- 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.
Please give the video a
thumbs up if you did enjoy it
and subscribe if you're new
because I make new videos
about design every single week
and I think you will like them.
And even if you've been
subscribed for a while,
I know that YouTube has been having
a bit of a problem lately,
so hit that little bell icon,
and you'll be notified every
time I make a new video
and they won't get missed
in your subscription feed.
Okay, I think that's all I have to say.
Have a good day and I
will see you next time.
Bye.
