Outsourcing graphic design and creative services is becoming more and more necessary for businesses—and welcomed by many executives. Outsourcing creative design talent is a means to expand the strength of the internal marketing team of your organization. At a certain point in the growth of your organization, it will become advantageous to have some of the marketing and design responsibilities handled by a team of creative professionals from the outside.
How marketing departments benefit from outsourced graphic design talent
- Offers a fresh point of view
- Leverages new skill sets that may not be found in the organization
- Takes advantage of senior-level creative thinking
- Saves money by not having a department of full-time creative staff
Below are three different scenarios that we hear frequently serve as triggers for you and your team to start thinking about outsourcing your graphic design projects.
SCENARIO 1: Your internal marketing team needs specialized support
Your marketing department currently consists of a marketing director, marketing manager, two graphic designers and a copywriter. Although the team can generally handle most of the requests of the organization, some tasks such as developing a new website, launching a new digital advertising campaign, or designing a new magazine may be great ideas but have been delayed because the team doesn’t have the expertise to begin.
The expectation that your internal designers can do EVERYTHING is unrealistic. Bringing on a team with specialized skills such as event branding, website design, creative direction or long-format publication design can enhance and complement your marketing team’s capabilities, improve their creative output and, in some cases, educate them on how to execute these materials themselves in the future.
SCENARIO 2: You’ve hired your first dedicated marketing person
Your business has grown to the point where sales and marketing can be delegated, and you’ve just hired a new marketing manager to join the team. Although this person has been brilliant when it comes to their marketing sensibility, budgeting, and working with you to get things done, they may not have the time or the design skills to implement your marketing collateral on an ongoing basis.
Outside design support is an excellent way to start building a marketing team that can execute your organization’s marketing calendar. This allows your marketing manager to focus on what they do best for your business. For some organizations, this is the first step to building out a marketing department, for others, having outside design support is a long-term, cost-effective way of running a marketing department without having to pay an additional salary for a full-time graphic designer or team of designers.
SCENARIO 3: Your internal marketing team is getting burned out
Over the last six months, your marketing team has suffered late nights at the office, the quality of the work has been less than ideal due to the workload, and deadlines have been missed. Even worse, one of your designers has threatened to resign because morale is low.
These are all common signs that your internal marketing and design teams are being stretched too thin. If your organization is rapidly growing and expanding your sales and marketing initiatives, or finding that there are periods in the year when you are consistently and overly busy, having an outsourced graphic design team can prove to be beneficial in many ways.
Hiring an external team to take on some of the internal projects may be a welcome lifeline for your design and marketing teams. An outsourced design team can allow your internal employees to focus more on the day-to-day deadlines by giving priority to larger initiatives such as branding, product launches or other new initiatives. In this case, the outsourced graphic design team becomes an extension of your own team and should work collaboratively.
Taking the First Steps to Outsourcing Graphic Design
At Trillion, we work with growing marketing departments helping them to alleviate the issues described in all three scenarios to create more efficient and effective marketing departments for our clients. Over time, collaboration becomes seamless as we operate as an extension of your marketing team. If you’re considering adding new, creative thinking to your team, give us a call at 908.219.4703, or just complete our contact form, and we will answer any questions you have about how to outsource your graphic design needs.
