The Magalog Guy's MagaBlog

I have an occasional client who is a real pain.

It takes him forever to be completely satisfied with the marketing pieces being created for him. Even when he is happy with it, it’s likely he’ll still want to tweak something weeks later. I’d love to fire him, but unfortunately I’m stuck with him.

The client? Me!

This scenario is actually pretty common among designers and copywriters. Working for other people is easy… working on our own marketing pieces seems to cause us to over-think things and constantly fiddle with it.

Maybe we spend so much time working for others, its harder to tap back into our individual personalities when we need to work on our own material.

I also experience this from the other side of the equation. Not only do I do design work for clients, in some cases I do consulting. Some of my clients have their own in-house designers, but want a second opinion from an objective outsider.

I’m providing that service for a new client right now. They have a really good in-house designer. But I think, as a whole, the company has not been as tuned in to really examining how their target audience is seeing their marketing material. This is really common and they’re not unique in this.

So, for them, I’m not doing any design work. I’m sent drafts of what they’re working on, and then I point out areas that I feel need improvement based on my experience and expertise not only in design, but marketing in general.

Whether they apply my advice is up to them. But it becomes a real value for them to have an outsider look at their work and either confirm that what they did was good, or tell them where they’re making some mistakes.

I’ve talked about this in the past… it’s very easy to overlook things when doing your own marketing because you know your product or service inside and out.

The most common problem I see when consulting is that something that is totally obvious to the company is not clearly explained to the reader. Internally, the client unconsciously fills in any gaps that the reader is rarely capable of doing because they don’t live and breathe it like the client does.

Here are some of the benefits to bringing in an outsider:

1. Spotting things you miss or think should be obvious.
2. Being able to apply techniques you might not know about.
3. Bouncing ideas off someone who isn’t afraid to tell you something isn’t right.

Contact me to learn how we can apply these points to your marketing projects.