- Today I wanna talk to you about what I do for a living.
Hi, I'm Charli and I am a marketing designer.
Marketing design is not something I ever heard talked about
when I was learning design.
It just wasn't a thing
that was really discussed as an option.
I sort of just stumbled into it.
But it's turned out to be the perfect job for me.
So, I thought today I would tell you a bit about
what it means to be a marketing designer,
and the skills that you need to be a good one
in case, I dunno, it might turn out to be
the perfect job for you, too.
Now I work as a marketing designer in-house,
and by that I mean I work in-house, for a company.
Rather than at an agency,
dealing with a lot of different brands,
I work with the same brand at the same company.
And they're who hires me.
I feel like being hired as a marketing designer,
it's most common for that to happen,
and to be your title at a tech company.
Just seems to be the way things go.
Design teams at tech companies tend to be
split into product design and marketing design.
So, the product design team work on the app,
or the software, or whatever it is,
and then marketing design handles
all the other design-related stuff.
So, you end up designing the marketing website,
like the public-facing front of the company, I suppose,
emails, documents, swag,
like when you make branded products and things,
slide design, print materials, social media graphics,
basically anything that goes along
with marketing the company.
As a marketing designer you also end up being
a caretaker of the brand of the company as well.
It means taking care of the brand
and making sure that it's represented in the right way
and that everything that goes out that's design-related
to the public is all on brand,
and I feel like being on brand would be
another whole video in itself.
But basically I mean that everything is unified
and everything represents the brand values
and the company values and it all looks cohesive
and like it came from the same place.
Ideally, for being a marketing designer,
you wanna have multi-disciplinary skills
because that list I just mentioned
included both digital and print design.
Often designers can be really strong
in print graphic design but those skills
don't translate directly to the web
so they end up being a lot weaker
in the web design skill area.
And I think in this day and age
that web design skills are more important
than print design skills for a marketing designer
because so much of the marketing
that tech companies do these days is digital.
Your goal as a marketing designer
is to communicate the brand values
with everything that you do
and think about the impression that your designs give
to people looking at it.
Your job is to make people love and respect the brand
through everything you put out.
And you also need to think about
walking the user through a journey
that eventually leads to them buying the product,
because you're designing marketing, right.
That means you need to be thinking about the user
at every single touchpoint.
So when you're designing a new page
for the marketing website,
you need to be thinking about
where the user is on their journey,
what information they might have seen from us before,
how they got to that site, etc.
And all of those answers to those questions
will feed into your design and the decisions that you make.
Before I started filming this video,
I asked on Twitter if anyone had any questions
to do with marketing design that I could answer,
and Renata asked a really good one.
She asked how you measure success.
And as a marketing designer, you tend to measure success
through the website analytics,
and the actions that users take,
as well as obviously the overall goal
of how many more people are buying into the product.
I found that overall being a marketing designer means
asking a lot of questions.
Unlike working at an agency or working freelance,
you're not often given an actual brief
when it comes to being an in-house marketing designer
for the projects you work on.
So a lot of what I do is asking people questions
when they come to me with something
that they need to happen.
Often, people will come to you with a solution,
say for example a colleague will come up and say,
we need a landing page that says this specific thing
because this is what's gonna help us get more users,
and instead of just going ahead
and making that exactly as they've asked,
I like to ask a lot of questions
to make sure I get to the root of the problem
and not just starting from the solution.
So like, who is this page aimed at?
Why are we making it?
How are people gonna find it?
Are we just making it
because perhaps one of our other pages
isn't performing correctly and we think this is the fix
when actually time might be better spent
improving those other pages that we already have.
Sometimes, often in fact,
the solution that someone came to you with
is actually the right solution to solve the problem,
but with design it's always important
to start from the problem.
And as a marketing designer,
you're not often handed the problem,
so you have to learn to ask a lot of questions
to discover it.
Asking a lot of questions also comes into play
when you're bring the caretaker of the brand,
like we talked about, is also part of the job.
So, say for example when someone asks me for the logo.
Instead of just sending them the file blindly,
I'll always ask them what they need it for,
because A, I wanna make sure that I'm across
everywhere that's going out branded,
I wanna make sure that I can
run my design eye over it and check it.
But also maybe there's a template that needs to be designed
and they're putting things together themselves
when actually I just need to design the template
for them to use easily
so they're not having to put the logo on things.
Obviously it would be a lot easier
to just design the solution that someone comes to,
and send the logo file off when someone asks for it,
but being a marketing designer also means
caring a lot about the product
or whatever it is that you're marketing for
and asking those questions and taking the time to do that
because you care and because you wanna do a good job.
I absolutely love my job
because I get to spend a lot of time doing web design,
which is my main design passion,
but also get to do a lot of other fun things,
like event signage and cool graphics.
There's always a lot going on.
There's always an exciting new project on the horizon
and as an in-house designer,
you can be the one to suggest projects as well,
if you're at the right company,
which is really cool.
I'm very pleased to have stumbled into this job
because, like I said, I didn't really understand
that it was a thing when I was studying design
at university, so it's not what I went out looking for.
So, I dunno.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about it
and maybe it sounds like it might be
the right thing for your too, who knows.
If you've got any more questions about it,
please leave them down below in the comments
because I can make many more videos
on this topic and talk for a long time on it.
But I thought that, keep it to the basics for now
would be good.
Thank you for watching.
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Okay, I think that's all I have to say.
Have a good day and I will see you next time.
Bye.