Author | Jackie

Making a digital planner for yourself is easy - you know what you need, you know what you want it to look like, and you know which page layouts would be helpful. 

Unfortunately, sitting down to make one for someone else isn’t as easy. When you could create anything at all, where on earth do you start?

To create a digital planner your customer wants, you need to be crystal clear about who you are helping. By knowing who, you can start to work out what they need. Knowing what they need makes the design process a whole lot easier! 

The best digital stationery products out there meet a need. They help people in some way. It may be helping them manage their lives, family, home, travel, hobbies, work, projects, or business goals. 

It is the one way above all else to stand out, get sales, and most importantly build a happy customer base. Good design is about helping people. And to do that, you need to know who.

Below, we’ll look at how knowing who informs your planner design process, helping you create a much better end product.

Knowing Who…Informs Your Planner Style

Your Planner Style Guide

Knowing who informs the style of planner. Different design treatments create widely different planners. 

You can see from the example below taken from the Ebook How to Create Your Digital Planner Style Guide, how different design influences and choices produce a very different graphic style.

Would a colourful, playful style suit the customer you have in mind? It is a very particular look and wouldn’t appeal to everyone.

Perhaps your planner is being designed with existing clients in mind as a complementary product:

• What style would complement your existing brand and services? 
• How can you make it look and feel like your client is inside your brand ecosystem?
• What do other planners in your niche look like? 
• How do existing digital planners catch the eye of your ideal customer? 

Grabbing Attention

While the look of a digital planner doesn’t sound as important as what’s inside, you can see it has a significant impact on grabbing a customer’s attention. 

It’s a bit like a book cover. Far and away the most important part of a book is what’s inside. But, if someone doesn’t pick the book off the shelf in the first place, the contents will remain a mystery. It could be the perfect book for them, and they’ll be none the wiser! 

Getting the book in the hands of a reader is the job of the book cover. A good book cover catches their eye, tempting them to pick up the book and start flicking through the pages.

That’s what your design style will do. It will catch the eye of your customer who will identify with the aesthetic, or if they are an existing client, they will recognise your branding. 

Once they’ve been drawn to the style, they will start to look at the contents, and that’s what we’ll talk about next.

Knowing Who…Informs Your Planner Page Layouts

Customers Need Your Help

If you know who they are and what they need help with - the purpose of your digital planner after all - you can create the perfect combination of page layouts for them. 

Knowing who is vital when it comes to creating your page layouts.

Your page layouts may mirror a process from your own services. It may be a series of specific page layouts, tables, or prompts. You can see in the image below right, just how varied and specific simple page layout elements can be (taken from Make Your Own Digital Planner with Templates & Affinity Publisher).

But, to know what to design, you have to be clear on who your customers are and why they are looking for a digital planner in the first place:

• A busy mum managing her young family’s commitments has different planner needs to a small business owner who wants to set, track and achieve her business goals. In fact, a work at home mum with a young family who want to start her own business would need both planners, each meeting a specific need.
• A retired couple planning their around-the-world trip have different planner needs to a student journaling their volunteering year abroad.

Choosing Page Layouts

Every planner will have generic pages, for example a calendar view or a monthly page-to-view. 

With these core pages in place, you will then need to identify and design niche-specific pages. For example:

• A busy mum would benefit from a meal planner layout. 
• A small business owner from a product launch checklist. 
• A retired couple from a travel itinerary page.
• A volunteering student from journal pages.

Once you delve into the possibilities of the niche-specific pages, you can see how much more useful a digital planner can be when you put the ‘who’ at the centre of your design process.

If you are ready to start working on your page layout ideas, grab this free Workbook that looks at Core Pages and Niche Pages.

Knowing Who…Informs Your Planner Marketing

And finally, knowing who will inform the marketing for your new planner.

If you’ve taken the time to create an aesthetic that appeals to your customer and you’ve sketched out core and niche pages that keep the needs of your customer front and centre and truly help them, you’ve just made your marketing a whole lot easier!

Design that Truly Helps People

When we need help with something, we identify immediately with something that talks to us and our problem:

• Can you imagine how much easier it would be to attract a young backpacker to your digital planner if your marketing talks about niche pages including a daily journal page to capture the day’s volunteering highs and lows.
• Or, a young mum to a digital planner that includes pages on meal planning, or planning for summer vacation.

How to create a digital planner your customers want (and love!)

I hope you can see that being clear on who you are creating your digital planner for from the outset makes the design (and marketing) process so much easier.

Personally, I think helping people is the most rewarding way to design!

From the design style and aesthetic to the marketing message, being clear about who you are helping is the key to creating a digital planner your customer wants.

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