In-house design teams are always busy. Whether they sit on the marketing team, or they’re part of a separate brand team, or they’re flying solo, there’s truly always something to be done. They take care of design requests of all sizes: can you just take a look at this email header? Can you design this new product page? Is this social post okay? Which one is the right logo file again? What about this landing page — can you re-design it? And it’s time to rebrand, can we do that this year?
It’s part of what makes in-house design work exciting, because every day is a little different. But it also means that certain kinds of work are very tough to get out the door in a timely manner.
Looking for content marketing support for your brand? We can help. Let’s Talk
That’s where marketing design services — whether that’s a full-service creative marketing and design agency, or a freelance marketing designer — come in: brought on for specific projects, they can help a company plan, execute, and publish a new project in a matter of weeks, instead of months.
Here are four types of design projects that are ideal for outsourcing to experienced marketing design agencies and teams.
4 great projects for marketing design agencies
1. Foundational content creation for scaling companies
Most growing companies have a lean in-house design team. More often than not, design work begins piling up, leaving creatively inclined team members to take matters into their own hands, resulting in an inconsistent brand.
And nearly one-third of brands report that having a consistent brand increased their revenue by 20%+.
Investing in working with a marketing designer to build on-brand, foundational content like social media content, CTAs for blogs, email newsletters, landing pages, ebooks, and sales enablement content.
2. Brand templates
Whether you’re working with a design agency to build your brand, or you already have an established brand complete with brand guidelines, a creative marketing designer can help you maintain brand consistency by building templates for your most-used content types.
Using a system like Canva or Figma, a creative design team can take your brand parameters and build them right into your design platform, so anyone at the company can quickly access the correct colors, fonts, and approved imagery.
And then, a marketing designer can build customizable templates for presentations, all kinds of social posts, whitepapers, business cards, product packaging, sales enablement one-pagers, and more — no matter what kind of content your team creates, a design contractor can create brand-ready templates for anyone to use.
It’s a win-win-win: Investing in 10 or 20 hours of a designer’s time spent building brand templates allows any employee, no matter their level of design experience, to easily create content that aligns with your brand. It also saves your design team from those pesky small requests, like social posts, that add up quickly. And it helps you establish a consistent and recognizable brand.
3. Marketing research reports
Many companies have started doing industry research and sharing their findings with their community as a way to establish themselves as knowledgeable leaders in their space — check out the HubSpot State of Marketing Trends Report and Owl Labs’ State of Remote Work Report.
It’s a great strategy: not only does publishing industry reports let you connect with your community and target audience, but you’ll also have great insights to share on social media, and journalists covering your industry will want to cite and link to your report (hello, quality backlinks!).
Most companies work with survey contractors to run the surveys, parse the data, and turn it into usable insights for your target audience. Then, they’re written up by internal or external writers. Finally, in-house design teams are typically tasked with designing the report in an appealing, easy-to-read way.
But this is a massive task: it comes with a lot of data visualization work, image sourcing, and hours of work figuring out how best to highlight key findings. Plus, reports are often between five and 20 pages long, depending on their scope, making them a lot more time-consuming to design than the average project.
And here’s the kicker: reports are time-sensitive. By their very nature, industry reports share insights about data collected now, explaining the challenges and opportunities within your industry today. If conducting the survey, writing and editing the report, and designing the report takes many months, the data is automatically less relevant than it would be if it was published in a timely manner. Since in-house design teams are often so over-burdened with tons of tasks, it’s not easy to dedicate the many hours needed to design a report (and implement feedback through rounds of design revisions).
A designer at a small market research report company or creative marketing agency, on the other hand, can dedicate a full-time schedule to designing your report, getting it done in a matter of days or weeks, not months.
4. New marketing channels and mediums
If your company is looking to try out new marketing channels and mediums, whether it’s building an email newsletter or trying out animation on your website or creating TikToks to connect with a younger audience, specialized design contractors can help.
Consumer preferences are always changing, and if all your design work is coming from inside the house, you may not be in a position to keep up. Institutional norms, infinite review processes, and long-held brand guidelines may discourage internal design teams from thinking outside the box and trying out new mediums.
Bringing on a creative marketing design contractor can help you try something totally new, reach new audiences, and test the performance of a new look, campaign, or marketing channel. Maybe your audience loves video and your design team has been too busy to try it out — a design freelancer or small agency can help.
Huge project? New channel? Backlog of creative marketing projects? A marketing design team can help.
If you don’t have an in-house design team, external design contractors can help you get your brand off the ground and ensure everything you publish represents your company exactly as you hoped. And if you do have an in-house design team, design contractors can work with them, taking on and completing the work they don’t have time to do, and helping them generate new ideas along the way.
Interested in learning more about how a creative marketing design team can help you grow your business? Get in touch with us at CXD Studio, we’d love to chat with you.
