrating on developing only the most “essential” features that need to be in that product. For instance, you might be building a shopping app for a website. For the app to be “viable,” it would need to allow customers to search through products and add them to a basket or shopping cart. The app would also need a checkout feature and security components.
However, additional functionality, like the ability to send questions about an item to a customer service team or features that allow clients to add products to a “wish list,” may not be necessary straight away. Part of defining a minimum viable product is understanding what it isn’t. For instance, an MVP is not:
When finding the “minimum” in a minimum viable product, the primary challenge is ensuring the right balance. Ideally, you need your MVP to be as essential, cost-effective, and straightforward as possible so that you can create several iterations in a short space of time. The simpler the product, the easier it is to adapt it, roll it out to your customers, and learn from their feedback.
However, developers and business leaders shouldn’t get so caught up focusing on the “Minimum” part of Minimum Viable Product that they forget the central segment: “Viable”; your product still needs to achieve a specific purpose.
So, how do you find the minimum in your MVP?
First, you’ll need to determine what your product needs to do to be deemed viable. What goal or target do you hope to achieve with your new product? For instance, in the example we mentioned above, where you’re creating an ecommerce shopping app, the most basic thing the app needs to do is allow customers to shop for and purchase items on a smartphone.
Consider the overall selling point of your product or service and decide what the “nice to haves” are, compared to the essential features. For instance, your AR app needs to allow people to interact with augmented digital content on a smartphone, but it may not need to work with all versions of the latest AR smart glasses.
Once you know the goal or purpose of your product, the next step is to make a list of features or capabilities you can rank according to importance. You can base your knowledge of what’s “most important” for your customers by looking at things like:
Once you’ve defined your most important features, the next stage is simply building the simplest version of your product. Build the item according to what you consider to be its most essential features and ask yourself whether it’s serving its purpose.
If your solution seems to be “viable,” you can roll it out to your target audience or a small group of beta testers to get their feedback and validate the offering. Use focus groups and market interviews to collect as much information as possible about what people like or dislike.
Using your feedback, you can begin to implement changes to your “minimum” viable product to add more essential features or functionality.
Minimum viable products are evident throughout multiple industries and markets today – particularly in the digitally transforming world. For instance, Amazon might be one of the world’s most popular online marketplaces today, but it didn’t start that way. Instead, Jeff Bezos began purchasing books from distributors and shipping them to customers every time his online store received an order to determine whether the book-selling landscape would work.
When Foursquare first began, it had only one feature. People could check-in at different locations and win badges. The gamification factor was what made people so excited about using the service. Other examples include:
Your definition of a “minimum viable product” may not be the same as the definition chosen by another developer or business leader. The key to success is finding the right balance between viability – and the purpose of your product, and simplicity – or minimizing your features.
Start by figuring out what your product simply can’t be without, and gradually add more features as you learn and gain feedback from your audience. While it can be challenging to produce something so “minimalistic” at first, you need to be willing to release those small and consistent iterations if you want to leverage all the benefits of an MVP.
Suppose you can successfully define the meaning of the words “Minimum” and “Viable” simultaneously with your new product creations. In that case, the result should be an agile business, lean workflows, and better development processes for your entire team.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post What is the “Minimum” in Minimum Viable Product? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Are you looking for a unique font that will make your next project shine? Or maybe you need a typeface with a beautiful design and rich history behind it. Luckily, mini-sites for fonts allow us to creatively explore a font’s origins and history. We know (from our own experience) how important it is for UI and UX designers to have a variety of fonts for our designs.
Now that 2022 is here, it’s time to expand our font collection. That’s why, after extensive research, we have created the ultimate list of the best 16 creative mini websites for fonts.
Are you ready to take a look at the most creative, cute, and fun font websites available on the market?
This website is about the history of one of the most popular fonts on the market, GT Eesti. As you will notice, the typeface has a long history (more than 80 years) and was recently reborn in Switzerland.
As for the font, GT Eesti is a flexible geometric sans serif that can be used in almost any project. As one of the most creative websites for fonts, full of animations and interesting information, GT Eesti quickly made it onto our list.
Are you looking for a font that combines calligraphy and elegance and sits between the sans and serif styles?
Then GT Ultra is just what you need. We loved how the creator tells the story and structure of Ultra with beautiful animations on this unique, one-page website.
Maru is by far the cutest design on this list. The website is a vertical narrative of the typeface’s history.
The typeface was inspired by the designer’s travels to Japan, and the mini-site fully reflects that. Best of all, Maru also includes a great collection of cute emojis and stickers.
