Professional graphics for marketing are critical to making great impressions.
As a pharmacy owner, you wear a lot of hats: janitor, accountant, counselor, inventory specialist, manager, and many many more. The last thing you need is one more hat. If you are looking at your pharmacy’s marketing assets and wishing they could be improved, you don’t have to put on the graphic designer hat. There are some great alternatives for pharmacy marketing graphics that I highly recommend to get you high-end results but on a low-end budget. There are 2 categories I will cover: DIY and done for you.
Sometimes It Does Pay To Do It Yourself
By doing it yourself, I don’t mean it actually has to be you, as in you, the pharmacy owner. “You” can be an employee, a family member, or even an employee’s kid. There are some excellent services out there that make it super easy to be a pretty good graphic designer with zero graphic design skills. These services provide a wide variety of templates along with stock photos and elements so that you can put together great looking pieces without knowing how to use Photoshop or Illustrator.
Maintaining your brand consistently is vitally essential to a marketing strategy. These services allow you to define your brand with logos, colors, fonts, and even templates so that it is easy to stay consistent. With these tools, you can create professional-looking pieces within minutes. My favorite of these services is Canva. Canva has 2 versions, a free and a paid version. The free version is pretty robust though you will be missing the branding elements, the plethora of stock images, sharing features, and resizing options that come with Pro. The Pro version is a minimal price of about $120 annually or $10 a month if paid annually. It’s value far exceeds this cost. You will save oodles of time and frustration when creation your pharmacy marketing graphics when you use Canva.
Sometimes It Pays To Hire A Professional
It can be glorious to hand off responsibility to a trusted professional. You can give them guidance or free reign. All you have to do is sit back and approve or disapprove. There are many paid services out there, and each will often have a specialty or niche. I am going to introduce you to 3 different paid services with various specialties.
Unlimited services for a flat monthly fee
Quite a few unlimited design services have popped up over the past year or two. I certainly have not used them all. These services work by providing unlimited design services for a defined scope of assets for a flat monthly fee. This doesn’t mean you have a room full of designers doing a crazy amount of work just for you. It typically means that you are assigned a designer or two, and they will work on your jobs based on a queue. Generally, many of these designers work opposite hours from the US. So it becomes almost like magic. You submit your requests by the end of your day, and you wake up the next day with finished designs in your inbox. My pick for this type of service is Design Pickle. They have a broad scope of services, which means they do lots of different kinds of designs, and it’s the type of work you need for your pharmacy marketing. If you want to expand your clinical services, you are going to have to market them!
Contests for specific projects
You may not be the creative type that knows what you want and how to describe it to others so they can give you what you are looking for. This is where contests fit the bill. A professional design contest puts your pharmacy marketing graphics project in front of hundreds of designers. You get to see all of their concepts and then just pick your favorite.
Typically you will be walked through a series of questions along with how you are going to use your design, so the designers have some foundational information to work with. Then as designs come in, you can give feedback, rate them so that you get lots of good submissions. Most contests work in rounds. The first round is to gather as many concepts as possible. The second round is to pick a few favorites and flush them out. Then the final round is to finalize our design. Contests are terrific for logos or specific projects (such as a patient club) and are really cost-effective. I recommend you try out 99Designs for a low-cost competition.
Niche Digital Design Development
The unlimited design models are great for traditional print designs or designs meant for social media. When you need a website or a more robust project, it can be beneficial to hire a niche designer. These designers will often have coding or other marketing skills in addition to graphic design that will make completing your entire project easy peasy. A great website to find niche professionals is Fiverr. Yes, it has 2 Rs. Many professionals on this site can do just about anything you might need for your pharmacy marketing graphics. I have used this site for much more than graphic design. There are excel experts, coding, writing, and really almost unlimited amount of talent.
As a recovering Word flyer designer myself, I have found this service extremely helpful in presenting a professional brand for my pharmacies without a huge bill. Marketing is critical to your pharmacy’s success.
If you ain’t growing, you’re shrinking.
Always Be Marketing.
Those are just 2 of my favorite marketing catchphrases. If you are ready to up your marketing game, get some help, and get the right support. Start with how you are presenting your pharmacy to the world through your digital and print assets. They may need an upgrade, and now you can afford to do it with some of the low-cost options.
