I wish someone had told me the difference between graphic design and marketing back in the day. When I first started my career, I was under the belief that in order to successfully market a product or organization you had to be a graphic designer.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe having graphic design skills is important for a marketing professional, but those skills are not absolutely vital. There are several different programs that can help create the day to day graphic designing for you!
I was lucky enough to discover the website Canva when I was a Resident Assistant in college. Each month we had to create informational flyers for our residents. For art students or marketing majors as myself this was fun. For other Resident Assistants however, this was a tedious task. Canva offered design templates and content ideas for the less creative while allowing the more creative RAs the opportunity to bring their ideas to life.
Canva can be such an asset to a marketing professional if used properly. The program offers simple templates that can be personalized to your heart’s content or kept exactly the same with your information pasted in. This is where many marketing professionals have issues. Time and time again I see flyers and social media ads that are identical because the organizations did not take the time to alter the design on the template at all. As long as a person has somewhat of a creative eye, they can take what canva, and other design websites, has to offer and create amazing works of art without a background in graphic design. While I have been taking graphic design courses, many of my designs do start as templates that I take and customize to my organization’s needs.
I see people compare graphic designers and marketing professionals all the time. Even I did not have a clear image of what the difference was when I was in school, but now that I have been in marketing for several years, I see that there is so much more to marketing than just designing advertisements.
As a marketer, once the design is complete, I get to find it the proper home so that the right audience views it. I am tasked with deciding who the target market is and how to reach them. This is my favorite part of the job. I get to decide if the information would be useful to our community via a radio ad, in public groups on Facebook, directly sent to them in the mail or an email, there are so many possibilities. Sometimes there is more than one correct answer. This process is like finding the final piece of the puzzle that fits just right.
I'm lucky enough to have a job that allows me to create the designs and distribute them, but if you do not have graphic design skills, don't worry, you can find marketing jobs that do not involve having a graphic design background.
Until next time,
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