Choosing A Local Designer
As a designer I’ve never extolled the benefits of hiring a local designer, or indeed made any attempt to acquire clients on a local basis for the duration of my trading (around 7 years now) time.
The reason for this is that I’ve always felt that the world is my oyster and therefore proximity between myself and my customers is of no consequence to myself or them.
I still believe that, but I did read an interesting blog by a design firm a short distance from me called Zulu Creative, that did get me thinking about the benefits of having a more localised client/designer relationship.
With the permission of Zulu Creative, I’ve pasted their blog for you to read below:
I started Zulu because I found it really difficult to find a local agency that met my expectations of what an agency should do. After dealing with a lot of agencies all over the UK, including many of the best in London, I found it really surprising that Birmingham was not as well served with good quality design and advertising agencies.
Reasons for this range from client perception of local Birmingham agencies (as having insufficient depth and experience to meet their account needs), to the region’s poor image in terms of design. If we look at the Birmingham city image, I would suggest it does not adequately reflect the true nature of the area. As an adopted midlander, I had severe reservations about moving to Birmingham, not because I knew a great deal about the city, but because of the image that the city had.
I have now set up home and a business in Birmingham and feel passionate about the West Midlands region. Despite this, I would suggest that the same reservations I had, are still being experienced by many businesses and therefore, it is hardly surprising that when it comes to choosing an agency, Birmingham can often be at the bottom of the list.
So what can be done? To start with, the city needs to develop a coherent brand and apply it in a coherent fashion across all aspects of the city’s activity. Secondly, I believe the city should back itself and use local companies whenever it has the opportunity. I also think that local agencies really do need to raise their game. You can’t survive by selling hours, you need to work further upstream providing advice and consultancy that really understands the business drivers of the current environment.
Design can be great inspiration for attracting new clients and creating opportunities for new business. This vibrant and exciting approach needs to be fostered if we are to grip our present economic difficulties and innovate our way out of the present recession.
Being local has significant benefits. Many agencies will charge for every hour plus travelling expenses, and London agencies love coming to see you in Birmingham for a price!
The bottom line is: use a local agency, build a relationship, tell them what you want and what you expect and the rest is down to them. Together you can build a competitive position based on mutual benefit, look at agencies that have a good reputation and speak to their existing clients and most importantly, see if they are prepared to recommend the agency. Thats better than any credential pitch!
I think this piece got me thinking about the Midlands in general, and my place in the development of Birmingham as a vibrant city of enterprise. Zulu is right in the fact that Birmingham has a poor image … and perhaps instead of spending most of my time designing for London based firms (most of my clients are in the London area), I should make some effort to gain local clients and support the region.
Coincidentally our very new client Gym & Slim are based just streets away, yet out of hundreds of projects over the years, probably only about 3% or so have been even Midlands based.
We recently completed a newspaper advertisement for Gym & Slim, which I had the pleasure of viewing over my morning coffee this morning in our local observer! 
4 Responses to “Choosing A Local Designer”
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Well this certainly shows you another perspective on things!
To be honest though, I’m not sure how much luck I’d have punting for jobs in my local area. Although I live in a big city I think it would take a lot of effort for a small return. It might be worth a go though, and as far as web traffic goes I’m more likely to be found in a localised search, and I do have local clients, so that’s one thing that’s working out for me at the moment.
Hope everything is well with you Amanda, I’ve just got back from a well deserved break and finally got round to another blog post myself!
Matt
Well this year, once I get my new swanky office sorted out in my garden (because local clients tend to want to meet up), I’ll be making a clear effort to gain local clients and see how that goes and what effect it has on my business.
I’m especially interested to see what effect meetings have on profits and whether it would require higher prices for local clients if they insist on meetings. I suspect it would, but then perhaps they would be happy with that and willing to pay for the extra cost of extra personal attention over and above emails/telephone.
It would be certainly nice for people to come in and see me within my four walls, it’s pretty isolated on my lonesome!
I’ve also had a break and just got back from sunny Gozo, all refreshed and raring to go so some new blogs will ensue shortly
This is really interesting as 98% of my clients are in my local area, or within a reasonable driving distance. I find it essential to meet with clients in my web design work as getting to know them helps me understand their businesses, their values and personalities and get those across in the design. Local projects have also gone more smoothly in terms of approving designs, discussing and receiving content and finishing the project on time, compared to the over schedule nature of my long distance projects. I have learnt from my long distance projects and as a result will do a few things differently next time. Any advice or tips on what you do to ensure long diatance projects stay on schedule and that your design suits the nature of the business? Am I missing something? How do you build meaningful, effective relationships with your ‘not local’ clients? Do you use any specific review tools online that cuts down email?
I find networking helps raise awareness of my business locally and builds relationships with ‘serial networkers’ who are then willing to recommend my services. Although networking takes time away from productive work, it brings home the bacon in the long run!
Enjoy your new garden office, I’m planning the same move!
I find I can easily understand a company and their values via a telephone call and emails … to me the fact I can’t actually see their face doesn’t mean I will be rendered unable to understand the message they need to convey with their brand image and their marketing aims for the business.
I’ve gotten to know my clients really well – to the extent that via email and infrequent telephone calls we have talked about our kids, our personal lives, and I send them Christmas gifts each year (sometimes I get gifts also from my clients). So you can’t get much better than for a client relationship and yet I’ve never met any of them.
I have several clients that I’ve had for about six years since my early days of starting the business, and I still haven’t met them. Indeed many of them I haven’t even spoken to on the telephone. I have a 7yr old client based in Dallas, Texas, not only have I never met her, I’ve never spoken to her on the phone either.
Distance is no barrier to a great relationship I find, especially if yourself and the client are comfortable with virtual methods of communication, and of course that’s the type of client I target as it suits me well to work that way.
There is no difference in the way a long distance project is run compared to a local project – you can communicate just as well and just as frequently over a distance and so it doesn’t really change the way you would handle a project just because you don’t actually see a client. It’s just that were you would arrange a meeting, instead of that it’s a phone call or an email for the discussion and emails are used to send designs for approval.
As far as how smoothly projects go, I find all my projects go really smoothly to be honest, I rarely get issues over design approvals (99% of the time a design will be accepted first time with very few revisions required).
If you use email and phone calls to talk and communicate with your clients in the same way as you would face to face, no issues should arise. For instance; still use those mediums to be warm and friendly and don’t skimp on what you need to say or what you need to find out just because you have to type it all out instead of say it.
For me it’s not difficult, I touch type at extremely high speeds and prefer emails for communication because it means I then get a record of every single communication to refer back to with no danger of mis-communication or ‘forgetting’ important bits of what may have been agreed or requested.
Thus I don’t cut down emails, I send tons of emails over the course of a project – that’s so that communications are clear, relationships are built and projects are moved along at a reasonable pace. My clients are happy with responding equally as frequently, and as I said, I type very fast so frequent emails are not an issue for me at all.
It’s likely that because I target businesses that are very active online, chances are those people can type rather fast also and hence emails are no an issue for them either for that reason – my clients are all very technically able and comfortable with using technology. Indeed many prefer to dash off a quick email at a time that suits them, rather than wade through a telephone call.
I use networking as one of my strategies to win new clients also… but I do online networking rather than face to face. I rarely attend any face to face networking meetings because I don’t need to and to be honest find them boring as hell, lol.