Hope your short week after a long weekend wasn’t too short… was a little for Reaxion! đ
You’ll find a lot of what I pass on is food for thought – designers and marketers have a lot of thoughts! You never know when they’ll come in handy!
A few weeks ago I mentioned a bang for your buck strategy is to direct your advertising to your core past customers rather than a shotgun public advertising campaign. Now twist that idea around and look at YOUR suppliers! Do they have a stake in your success? Any of them fall over themselves to schmooze you for next year’s account? Now you have someone to help pay your ad bill!
So how does this work? A tried and true user of this method is our local chamber of commerce. At least once a month they mail 800+ newsletters and give the option for members to insert a brochure into the same envelope for a fee MUCH MORE REASONABLE than a Canada Post direct mailing. The chamber pays for their distribution and advertisers penetrate their chamber members’ offices- win win!
So how do you implement this? Well, I won’t dissect any possible politics involved, for instance, you don’t want an advertiser duplicating or providing your service, but if you have a “links” section on your site you might have your call list.
What’s a good advertising medium? Start with your website. If any of my hosted clients charged only $10 PER MONTH for an ad, the annual hosting budget would be covered! Add a couple bucks and you can put in for the company Christmas party!
Think of this idea every time you advertise to the public, you might be able to do it for free!
Well, well! Even marketers need to market themselves!
On August 28, 2009 we launched our new e-newsletter to help explain what the heck Reaxion Graphics does. Anything that helps us scream “WE DO PRINT, WE DO WEB, WE DO MARKETING, WE DO WHAT WE’VE NEVER DONE BEFORE” is a good thing! No doubt it will only give a glimpse (like this blog) but any exposure helps and it’s the next logical building block in any online marketing scheme.
This new platform is a fun and exciting way to inform and hopefully entertain our clients – ways to thank and reward our clients for their business.
Speaking of reward – yes – we hope to continue an ongoing contest into the weekly e-newsletter, again a reward for your business PLUS a reward for lending your ear! The rule in business marketing is “what’s in it for me”!
Here is a “fly-on-the-wall-on-crack” view of a website being created in two minutes!
What to watch out for: three major steps (1) Mock up in Photoshop (2) Creation of a coded site from “cut up” Photoshop graphics (3) upload and debugging of the live version!
What a loaded question! There are ten ways I could approach this subject. I think most of you have an idea what a designer does, and you see it every day. Every website and every inch of a newspaper or magazine was touched by a designer. But what about being a designer are they NOT telling you? What is expected beyond the list of programs you will learn at school or the 1 inch job listing?
I donât think two designers would give you the same answer. From my experience, no graphic design career is the same as the next, probably because of their random genetic makeup of geographic location (who provides the jobs in your areas, is the market saturated with designers), what the potential designer THOUGHT they wanted to do when they started their education (what were the misconceptions going in about what the career was about â personally I had no idea!), what they DID do when they were finished their education and found their first precious employment (did they have to grab that Corner Quick Print position to pay the bills rather than design Pepsiâs new logo?) and how long did they hold that position before moving on to the next one?
Why would those things affect a career? Geographically, for instance, if you are in a rural area, you are more likely to be creating brochures for farm equipment rather than flyers for hot DJs and chic art exhibits. What was the expectation going into school and what happened after? I thought I was going to be a multimedia designer, doing interactive CDs back when multimedia was the buzz word. A year after finding no opportunities in that area, I fell into print, which was the best ever! I find that is a major factor in deciding how many designers out there make it. If you are happy designing, it doesnât matter what you are designing, and the old adage of âpaying your duesâ rings very true. Talk about paying dues? I also wanted to freelance after school, and after a decade of âpaying my duesâ, I was finally ready! J
So, youâve probably realized I believe a true designer isnât born in the classroom, but is born in the field. The real world is filled with an infinity of potential design problems! You canât call yourself a true designer until you feel youâve seen it all, and eventually you will. You will have to finish that brochure with half the pictures you would have liked, or get the clientâs logo off a matchbook so you can design their highway billboard. Donât get me wrong, you need a good foundation of education in sound design principles, but you also have to enjoy what you do 24-7, enjoying problem solving hour to hour, and be expected to perform design miracles and fill roles you never dreamed of.
