Every piece of your marketing relies on good design to be effective. You can have the most amazing products and the most enchanting copy that the world has ever seen, but if it isn’t visually appealing, then your words are unlikely to get you anywhere. It’s a piece of your strategy that you absolutely cannot compromise on, and that’s why we only hire the best designers to create assets for our partners.
“Obviously, I was always very interested in art before college,” says Kyle Groover, a Senior Designer here at SalesLabX. “I went to Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Georgia where I was in the painting department for a bit, but I ended up switching to the illustration department because I liked designing for a story and a purpose.”
Kyle quickly set themself apart from others across the industry, and their growth here at SLX has been meteoric and unsurprising. Their impressive artistic background combined with their ability to keep up with current design trends and to find unique design solutions to design problems that our partners may be having has proved invaluable in our day-to-day operations.
“I was the marketing coordinator for the school district that I worked in, so I would design the brochures and lay all that design out. It was a bunch of print marketing at that time instead of the emails and landing pages that I do now. Brochures, posters, and lots of flyers. I also had a couple of WordPress clients that I started working with at that job, which helped me get into my current role. I also went to the Springboard UX/UI career track from 2020-2021, so I also have my UX/UI certification. I’m so good at this.”
When you’re thinking about working with an external marketing team like ours, it’s because we have people like Kyle working for you. You can build your own team in-house, but it can take a lot of time and a lot of money. It’s a noble endeavor, but what ends up happening is that while you’re bringing that team up to speed, you’re missing valuable marketing opportunities. There are campaigns you could be running now that could catapult you toward your goals, but instead, you’re just… stuck waiting. Waiting to find the right candidates, onboard them, build a cohesive culture to keep them around, and perfect your internal processes to make use of their talents as efficiently as possible.
SalesLabX was created so that you don’t have to wait. You can have the same, world-class level of design that the best major organizations have, and you can have it today.
“Even though we’re external, we’re still on a team with them,” Groover says, speaking to the potential apprehension that organizations might have when it comes to partnering with teams like ours. “We’re not going to try and disrupt their brand or message simply for the sake of ego. We’re there to facilitate the best possible marketing assets for them. When we make suggestions, it’s not any kind of judgment, and we’re not saying anything negative against their ideas. It’s truly just us knowing that something that will perform better for them. There are things you can’t really know unless you work in the design field.”
You work with designers like Kyle because they bring that level of expertise to your marketing that makes it more impactful and resonant with your audience. Every partner of ours comes to the table with a vision for their branding and marketing, and we love that! We love to work with organizations that have that kind of drive and vision. Our aim is to simply execute your vision in a way that aligns with the design and marketing best practices that we know to be the most effective. Sometimes that means pushing back on common mistakes we see different organizations making.
“Making the text in an email into a flat image is one of the biggest things that our partners want us to do that they should stop having us do. They’ll make those requests because there’s something that dark mode is making difficult, or it just doesn’t show up well on all email clients (Outlook is every coder and designer's worst nightmare). As a result, a lot of them just want to flatten everything into one solid image, which is a big accessibility and deliverability no-no. Anyone who uses a reader app that might have vision problems or something like that will be left out in the cold because that reader app will just skip over that email entirely. And that’s if the email even makes it past the spam filter with little to no live text in the message.
“Another big one is not putting your CTA (call to action) ‘above the fold’. If you have a CTA at all, it should really be in that top hero image where you’ve got the big splash, and the same goes for landing pages. A lot of brands want a big flashy image and title, but they won’t have their CTA until a good couple scrolls down the page. Just basic usability things with UX/UI that our partners might not really be thinking of.”
But it’s not just about trusting your designers to know trends and basic design principles. You also need to trust them as artists. When you give an artist a certain amount of freedom, they’re able to use their creativity and passion to take your assets to the next level. So while it pays to have a brand profile, it also pays to keep that profile a little bit flexible.
“I do get some collaborators that say ‘Creative freedom! We’re not really sure what we want here, but do something with these inspo words’. Then I know that I have the ability to come up with something or bring in something new. If they like it, then we just add it to the brand profile. It’s nice! It’s very much a living document where we can help the brands grow their visual language rather than just resting on it.”
You have an expert designer with boundless artistic vision, so that should be all you need, right? Well, without a supportive, nurturing environment, you’re going to have an extremely talented individual that isn’t going to be operating at 100%. Kyle Groover was able to find that with SalesLabX.
“I’ve designed for other companies, I do freelance work, and I have a background in animation, so I’ve worked on a lot of teams in various creative fields. I think right now especially, my design team is just so collaborative and supportive. Our lead thoroughly checks our stuff and gives us feedback, but I don’t feel like he ever tries to take over our designs, you know? It’s very supportive, and it’s taking the design work I’m doing to the next level as opposed to curtailing the creative stuff I come up with, which is kind of unique.”
This is what makes the SLX way different from other organizations in our industry. Too often, these other teams will default to “the way things have always been” because it’s easier than forging a new way forward. The old way isn’t always the best way, and that’s why SalesLabX is committed to changing the way business is done. Not just for our partners, but for our team as well.
“The main thing is the ability to give feedback,” Kyle said, detailing the ways that other organizations can improve things for their team members. “I had a lot of anxiety from my last job, and I was afraid that providing feedback was going to be viewed as me not being able to do my job. Bringing that to a lead at my other jobs was almost viewed as insubordination, even though it was meant to be entirely helpful feedback. When I give feedback here– even if my idea isn’t fully realized–it’s not counted against me or anything like that.”
“We have our check-ins and one-on-ones every month, and I think the questions that are asked in our one-on-ones are something that more orgs should ask their people. ‘What is your least favorite part of working here?’ is a question I was never asked before. Also, ‘What are ways that I can better support you?’ I’ve had meetings like this before, but they were always just focused on the things I wasn’t doing well enough. Now, even if I have stuff to work on, I leave the meeting feeling like I know what to do and I’m empowered to make that change. It’s collaborative growth versus threatening growth.”
