Craig Swanson discovered the first rule of marketing a small business over two decades ago when he combined his technical talents with his passion for the creative arts. As one of Seattle’s top technology consultants to the design and pre-press community at the time, Swanson began to appreciate a simple rule: The key to business success is understanding your target audience.
“If you know your target audience, you can get everything else in your marketing wrong!” advised this Mac tech “guru’s guru” in an entrepreneurial session at the recent MacTech Boot Camp conference. The packed amphitheater at Seattle’s Bell Harbor Conference Center applauded his sage advice. Conversely, he shared: “If you don’t know who your client is, NO marketing tactics will help you!”
With his acumen for dealing with complex computer issues, Swanson became Seattle’s embodiment of the creative arts’ “411” or “911” call for help. Craig was both a first responder and often the resource of last resort for beleaguered art directors, photographers, designers and printers suffering from network bottlenecks, system conflicts, hard drive meltdowns, color pre-press issues, workflow architecture and the thousands of gigabits and pixels in between.
Swanson served Seattle’s rapidly growing desktop computing industry as a one-man-army from 1988-1994 before founding and managing Creativetechs.com. From 1995 to 2010, Craig grew the firm to over one million dollars in sales, adding four new techs in the process. Creativetechs was sold in December of 2010 and is still a vital tech support resource in the region.
Now, in his new role as the founder and principal of creativeLIVE.com, Swanson is leveraging the power of the Internet to educate and inspire an audience on a global scale. His reach now extends beyond the Northwest to the Web’s creative community writ large. Still Swanson’s’s mission is as compassionate as ever — training and support for the creative practitioner, be it an artist, a photographer, or an amateur who aspires to reach a higher level of digital mastery.
creativeLIVE is billed as a “Live, Worldwide Creative Classroom,” and all of the “academy’s” live creative workshops are available to watch for free in realtime at http://www.creativelive.com/live. Once a live workshop is over, the production team edits the best of this content into easily downloadable files available for purchase through the site’s online store.
The “Schools” that are fostered by creativeLIVE and aggregate its video courseware represent Photography, Design, Technology, Web Design, Filmmaking and Fine Arts. When we assayed the “tuition costs” of the video classroom, the pay-per-view price point ranged in cost from $9.99 to $149.00.
At MacTech Boot Camp, the creative-focused Swanson expanded on his thesis on understanding the key vertical you serve. “You can’t focus on everyone, so who is your ideal client?” he asked. What are their demographics? What do they aspire to? What triggers them to look for help? He suggests research on Facebook as well as exercises like interviewing your most productive clients to learn what makes them tick.
“The #1 place to focus your time is building a deep understanding of your target client,” Craig believes. The Seattle creative community will always be grateful for that focus. [24×7]
