My journey to obtaining the ideal client
My design journey started in school, with the subjects I excelled in being art and design, graphic communication, and product design. Leaving school and going on to study graphic design, a combination of utilitsing my artistic drawing skills and computer skills seemed the most logical step. I studied digital art at the University of the West of Scotland and left in the summer of 2012. I then went on to build an e-commerce brand from the ground up, this is something I’m going to go into detail more in another blog post.
Fast forward to me becoming a freelance graphic and web designer and I was starting off with only my design skills and a laptop. To get up a running I knew I needed a portfolio of work and with only a few projects along with my previous business experience, I put together a small website detailing my work and what I had to offer. Starting out with no clients and no idea how to get any clients was a learning process. I began to advertise on Gumtree with only a few other designers advertising I knew this was the starting point in getting clients, expanding my portfolio, and building my business. Gumtree was a great place to start and I like to think of it as an apprenticeship in learning the ropes, but with all the good it taught me, the amount of clients trying to devalue my work with the amount they were willing to pay to clients ghosting me and not paying took its toll.
After I would say a year of promoting and building up a bigger portfolio of work from Gumtree I knew it was time to move away and source work solely from my website. I put together a strategy for promoting on Facebook groups, messaging businesses on Instagram, and joining design groups on Reddit. For anyone starting out, these are great places to advertise for free. Learning when’s best to post along with creating a captivating advert all aids in getting clients to your website and then in turn developing into potential leads.
Along with still utilising these free advertising routes today, I run Google adverts. This has been a game changer in terms of acquiring the types of clients I’m looking to work with, small to medium-sized BTC services-based businesses. The journey to obtaining the ideal clients took a long time, with lots of moments of doubt in thinking is what I’m doing even working, but the main piece of advice I can give to anyone starting out in becoming a designer is persistence. From the early years of no clients to months when I couldn’t see any leads ever coming through, I kept going and in the end, it’s led me to work with some amazing businesses so far.
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