What unexpected roles come with being a designer? That can be determined by how large a firm is that employs you. Iâve found the majority of firms donât have 100 employees compartmentalized in their tasks. Often design companies will have a hand full of designers and even fewer sales and/or managing staff. That means consulting clients, travelling to meetings, job quoting, phone calls, product sourcing, IT, copy writing, photographer, etc., falls to the designer to get their clientâs job done. No matter how kick ass your poster design is, you may be the one to find a printer, a quality printer AND a printer at the right price â there alone are 3 more problems on top of design than you probably didnât learned in school, all with their own subset of problems!
Speaking of additional tasks, occasionally a design firm will do some material production in house â this can get interesting! In the past, just a few production duties Iâve completed in addition to the design are pressing designs onto t-shirts, cutting vinyl decals and applying them to signs and vehicles, folding booklets, stuffing envelopes, etc. And donât think anyone will be there the first time you do it to hold your hand, often you have to find a solution, research it, then do it to a quality level you can charge somebody for. I do have to admit the odd manual task is refreshing compared to sitting behind a desk all day!
I might have conveyed that everything Iâve mentioned is a pain and the negative side of designing… quite the opposite! This career is for those who love variety and the unexpected. Like many careers, it can move you to cities you thought youâd never move to, career roles you never dreamed of, and give you the unique ability to personally and directly impact the world with how youâve graphically delivered a message.
I have only touched on what a graphic designer does, this is destined to be an ongoing subject!
Reaxion Graphics was profiled in the Saturday, May 30, 2009 Brandon Sun. The column is called “Attention Shoppers” and is penned by reporter Colleen Cosgrove who “writes a column each week about the local business scene, focusing on the retail sector”.
I must say the Reaxion Graphics blurb turned out great without glaring errors (not like a blog you can go back and rewrite! đ Of course you can’t put your life story in 200 words (I tried), but I’m happy to say the message I’m trying to get to my local customers was delivered.
Below is my section of the column! I’m publishing it here since (a) it’s 12:07am and yesterday’s news, (b) it’s easier to do something and apologize later, and (c) I hope my second paragraph gave the proper props, but if that isn’t enough, I encourage anyone (especially small businesses) to go to www.brandonsun.com or email ccosgrove@brandonsun.com to send your information for YOUR profile! It’s excellent press and FREE. You can’t pass an opportunity like that up in small business, more on your advertising dollar in the future!
Here it is – hope the “web borrowed content gods” are in my favour!:
Reaxion Graphics – by Colleen Cosgrove, The Brandon Sun
Brandon’s newest web and print design company, Reaxion Graphics, has been quietly creating some of the region’s most eye-catching websites and print promotions for just over a year now.
Located at the entrance of The Town Centre parkade at 153 Eighth St., Reaxion (pronounced like reaction) is the brainchild of Neepawa native Scott Kasprick.
Kasprick got his start in the print industry at the Neepawa Press, and after a decade of bouncing around Manitoba, Kasrpick said he was glad to find a reason to set up shop in Brandon.
“I recognized Brandon as having a huge hole in the design market, especially when it came to the availability of contemporary experience and choice – primarily in the area of Internet design and marketing,” Kasprick said. “I knew the advantage of coming to a market that generally loses experienced designers to larger markets was a vacuum waiting to be filled.”
Thanks to his rural upbringing, Kasprick says his forte is his ability to identify with the local mindset.
“My goal is to exeed (my client’s) expectation by delivering results expected from firms in the big city to big companies,” he said. “I try to exceed the rural ‘good enough’ trap we sometimes expect. Everyone is good enough to deserve more.”
Although Reaxion’s focus is on raising the bar for marketing and web design and web hosting in Westman, Kasprick has clients across the country and says his “can-do” company knows no boundaries when it comes to wowing a crowd.
See how Reaxion can wow by emailing Kasprick at Scott@ReaxionGraphics.com.