GT Flexa is a very flexible font that you can easily use for a responsive UI design. We enjoyed navigating through the minimalist mini-site and exploring the creation and history of Flexa.
Flexa also offers a free trial that allows you to try the font before you buy.
Super’s mini-site reminded us of earlier decades. GT Super is a vintage typeface inspired by the serif fonts of the 70s and 80s.
Therefore, it can beautifully frame nostalgic designs. The font was designed by Noel Leu and is available in two styles (text and display).
GT Zircon is located in a place where creativity meets minimalism. This is one of our favorite mini-sites for fonts.
The site showcases Zirkon’s history and design process through creative graphics, videos, and animations.
This mini-site allows you to explore the history, style, and character overview of GT America, a contemporary font family.
The designer has used elements from American Gothic and European Grotesque to create one of the most flexible typefaces available.
Reto Moser recently designed one of the most popular GT typefaces, the Alpina “Workhorse” serif.
This innovative, one-page website tells us the story of Alpina and explains how the designer jazzed up, posed, and flexed the classic book typography to create a wide range of typeface variations.
As the name suggests, this mini-site is inspired by classic cinematic movie reels. If you’re looking for a font inspired by the fascinating world of cinemas, Cinetype is simply the best choice. And on this creative website, you will learn all the reasons why.
When it comes to monolinear geometric typefaces, Haptik is one of the best. This innovative mini-website tells how the Haptik font came to be and highlights the history of the font.
The hand gesture gifs at the bottom of this one-page site are some of the most creative mini-videos we have seen in a long time.
Walsheim is a typeface designed by Noel Leu. This mini-site explains how the designer was inspired by the fascinating poster designs of Otto Baumberger, a successful Swiss painter of the 20th century (1889-1961). If you like fonts with a deep backstory, Walsheim is a must-have for you.
The Prospectus mini-site is specially designed to look like a newspaper. And let us say: the result is extraordinary.
This one-page website explores the origins, construction phase, and classifieds of the Prospectus typeface, allowing us to experiment in real-time with the weight, height, tracking, and size of the typeface.
Mort Modern is a unique serif typeface designed by Riley Cran in 2018. The mini-site provides information about the typeface in a creative, cartoon-like way.
We really liked this responsive, one-page website because it is elegant and colorful at the same time. The font is available in 56 (!) styles and promises to beautifully frame any kind of modern design.
The Tofino mini-site is a creative, one-page portal that allows us to discover one of the most adventurous Swiss-style fonts on the market.
Tofino is a top choice for any travel-related project and comes in 75 unique styles. When it comes to creating a well-crafted report on a font, there’s nothing better than this.
We love websites that offer both a dark and light theme. And the Faction mini-site is one of them.
In this mini-site, you’ll learn how the Faction typeface was created and why it’s one of the most popular display typefaces for modern designs.
If you’re looking for a unique sans serif font with extended multilingual support, Moriston is the font for you.
In this one-page mini-site, Riley Cran tells the story behind this typeface and explains why Moriston is the best choice for Risograph posters, monograms, and more.
The post 16 Best Typeface Micro-Sites first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
While working on establishing short- and long-term goals with a client, my focus was establishing horizon two and three objectives in the McKinsey Three Horizons Model.
For those who are not aware of this framework, horizons two and three focus on new and next-generation features and functionality. At the top of my priorities’ list for this project was the adoption of an API gateway.
In this article, we are going to explore all the features provided by mule Email Connector. Email connector helps you to Send, Mark, List, and Delete Emails. We see a simple demo for each of these features now.
Before starting with developing the Mule Application we need to do some configuration settings in the Gmail account.
The words risk, threat, and vulnerability are often confused or used interchangeably when reading about computer security, so let’s first clarify the terminology:
A typical implementation of a chatbot user interface:
The XSS vulnerability is in the second step — when entering text including malicious Javascript code, the XSS attack is fulfilled when the web browser is running the injected code:
<script>alert(document.cookie)</script>
For exploiting an XSS vulnerability the attacker has to trick the victim to send malicious input text. It can be done through one of the following ways:
Few things are more important to a web designer or developer’s chances of success than having the proper workflow. The term “workflow” applies to the set of standardized steps you or your company uses to create, test, and deploy designs or products.
Over the years, as development processes have evolved, so too have the workflows experts use to bring their ideas to life. The MVP workflow, or “Minimum Viable Product” strategy, is one of the most popular options in 2022.
Here’s what you need to know about the MVP workflow and how it differs from some of the other standard workflows developers may be used to.
