Top Tips For Working With A Graphic Designer To Drive Sales & Deliver Maximum ROI

Graphic design is the special sauce that super powers every other element in your marketing program.

It is the key to higher success rates and greater ROI because Graphic Design is the most important element of effective communication.  We call marketing collateral "visual communication" because it is so much more than words.

Every element, from the colors, fonts, and images, to the visual hierarchy of your information say something about your business and should be created to speak to your target audience. If not, you could be talking just to yourself. Make sure you are getting the right message to the right people.

When to Hire A Professional Graphic Designer

• You have a very important project that must be executed successfully. It must effectively communicate your marketing message and brand in ways that drive sales and engagement with your target audience.
• You want to enhance your brand and overall image of your business.
• You don't have an in-house graphic design team that you can work with to develop your marketing collateral, or your internal graphic design team is tied up with other projects and can't dedicated the needed time and resources to your project.
• You don't have the design skills, software, or high-powered computers to do the work yourself.
• You don't have the time to go through the trial, error, and many edits of doing it alone.
• You have other key tasks to focus on that require your expertise and you don't have time to be off-task.
• Finally, you need cohesive design elements to use across multiple collateral pieces because you want your efforts to be memorable, enhance your brand, communicate effectively, and increase ROI.

Work Effectively With Your Designer To Drive Sales & Deliver Maximum ROI

Use this guide to help you get the most from your investment and prepare you for your first meeting with your graphic designer.

1. Determine which of the most popular promo and marketing items will be needed for your promotion. As we discussed in our AG Formula for Success on Marketing, successful marketing campaigns utilize multiple channels and materials to reach customers where they are. You should plan for both print and digital elements. When you plan which components you need from the beginning, you save time and money and avoid costly surprises and delays when you are approaching the crunch time of the project. 
2. Fine tune the message of your promotion. One way that many marketing materials go astray is unclear messaging. A professional graphic designer can work with you to hone in on the most important message of your promotion because this will be the meat and bones of each of their marketing pieces. You will develop a core marketing message and sub-messaging that can be used throughout your campaign and all of your real-time marketing channels like Social Media.
3. Create a proper hierarchy for your key messages. Your key information will help determine the hierarchy for each document. Hierarchy in visual communication is about using the right information in the right way, making your message clear, precise, actionable and easily consumable.  Visual and textual hierarchy shifts from piece to piece based on available space. A poster will use a different hierarchy than a brochure because it will have less information and the need to communicate key messages more quickly. A professional designer will ensure that the hierarchy of each and every piece is on point.
4. Develop a plan for Copywriting and Image use. Copywriting is the art of creating marketing text that drives sales, and generally focuses on benefits. When combined with the correct images, your message will be communicated as quickly and clearly as possible. This quick, effective, benefit focused communication is what drives sales.
5. Create a plan to best communicate with your target audience. Design and message work together to grab the attention of your audience, so it goes hand in hand to say that your audience determines the direction of your design and message. A professional graphic designer can help you create a proper roadmap of key messages, styles, images, fonts, and colors that best fit what your key audience needs to see to make a purchase or initiate contact.
6. Make it all Cohesive. One of the major challenges for non-professional designers is keeping all the moving parts together in a way that is cohesive. Cohesion across your brand and marketing campaign is one of the best investments you can make in your business because it super-charges everything you do.  Think of your favorite companies...Apple is a great example. Every piece of marketing, packaging, promotional items have a cohesive look.  You don't even have to see the Apple logo to know it's an Apple product. This is the power of cohesion. A professional designer can help you create many pieces that not only support a particular campaign or promotion, it will work to promote your brand at the same time.  Achieving cohesion in design is an art and science that designers spend years honing.

The Benefits of Working With Professional Graphic Designers at AlphaGraphics San Francisco

One-stop for everything you need. AlphaGraphics is San Francisco's premiere visual communications firm that is your one-stop shop for professional printing, marketing, signage and graphic design. Our clients find that working with us means less work for them because we can handle every aspect of your project. There is no shuffling pieces of a big project between vendors, we do all the work for you.  Once your project is designed, we can move it seamlessly through production and distribution.

Professional Account Managers, Graphic Designers, and Production Staff. Working with true professionals is another thing our customers love about AlphaGraphics. (See our Happy Customer Testimonial Page for real feedback from real customers) Working with professionals means excellent communication between you and us. It means expert advice and guidance to ensure that what you have in your mind and the results you need are translated into the end products.

Useful project documentation like timelines, budgets, schedules, etc.  When you work on a major project with AlphaGraphics, our Account Managers take the burden of managing the production of your project off your plate.  Having worked on hundreds of projects with some of San Francisco's premiere companies, we understand that though you may hand-off a project to our professional team, you still need to report back to your team.  We make this easy by accommodating whatever documentation requests you need to do your job.

A sign created for Bistro Burger of San Francisco.

Beautiful Results. Our design team is highly experienced in creating gorgeous visual communication that effectively communicate and drive action. We will work with you to gather all the necessary information about your goals, your target audience, key information that must be included, timeline, and budget to make sure you get what you need when you need it.  Our team has designed hundreds of pieces of visual communication for some of San Francisco's top companies, and we can do the same for you.

We've got what you need.  We can design a large array of products for your business that cover both print and electronic marketing.

• Branding and Identity
• Custom Business Cards
• Custom Logo
• Brochures
• Postcards
• Flyers
• Newsletters
• Power Point Presentations and Graphics
• Websites
• Landing Pages
• Wall and Window Slicks & Decals
• Posters
• Signage
• Banners
• Bannerstands
• Special Event and Conference packages
• Promotion Visual Communication
• Menus
• Stationary Sets and Letterhead

Technical Services

• Pre-press, pre-flight
• Color Correction
• Image Editing and Processing

We have all the services you need, for all the success you want! We are always here to discuss any project you are working on, full of expert advice and guidance that will save you time and money, as well as increase your ROI on any project.  You can visit us at:

AlphaGraphics Montgomery Street
840 Sansome Street
[email protected]
(415) 781–4910
Monday–Friday: 7:30am – 5:30pm

AlphaGraphics 2nd Street
199 Second Street
[email protected]
(415) 882–9390
Monday–Friday: 8:00am – 5:00pm

Or you can fill out our brief Request A Quote form and let us know that you need help with your next big project.  We are here to help!