Ambitious goals, tremendous opportunities, but multiple challenges. India is witnessing a significant spark in the design sector that is blazing and glowing brighter each day. Design agencies are becoming more prominent than they ever were, but is this enough to make your studio stand out in this fiercely competitive industry?
You’re now probably wondering how we accomplished this feat and stood out from the rest of the crowd. We seized every opportunity that we could to propel Lollypop Design Studio into the limelight and inspire aspiring designers and design communities to believe in the power of design. After a great deal of trial and error, we have finally identified the right combination that has provided us with the most visibility and growth in 2022. We’ve developed five amazing recommendations to help your design firm and your business achieve maximum productivity, especially if you’re just starting and feeling lost in this cutthroat sector.
We revamped our entire website, and we also added some engaging content to draw in as many visitors as possible. Because our target demographic includes more than only gen z, we aimed to make the UI enjoyable by eliminating flashy interactions and animations which made our website incredibly simple to use, and concentrated on giving content all the spotlight, so that our message was effectively communicated to all the cohorts.
We wanted to target a broad global audience as well, and the redesign was also done because we’ve witnessed tremendous growth not only in India but also internationally. In order for users from all over the world to feel connected to our services, we decided to give equal attention to every region on our website.
Our brand colors were employed to indicate to visitors that our studio is energizing, powerful, trustworthy, and friendly, thus creating a lasting impression on users. We decided to keep the content simple yet effective and crafted it in a way that helped us attract more visitors’ attention. We used basic grammar and common vocabulary to ensure that our message was communicated as effectively as possible. We were careful to exclude any unnecessary jargon or challenging words from the text, which is always beneficial to both clients and users. Always keep in mind that the main purpose of communication is to convey necessary details, thus we chose this technique of awareness creation to help everyone acknowledge what we do and how we do it!
We introduced three new services, ranging from design to development, that included user research, data visualization, and an illustrations page. This gave us maximum visibility, resonated with visitors well, and gave them a sense of belonging by demonstrating that all skill sets are welcome in our studio and that there are opportunities for every service to grow here.
We also placed a strong emphasis on user research, since it is one of the most crucial steps in achieving an exceptional user experience. As a result, we received a lot of attention from design researchers while also delivering value to our users by ensuring that no service was overlooked and that each one was given the same amount of priority.
We all feel an immediate kinship with individuals who share our profession or ideology since, at the end of the day, we are all humans. We decided to capitalize on this quality of humans to create a design community by hosting as many events as we could.
Never think that you won’t get a sizable enough crowd to your event, regardless of how new your agency or business is. Even if only a handful of people turn up, you’re still making a difference. Always keep in mind that for things to work out, you must be prepared to take risks and go the extra mile. We only had a handful of attendees at our events in other venues at the beginning of the year because we were new in those locations, but we never gave up. Even our global events now draw three times as many people as they did at first.
We held numerous events, but two, in particular, drew a large crowd and had a massive turnout. The first was, of course, our flagship Design hackathon – Designathon, which was held in April this year. We’ve conducted one every year, but the pandemic compelled us to skip it for the last 2 years. We’ve always had a significant number of participants, but the surge in interest this year was astounding. From a broad group of roughly 800 participants—from India and throughout the world—we had to shortlist 80. This time, we broke all boundaries since we had registrations from other countries, which proved that we had, in fact, created a large amount of noise regarding Designathon throughout the world. Participants were writing about their experiences of meeting huge pioneers in this field, praising how well the event was organized, which resulted in Lollypop to be trending all over social media in the months of April and May. As a result, we garnered a lot of traffic to our website and attracted a huge number of followers on our social media handles.
Our collaboration with ADPList, a renowned global mentorship and learning platform for design, yielded yet another successful event. At this event in Bangalore, we had over 900 attendees, and it was a night to remember. Members of the design community met and interacted with one another, learned more, and had a truly magical experience. Following the event, we observed a 15% increase in followers and a 20% increase in our engagement on Instagram. Milestones like these made a huge impact and helped us gain maximum reach, conveying our story and our mission to a lot more individuals.
Not only is it vital to host events, but it is also crucial to attend as many as possible and do word-of-mouth marketing for your agency because the more you socialize with people, the more you get to talk about what you do and the more attention you attract to your services. Bangalore Design Festival, a month-long festival with over 700 design activities conducted under its wing, was one of the largest design celebrations ever in Bangalore. Anil Reddy, the founder and design director of our studio, addressed a sizable audience of influential pioneers at the festival’s main summit, which helped attract a lot of interest from the design fraternity.
Another event that we were present at, was the UNLEASH conference, where young people were motivated and enabled to grow into leaders, generate new ideas, and build networks that would aid in achieving sustainable development goals. A few of our designers attended this conference, and while they were there, they spread the word about Lollypop to all the global participants, igniting their interest in our studio. Some of those individuals were so captivated that they ultimately decided to come to our studio and interact with our design professionals. We thus made an effort to attend all design-related events, which helped us drive traffic to our website and piqued people’s interest in our studio!
Popshot is an internal endeavor of Lollypop, that involves designing hypothetical interactive applications for users. These applications range from e-commerce to tourism to sports, and they have piqued a lot of interest from our audience. We’ve done a lot more popshots this year, and it has brought more attention to our website and services. Even the variety of the illustrations we’ve been producing and promoting—from cyberpunk to FIFA—attracted a huge following and admiration from people all across the world. Our goal was to draw maximum attention to animation, graphic design, and other forms of art in order to encourage creators everywhere to keep producing unique artwork!
Once you’ve accumulated a large number of followers and traffic to your website, it’s critical to raise knowledge about your services not only locally, but also globally. We began our journey in Bangalore, expanded to Chennai, Mumbai, Vietnam, the MENA Region, and San Jose, and this year, we’ve taken Salt Lake City and Hyderabad by storm.
We chose Hyderabad since it is a city experiencing rapid technological growth. We intended to establish design communities and be pioneers in the industry here since we observed a great deal of enthusiasm and passion toward design in this artistically developing city.
Salt Lake City was our next destination after the Bay Area in the States since it is one of the biggest technologically advancing cities. It is also termed the “city of innovation”, and so we wanted to redefine and reinvent design technology here.
We have always been committed to promoting our services throughout the globe, to reach designers from all over the world, and we’ve decided to keep extending our services to new nations and localities!
These are just a few recommendations that were important to convey to you on how to continue expanding your empire and distinguish yourself in the age of up-and-coming studios every day. We believe in creating a healthy ecosystem for better business, which draws customers from all over the world! If you continue to build upon and customize these suggestions, we are confident that you will find the path to success sooner than you anticipate. These are some pointers that have helped us along the way, and we are confident that by next year, following the same footsteps, we will be expanding and increasing at twice the rate that we’ve been.
We appreciate everyone who supported and believed in us this year, and we are confident that we will continue to uplift and inspire everyone by fostering creative communities around the globe. We’ve never been so close to completing our goal of impacting a billion lives, and we can’t wait to keep working towards this goal for many years to come!
