We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cowbird Creative a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Cowbird, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

As a small business, we’re nimble and able to create truly custom work for our clients. Our goal is to help our clients illustrate what makes them totally unique in each of their industries. That requires the time to dive deeply into their businesses, their offerings and their audiences. We don’t want to add to the noise of the marketing landscape. Our goal is to create work that is as effective as it is bespoke, at a price point that feels manageable to small business owners, entrepreneurs and creative professionals.

We’ve seen many clients fall prey to other designers or social media strategists who create cookie-cutter content, rely heavily on AI tools, and care more about quantity than quality. We want to empower our clients to understand their own marketing goals and be invested in the strategies we build and implement for them. We’re not just delivering creative work to our clients and then walking away; we are there to support, coach and collaborate during each phase of a project.

We’ve been communications professionals for over a decade. In that time, we’ve seen business owners pour tons of time and money into hiring different people to handle their marketing and communications tasks piecemeal. But when the logo designer, web designer, photographer, copywriter and social media manager don’t communicate with one another, they inevitably end up diluting the power of the brand and stunting the growth of the business. Our goal is to provide a strong foundation of strategy and a clear creative direction so that each brand touchpoint is cohesive and intentional.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

At Cowbird Creative we build custom branding, websites and visuals for small businesses, entrepreneurs, educational institutions, nonprofits, artists and creative professionals. We partner with clients to help design targeted brand strategies; we take custom photography and videography to help showcase and elevate brands; and we generate and roll out social media strategy and content.

Our aim is to provide a one-stop-shop for clients who are looking to overhaul their branding and visuals, but who don’t have the time or resources to hire a logo designer, web builder, copywriter, SEO expert, photographer, videographer and social media manager. We do it all.

As small business owners, we are aware of how difficult it is to focus time and energy on building a brand while serving clients and running a business. We find it satisfying to be able to help business owners level up their creative materials and provide a strategy so they can stop thinking of marketing as a frustrating chore.
We’re teachers at heart, so our goal is to empower our clients to understand the objectives behind what we do, and to work closely with them to implement strategy so that once a project is complete, they feel confident moving forward on their own.

As we’re entering an era of AI-generated text and visuals, we feel strongly that creativity and originality is more of a superpower than ever. We pride ourselves on our custom work. Everything is written and created specifically for our clients.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

We met at Columbia University where we were MFA candidates in the Creative Writing Program. We were paired to lead a literary journal elective for a summer program for high school students, which required us to publish a magazine of student work. The process of designing the magazine, from the layout to the content to the cover art, allowed us to merge our love of design, creative writing and attention to craft. From that point, we knew we wanted to work together in some capacity that centered on the creative process. We continued working together in this summer program for many years, and we developed a friendship and a mutual respect for each other’s working process.

Years later our professional lives intersected—once again at Columbia University—where we worked together in the Communications Office at the School of the Arts. In this job we applied our interest in design to marketing and branding projects. We gained valuable experience developing digital campaigns to grow enrollment; we built logos and branded suites for various internal clients at the school; we created designs and tailored assets for print and digital platforms; and we developed and executed social media strategies. Designing marketing campaigns for multiple high-level stakeholders taught us the practical side of design—how to communicate and collaborate with clients, how to manage a team and the importance of creating a positive, productive work environment.

Eventually, we decided to head out on our own and create the partnership of our dreams. As we branched out, we were able to take on a range of clients, including jewelry designers, fitness studios, musicians and independent artists of all kinds. We love that we are able to continue to center our creativity in our business and use the skills we’ve learned along the way to grow our business.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

At the beginning of the year, we developed a voracious, comprehensive twofold strategy: to grow our reach organically by expanding our social media output and reach and by physically stepping out into the community and putting ourselves in the pathway of other business owners and potential clients.

We wanted to position ourselves as educators, so we launched a content marketing campaign designed to provide free advice to business owners who are looking for help with branding, websites and marketing. We also made a point to engage with local businesses through our social channels and to highlight more of our own design and photography work through our posts and stories.

Since we operate a service-based business, connecting with our clients on multiple levels has always been important. We work to understand our clients’ goals and pain points, and we help identify what makes them unique in the marketplace. We decided to take this personal approach into our community and introduce ourselves in-person to small business owners in our neighborhood. We started offering a few free visual assets—professional photos and videos, and we featured these businesses in a new series on our Instagram. This boots-on-the-ground approach has allowed us to get to know many wonderful business owners in our community and offer them a sample of our services. To continue our in-person foray into the community, we recently joined a local networking group. We’ve attended several meetings, and we’ve already made some strong connections. We’re currently laying the groundwork to collaborate with these new connections on exciting projects and provide even more educational resources to struggling business owners.

Contact Info:

• Website: cowbirdcreative.com
• Instagram: @cowbirdcreative
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Cowbird-Creative/61553582102833/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cowbird-creative
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@cowbirdcreative
• Other: https://www.pinterest.com/cowbirdcreative/

Image Credits
Cowbird Creative