You've been trying different tactics to attract new customers for a while.

You've got a great product or service that is just as good or even better than anything people are buying from the big names in your industry.

You know that if a customer just bought once, they'd be so thrilled that they'd become a lifelong customer and would even tell all of their friends to come buy from your company.

You just can't seem to figure out how to get people's attention to convince them to buy. You're frustrated from trying endless ways that keep falling short. You feel like everyone else has some kind of magical know-how that makes advertising and marketing so easy for them, but so hard for you.

I know how frustrating that feels.

Hey there, I'm Sori Apfelbaum.

I'm a graphic & web designer who works with established businesses that struggle to find the best way to attract new customers.

They are tired of trying many different tactics - discount coupons and sales, expensive ads, always thinking what to post on social media... that don't worked out as well as they'd hoped.

They're so frustrated from trying to promote their product in different ways that didn't result in consistent sales, and they want to stop guessing how to get customers through their next attempt.

I cut through the confusion to create eye-catching designs that make people understand why their product is best and want to buy it.

Here's my story.

As a teenager, I loved to get creative with hands-on activities, but also was a full blown computer geek. In my spare time, I carved artistic fruit platters and spent hours designing and decorating royal icing cookies, until they looked just so. I knit colorful scarves for my family and loved to spend time working on my needlepoints.

On the computer, I tinkered with Word Suite and amateur design programs and pretty much looked for every excuse to use the computer. I would retype my school notes and made countless personalized birthdays cards. I created spreadsheets for everything from the grocery list to a grading sheet to help my mother (who was a teacher) calculate her grades without having to manually punch the numbers into a calculator.

When it was time to pick a career, I was pretty stumped at first.

The possibilities seemed endless and a small part of me even wanted to be an EMT on an ambulance. But the rest of me was scared of blood test and shots, so that idea was nixed. I decided to go for a degree in Digital Multimedia Design, which (in normal english) means graphics and web design.

Throughout my years in college, I learned about design principles, typography, and more technical terms related to color than I'd ever thought existed. I sat in classes that analyzed why some designs worked, where others fell short, and debated the perfect layout for an ad. I played with paint to get a hands-on feel for creating the perfect color combination, and spent endless hours creating and editing my designs.

I started school with a vague idea of why a design looked good and I learned to understand why it looked right and how to make it look even better. With sweat, hard work and more than a few tears, I acquired a trained design eye and the right to call myself a designer.

I started as an intern at the place that would become my first design job.

I worked with 4 other designers, creating artwork, adjusting it from client feedback and sending it off to print. We took the wording that the client sent us, listened to their vision and tried to steer them in the right direction so that they left with something that looked nice and we would be proud to say we made.

But was I missing something? Was there more to it than just design?

Over the years, I saw many types of creative processes and wide range of prices for seemingly the same service. I wondered what's the difference between a logo that cost $200 and one for $20,000?

Was it just that one was a freelancer who was just starting and less experienced and the other a company that added lots of unnecessary fluff? Did they really need to interview key people in the company and write pages about strategies, communication and placement? Or was that "need" just a tactic to inflate the price by making everything unnecessarily complicated and selling services that weren't needed?

Focal Point gets started.

Like most designers, I started freelancing on small projects on the side. When I got married and moved to a different state, I decided not to look for a new job but to grow my side hustle into a full time company.

Truthfully, it was the appeal of sleeping past nine and working later in the day that really called to me, 'cause my brain does its best work from late afternoon to an unmentionable hour at night.

Boy, was I in for a surprise!

I hadn't counted on how hard it would be to find customers! We're talking head-scratching, soul-searching, universe-pleading hard!

I read all the blogs and tried all the tricks. I redid my website no less than 3 times. (Yup, you read that right!) I posted on social media, ran ads in the local phone book, even tried cold-emailing. Surprisingly, that one was the most successful. Who would have thought?

But that all changed on one earth shattering autumn night.

No, it was not a hurricane. Well, not a real one, but rather, a mental one. I was reading a blog about how to write emails to potential clients and the author said to stop talking about yourself and start looking at things through the eyes of your customer.

He went on to say different do's and don'ts, but it was like a bomb went off in my head. Because it wasn't just in an email that it mattered, but also in ads and taglines and every other creative thing that had to do with a company trying to sell something.

I had found the missing piece.

It's truly understanding how marketing and human nature plays a role in purchasing decisions. The most influential things that impact people's decisions are on a subconscious level that most people aren't even consciously aware of. It's the little nitty gritty, often overlooked details that make it or break it. I know it sounds like a cliche, but there really is a lot of psychology behind all those crazy marketing schemes.

From then on, I obsessively inhaled everything related to this that I could get my hands on. I took out stacks of books from the library. I binge read blogs of people who said smart things.

I stretched, learned and grew because I wanted not just to help my business, but to help every company that would ask me to design something.

There was another missing element to designing for businesses that no one acknowledged. It was that designs cannot just be pretty.

They also have to target the people who they are meant to motivate into action. Therefore, every element, from the wording to the color and image choice needs to be done with the targeted customer in mind.

See, the secret nobody ever says is that the big companies have both a design and a marketing team. The marketing team comes up with a strategy that the design team then creates. But when smaller companies create designs, they unknowingly leave out the marketing step.

Now that I knew, it was time to take action.

So with more sweat, hard work, and burning lots and lots of midnight oil, I learned different theories and types of marketing strategies. I learned how color plays a crucial role on human behavior. Why in some places, it's better to ask a question and in others, to make a statement. And yes, there is some truth to the fluffy services in the overpriced logo. But also, it's mostly still fluff.

What I do.

Today, my team and I work with established companies that are feeling the pain of not having a plan guiding their designs, but try as they might, they don't understand how to fix it.

I help them understand where they are falling short and what they need to do to start getting new customers and increasing their sales. Together we take a closer look at what they have to sell and who their perfect clients are so they know know which tactics are right for them and how to market their product or service.

I love to help my clients clear stop guessing what it is they should say and do and I feel so accomplished and happy when they are successful!

If you dread staring at a blank screen trying to think of the right words for an ad, download your copy of 5 essential elements for ads for failproof ad copy that's tried and tested.

If you're an established business struggling with attracting your perfect clients and want some help, check out Stop Guessing & Start Knowing! so I can help you jump start the process.

If you need something designed for your company, stop by my Services page. If you don't see what you're looking for, or if you have any questions, please get in touch on the contact page or send me an email at sori@focalpointgraphics.com.

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