As a fast growing design studio, we learned that it’s important to adopt best practices in the way we run our business by using the right tools. There are many business tools out there to shop from online. For us, picking the right ones was hugely dependent on how they could help us maximize our efficiency and grow as a design business.
Our main goal at LYD Studio with the tools we use is to be able to offer our clients amazing branding and web design, unmatched on-boarding and off-boarding experiences, in addition to tapping into growth opportunities that help us grow. We tried a few tools and finally found the right ones that fit our goals going into 2022.
Here’s a round of the tools we are using to grow our design studio:
1/ HONEYBOOK
We started using Honeybook during our second month in business after realizing that using an excel sheet to track new inquiries, capture leads, collect payments and organize project’s all at once was almost impossible. We chose it because it has all of the CRM solutions that fit our business needs. We love the Pipeline Management feature that makes it easy to move client projects through our pipeline and keep track of the project status. Another huge sell for us was the task automation feature. Being a small studio, having a CRM that makes our workday easier, by eliminating mundane tasks from our to-do list and ensuring everything is accurate and complete is a huge life bonus.
*Everything about honeybook is super easy and straightforward and we recommend it to all of our clients. Give it a try and get 25% of your subscription for one year using our link: Click here!
2/ FLODESK
Switching from freelancing to running a design studio full time made us increase our email marketing efforts. Being a design studio, having excellent visual communication material is our top priority. So naturally, we fell in love with Flodesk’s beautifully designed emails that have been helping to communicate with our clients easily and tastefully. We love the analytics panel that lets us view when our audience is opening their emails on desktop or mobile. We can also resend emails to customers who might have not opened initial emails, which is pretty cool!
Want to check out Flodesk? We love email marketing and want you to love it too!
Give it a try and get 50% of your subscription for life using our link: Click here!
3/ GOOGLE ANALYTICS
When we first launched our website we setup Google Analytics so we could view visitor data. With GA we can track and understand our customer’s behavior, user experience, how they engage with our online content and how much traffic LYD Studio’s website gets. We love that it’s a completely free tool that collects useful data such as our audience’s age group, gender, interests, devices, and location automatically.
4/ ADOBE CREATIVE CLOUD
The Adobe Creative Cloud provides top industry-leading applications in one service. As a small design studio, Adobe provides us with all the creative tools we need for graphic and web design, video editing, web development and photography. The all apps plan and consistent updates, cloud services, and access to new features make Adobe Creative Cloud a fantastic value and a top choice for us.
5/ TRELLO
Trello is pretty much a list-making application. If you have worked with Asana before, this is kind of similar but straightforward and much easier to work with. We love creating lists in Trello that we can structure as cards or boards, then invite collaborators to view and add to them. Our day as a design studio is usually filled with all sorts of to-dos, having these tasks all in one place makes it easy for us to get things done. Another great feature is being able to get a bird’s eye view of our entire to-do list so we are always able to plan what to do next.
