About the project

Ne.Studio is a design studio — a team of specialists in graphic design, branding, and web design. Our teams had already crossed paths, and the design of our own community was crafted by the professional hands at Ne.Studio. This is the kind of thing you judge with your eyes, so take a look — you’ll see what I mean.

Goal

The ask was straightforward: bring in 3 branding clients per month, consistently. The task sounded simple on paper: build a selling reputation, strengthen the portfolio with real work, and use that to lift lead generation. We agreed that a CPL (cost per lead) of RUB 3,000 was acceptable.

Longer term, the goal was to reach break-even, so we needed work on upgrading the conversion funnel.

Spoiler: we did find work for graphic designers — it came through a different service line, not branding.

The client came in with a USP (Unique Selling Proposition; RU abbreviation: UTP): “studio-quality work at freelancer prices.”

Timeline and budget

The client already knew our approach and our timelines — we had worked together before, and they understood that time goes into testing, market reading, and sharpening the USP. Since this is a design studio, we didn’t need to “repackage” them visually.

The budget was reasonable for working with VK Ads (VK’s advertising platform; VK is a major Russian social network):

• Across 94 days, total spend (ad budget only, excluding our fee): RUB 24,015.22
• Spent on the idea that eventually worked: RUB 10,892.77

Prep / Kick-off

We started with the usual:

• scraping competitor ads,
• reading case studies (ours and others’),
• auditing the community,
• assessing the business as a whole.

The client’s pricing depends on many factors, so we drove people to the community and into chatbot messages — later in the text you’ll see why this mattered. Initially, we planned to target startups and early-stage businesses for branding (visual identity / brand style). We also targeted existing businesses that were expanding and needed packaging for a new product and/or a rebrand. We aligned creatives and launched the targeting.

Course correction

We do a lot of strategic work, which is why we call ourselves a marketing and promotion agency. When results don’t show up, we go back to our marketing frameworks. This time, we returned to a SWOT analysis of competitors.

Our first competitor set was too strong. Their lead generation was built differently: it ran on studio reputation and a referral network grown over years — sarafan (literally “sundress” in Russian; idiom for word-of-mouth referrals).

We concluded that we needed a closer comparison set and a deeper breakdown of their funnel — to find clients at a level that matched where Ne.Studio was at that moment.

Strategy-wise, we moved into SOM.

Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) is the realistically attainable slice of the market.

Ne.Studio is already a studio, yet it aims to price like a freelancer. Freelance work usually lives inside that “close, attainable” market slice — not in the large-client scale we had implicitly looked at in our first competitor batch. Those studios were playing in a much bigger league:

• Total Addressable Market (TAM) is the total size of the target market where, in theory, the product can be sold.

OR

• Served Available Market (SAM) is the available / actually served market capacity.

Strictly speaking, these acronyms are used for a slightly different purpose. We used them as a practical way to rank players by scale. A team chasing TAM or operating in SAM is already a large player. When you zoom into smaller market “slices” and look for who’s nearby, you find tasks that are closer to your current competitive level.

To reach competitors who operate in a SOM-scale market close to Ne.Studio, we did the following:

1. Our traffic manager Polina collected friends of Bogdan (team lead) in a parser (scraping tool) — a huge set of designers and web designers.
2. From there, she filtered people whose profile status stated they were a designer.
3. Then she collected their friends and followers — building the closest social graph to us (a dense, multi-node cluster).

We considered this relevant because Ne.Studio’s founder Andrey and Bogdan (TQO) were in roughly the same “weight class” in terms of maturity and network. Designers and web designers still follow Bogdan today.

1. Next, we collected the communities those people administered via the same parser.
2. Then we filtered to keep active communities in the 100 to 2,000 follower range.
3. We exported the resulting list into Google Sheets and ran a selection process:

1) Sorted ascending by follower count.

2) Out of 197 rows, the middle rows were 98 and 99. We highlighted them as the median point (a “typical” value).

3) Took the range edges: 105 followers at the lower bound, 1,961 followers at the upper bound.

4) Calculated the arithmetic mean — 563.87 followers — and found a competitor closest to that number. It was a community with 555 followers.

We ended up with 5 competitors inside the SOM-scale, with a spread across that “weight class.”

Across a large number of competitors we noticed a common “product card” packaging style — like what you see on marketplaces such as Ozon or Wildberries (major Russian marketplaces, broadly comparable to Amazon Marketplace).
Marketplace sellers often need product infographics.

We explained the value of this strategy to the client:

There’s a concept called customer costs in marketing strategy. In Russian we often translate it as “клиентские затраты” — the correct meaning is “what it costs the client.” And “cost” here is not only money. With creative vendors (designers, marketers), clients often expect a pleasant level of communication and reliable delivery. In simple terms, if you hire a design studio, it can cost X money, Y time, and W nerves/irritation. A good service needs to be:

• reasonable in price and precise in meeting the need,
• reliable with deadlines,
• pleasant to work with — no emotional drain.

When you go straight for a big design contract, problems can appear early.

When you start with a small order — a “figня” (RU slang for a low-stakes test order) — you can test the vendor without big financial risk.

We suggested the client build the strategy around that.

The logic was that after a low-stakes first order, cross-sell could happen — more services purchased later. Simple service delivery also tends to uncover additional design issues, which can lead to an upsell — the deal expands right in the negotiation.

The client agreed, and we rushed to scrape marketplace-business communities and their members.

Results

Bingo. We landed a client for product infographic design. It was one of our competitors — a marketing agency that promotes marketplace sellers. Through their network, they spun up a conversion flywheel.

As a result, our client gained a whole network of customers for graphic design orders.

Final numbers, part 1

Final numbers, part 2

The campaign that brought the lead. It was a reach campaign, so the ad account doesn’t detect the target actions.

Misses and f***-ups

Throughout the entire first phase, we weren’t yet optimising in a way that truly solved the core problem. In a world where almost everyone has “a friend who’s a designer,” it was hard to show — through ad formats in the new VK ad account — what exactly makes Ne.Studio a better choice.
We tested different hypotheses:

• Selling expertise

• Memes as the entry point

• Case studies

That was about creatives. The classic visual-case format turned out to be the winner.

On audiences: we started broad, then narrowed into specific niches. We picked three directions: pet industry, psychology/coaching, and legal.
Why? Those were the three niches where Ne.Studio already had case studies.

We stuck with psychology the longest and kept running ads there even after we pivoted toward marketplace work. The pet industry is far from marketing in general, especially when it comes to vet clinics; pet stores could have worked, yet we didn’t hit the right people at the right time.

With legal, it was hard to diagnose the bottleneck.

Main takeaway: this segment is less active on VK.

Wrap-up

This is a foundational case for us. We found a way to sell graphic design services using our marketing thinking — through the working frameworks we rely on.

In a time when design competition is high — and generative AI is evolving fast — you don’t just need “your audience.” You need a client who recommends you. In Ne.Studio’s case, they do something essential for keeping that wheel turning: they delight. Our job was to identify who they could impress most with their professionalism.

Credits:

Bogdan Zozulya — strategy, marketing, and team lead: https://vk.com/the_redbeard

Anastasia Kiselyova — project manager (until May 9, 2024): https://vk.com/stacykiselyova

Polina Mladshikh — paid social / targeting: https://vk.com/dokersha_li

To order a service, message us via any of these links:

VK community: https://vk.me/bo_target

VK direct messages: https://vk.me/the_redbeard

Telegram direct messages: https://t.me/bo_martian