As mentioned above, the designer/developer workflow is a series of steps used by experts in the web design world to achieve a creative goal. The process includes the steps taken to start a project, evolve it, and finish it. Since software is never developed without tools, the technology you’ll access throughout the development process is also considered in most workflows.
An example of a standard development workflow might look like this:
Now you know what a developer workflow looks like, you can begin to assess the concept of the “MVP” workflow. The term “MVP” stands for Minimum Viable Product.
The idea of “Minimum Viable Product” applies to a range of industries, from education to healthcare and government entities. This term comes from lean start-up practices and focuses heavily on the value of learning and changing during the development process.
When you adapt your workflow to focus on an MVP, you’re essentially adjusting your focus to a point where you can create a stripped-back version of something new – like an app or a website. The MVP is built just with the core features (the minimum), so you can bring the idea to market and test it as quickly as possible.
For instance, if your goal were to create an attractive new website for a client, an MVP would focus on implementing the crucial initial tools, and nothing else. While you may create checkout pages, product pages, and other aspects of the site, you wouldn’t populate it with content or start experimenting with bonus widgets and apps.
So, how does this offer a better alternative to the standard workflow?
Simply put, an MVP workflow is quick, agile, and easy. The idea is you can validate key concepts with speed, fail quickly, and learn just as fast. Rather than having to build an entire app and almost start over from scratch every time you find an error, you can race through the iteration and development process.
MVP workflows are also highly appealing to start-ups and entrepreneurs hoping to validate ideas without a massive amount of upfront investment.
Still confused? The easiest way to understand how an MVP workflow works is to look at an example.
Let’s start with a conceptual example. Say you were building a voice transcription service for businesses. The desired features of this product might include the ability to download transcription, translate them into different languages, and integrate them into AI analytics tools.
However, using the MVP approach, you wouldn’t try to accomplish all of your goals with your software at once. Instead, you’d focus on something simple first – like the ability to download the transcripts. Once you confirm you can do that, you can start a new workflow for the next most important feature for the app.
One excellent example of a company with an MVP approach is Airbnb. The entrepreneurs behind this unicorn company, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, didn’t have a lot of cash to build a business with at first. They had to use their own apartment to validate the idea of creating a website where people could share their available “space” in a home or apartment with the public.
To begin, Airbnb only created a very basic website, published photos of their property, and waited to see the results. After discovering people were genuinely interested in renting another person’s home, the company was able to begin experimenting with new ideas to make a site where people could list their properties for travelers.
There are a lot of benefits to the MVP workflow – particularly when it comes to gaining agility and developing new products quickly. However, there are downsides too.
Pros
Cons
If you believe an MVP workflow might be effective for you, the first step is defining your “Minimum Viable Product.” The app, website, or product you design needs to align with your team’s strategic goals, so think about what your company is trying to achieve at this moment – before you get started. If you have limited resources, or specific purposes, like improving your reputation as a reliable company, now might not be the right time to develop a new MVP.
Ask what purpose your minimum viable product will serve and what kind of market you’re going to be targeting. You’ll need to know your target customer to help you test the quality and performance of each iteration of your MVP. Once you know what your ideal “product” is, ask yourself what the most important features will be.
You can base these decisions on things like:
For example, if you’re producing an AI chatbot that helps companies to sort through customer inquiries, the most important “initial feature” may be the ability to integrate that bot into existing websites and apps owned by the company.
Once you have your hierarchy of most valuable features for your minimum viable product, you can translate this into an action plan for development. Remember, although you’re focusing on the “minimum” in development, your product still needs to be “viable.” In other words, it still needs to allow your customer to achieve a specific goal.
While the MVP workflow approach might not be the right solution for every development or design team, it can work very effectively in the right circumstances. The MVP approach doesn’t minimize the importance of understanding market problems and delivering value. Instead, the focus is on delivering quick value that gradually increases and evolves over time.
As many developers and designers know, the most useful form of product validation in most cases is real-world validation. When your customers have had an opportunity to use a product on a day-to-day basis, they can provide much more effective feedback.
Just keep in mind that committing to the MVP approach also means changing your workflow and committing to iterations – otherwise, other features may never be completed. You’ll need to be willing to work quickly and in small bursts without getting too heavily caught up in one feature or functionality.
Featured image via Pexels.
The post How to Get Started with the MVP Workflow first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
There was a point at which I was very close to losing my business, and I didn’t realize how close.
I wasn’t always a good planner, and I didn’t plan to start an agency. One day I was a freelance graphic designer, my job list grew, I hired some help, and suddenly I was managing a team.
