All established and growing businesses need high-quality and professionally done marketing material. But how can you consistently source high-quality and on brand content, in a timely and cost-effective way?
Let’s explore the differences between keeping your design talent in-house, sourcing talent from freelancers, and the prime way to source it all.
What’s the difference between hiring in-house and outsourcing?
Firstly, let’s take a look at both options.
Hiring your own designers in-house
Source: Hillary Fox
Hiring in-house means that you have a designer on the floor and readily available.
But it can also be a lot of work. You have to find talented designers who will stick around, train them on your company’s brand and style, and then manage them as they create marketing materials for you.
For these reasons, owners from small businesses would resort to designing marketing material on their own while excluding the skills of a professional graphic designer from their list of needed staff.
But how often do you create a design that doesn’t feel like a hit? Or how often does it not portray the right kind of brand image you truly want to show your customers?
These small aspects truly contribute to the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns, points of sales, websites and email marketing campaigns.
For that reason, many businesses would out-source the talent and hire a freelance designer for individual projects. That seems simple enough. But here are two important questions to consider when you’re hiring these designers?
- How do you find these freelance designers?
- What if you have regular or seasonal work, such as digital ad campaigns?
How you answer these two questions is really the key to whether your business might be ready to make the switch from using freelance designers to on demand design services.
Let’s have a closer look at the two.
Freelance designers
Source: Andrea Pacquadio
Freelance designers are hired on a project by project basis.
There are lots of talented designers working freelance. And hiring a freelancer can be a really cost effective way to get individual jobs done.
Freelance designers are usually sourced through personal recommendations, online searches, or freelance marketplaces like Fiverr.
For short-term tasks, hiring a freelance designer may be the best option. But if you’re willing to grow your business with multiple campaigns ahead, and still in need of those outsourced skills, you may need to think of the following questions:
- How do you choose the right designer for your small business?
- How do you control the quality?
- What happens when you have ongoing projects and your trusted designer is unavailable?
- How do you ensure brand consistency across different freelancers?
The main gaps that you find in the process of hiring a freelancer, is that they may not always have the time to assist, which results in you needing to rebrief your brand image to new workers. This may be tedious, time consuming, and with inconsistent outputs.
So how could you fill in that gap and secure on-brand and on-demand designs without the high timely and financial expenses?
On-demand graphic designers
On-demand graphic designers work through a subscription-based model.
Rather than sourcing and engaging with a freelance designer on a project by project basis, you’re subscribing to access an already existing (and always available) team of designers. It’s like having an on-demand design agency, but without the big retainers or lock in contracts.
The best part is that the quality is controlled for you.
On-demand Design services, like Metigy’s Creative Services allows you to get high quality, on brand designs delivered in a timely manner. And they are cost effective too!
Have a pre-vetted pool of designers so you don’t have to worry about taking a gamble on quality like you do when engaging a freelance designer for the first time.
You will also have the same designer assigned to you, making it easier to achieve the right level of consistency to ensure you’re building your visual brand.
This also helps reduce the time spent on changes, over a longer period of time.
How do you know when your business is ready for Metigy’s Creative Services?
Any business that needs an ongoing or seasonal delivery of creative design tasks is a perfect candidate.
If you change your marketing creative on a weekly, monthly or seasonal basis across multiple platforms like Instagram and Facebook, then subscribing to Metigy’s Creative Design Services could really help you get on top of this.
If you’re hesitant to engage freelancers because you’ve had a bad experience, or simply want to reduce the stress of producing top-quality design creative. This could also be for you.
In the not too distant future, we will be adding other creative services like copywriting, video creative and making it a one stop shop for all your creative needs
So, why wait? Get started and add a designer to your team today.