There isn’t a guidebook for new business owners, you have to learn on the job, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. We expanded rapidly from two to four people, then seven, and suddenly we hit 16 employees in just 18 months. It was pretty scary and felt like driving on the freeway without brakes. A client shared a story that they were turning over $20m, and the owner was only taking home $30k. It felt like where I was headed. At that point, I could easily have lost it all.
I took a hard look at the numbers and realized that we were barely breaking even, let alone profitable. That needed to change to stabilize the business and regain control of my operations. The change wasn’t easy, and there were some hard lessons, but 11 years later, with a strong local team and 40+ awards for our work, I’m thankful for that wake-up call.
There are other people in my position struggling with the same issues I faced, so I’d like to share the four key things I did that helped turn things around and move us from surviving to thriving.
I wanted to do it all, and as the business owner, it was hard to turn down a new client. Our instincts are to help, and declining opportunities feels wrong. In our industry, digital agencies, especially web design agencies, try to cover all bases from marketing, SEO, adwords, design, photography, and coding. Everyone wants to be a one-stop shop for clients. I used to be that person: I would wash your car and shine your shoes if I could.
Do not give in to that fear.
When you’re a generalist, you spread yourself too thin. I know: a decade ago, we were offering dozens of services outside of the web design realm: packaging, branding, copywriting, sticker design, SEO, hosting, analytics, you name it, we provided it. We used over seven different CMS for our projects. If a client wanted it, we tried to offer it, no matter how unsuitable it was for us.
On the surface, we fulfilled our projects, and our clients were always thrilled with the results. But below the surface, our operations were dissolving into a mess. Our eyes weren’t on the prize; we were always chasing after each little job for cash. It took too much time to learn new skills. When I looked at our timesheets and deducted the unbillable hours, our projects would hardly break even.
What hurt us even further is that with diversifying, we had to manage multiple workflows, software, and systems: Sketch, Illustrator, Photoshop, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Google Analytics, Final Cut Pro, etc. It was expensive with minimal return. It was like an Olympic swimmer signing up for a swimming-diving-ice-skating club when their passion is swimming.
So I took a step back. I boiled it down to what we enjoyed and excelled at. Ask yourself: for what do you want to be known? For us, it was psychology-driven, conversion-focused web design. This was the service our team had the most skills in and collectively could give the best value to our clients. Once I’d figured that out, it was easy to eliminate those other services and specialize.
You can niche down by service or industry and be the specialist in what you offer.
The first red flag that my business was in trouble was when I said to my accountant, “I feel like my business is doing great.” He replied, “I don’t care how you feel. The facts are in the numbers. Show me your accounts, and I’ll tell you if you’re actually doing well.” As an intuition-driven guy, it was a real eye-opener; I’d only ever relied on gut instinct.
At one point, we had a ton of work coming in, so I hired a few juniors to help the rest of the team. The team grew to 16, and the vibes in the studio were great, but the numbers weren’t. Instead of increasing efficiency, projects took 40 hours longer than they should have done. Why? The seniors and mid-level designers were taking time out to train the juniors! Reassessing the team showed me I needed to hire experienced staff, so projects ran on time and budget. It was a hard decision but a necessary one to keep us afloat.
The crucial numbers for any design agency are your timesheets, where bottlenecks lie, how much you’re spending, how long a project takes; these determine your actual margins. Setting up quantitative software like Toggl, Gantt, and Asana were a game-changer for us. They gave our project management real purpose and potential. Knowing the average hours our primary type of project took made it easy to give clients realistic deadlines, anticipate the need for fresh hiring, and know when our plates were full. You do not want to bite off more than you can chew.
You can’t please everyone, and frankly, you shouldn’t be trying to. One type of bait won’t attract every kind of fish. First, identify the type of fish you want to catch, the pond where this type of fish lives, and finally, bait your hook with something that type of fish can’t resist.
Your sales team should be able to identify them instantly, and all you then need to do is streamline your team, process, and systems towards being the best fit for them.
There are many different marketing avenues you can go down, but go down too many, and it becomes a tangled web of confused messaging.
Remember, just because your competitors are doing it does not mean it’s the most effective approach for your target market.
There are really only inbound and outbound types of strategies, and it’s a great idea to list out the pros and cons (and the ROI of each) concerning your target market. Or, you can approach marketing based on your existing skillset — for example, if you detest being in front of a camera and don’t want to do video marketing, then just don’t do it.
Identify what works for you, and then be consistent. Consistency is the secret to a successful marketing strategy.
The post How I Saved My Design Agency & Tripled My Profits first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
