Marketing on a Budget

Reality

• A good provider trains their team members to understand North American design sensibilities and educational courses on regions, states/provinces, cities and more, as well as vertical markets, colors, fonts, holidays, sports and leisure, etc. With this information as a foundation and access to the Internet, research on local design trends is fast and easy.
• Email, IM and free conversations remove geographic barriers. If you had all the money in the world to hire an agency, the personnel still would not be in your office and you'd have to call them most of the time. If you submit written instructions, samples and sketches you can quickly come to an understanding of requirements with a designer. Add to that an order management tool that walks you through all the minimum requirements for each product type and the system is foolproof.
• The same order management tool should make transferring files fast and easy, while storing them along with finished products so they can be used later. Emails get lost and have size restrictions. Thank goodness there are better ways.
• When it comes to revisions, you can certainly have an iterative process and go back and forth but doing so will come at a price because you will pay for each version. But with an outsourcing company, the initial cost of the design and five revisions will still be a maximum of one tenth what you would spend with a local agency or freelance professional. Take it from me, in time, you will actually become more efficient—there are very few projects any more that need more than two or three passes between Mel and me because I'm better at making decisions upfront and communicating, and he has great ideas and knows my preferences. I have too much to do to go back and forth between images, don't you?
• Another consideration is turn times. Do you have the ability to spend days or weeks working on a display ad or Facebook page? No, you've got to handle customer service, billing, new business and ten other things today. Once you experience turn times of 24 hours or less, you realize how much more you can get done and feel liberated.
• Whatever you need to get done—Flash ads, video production, image editing and so on—a good provider will have the skills and capacity. No single person you hire could have the breadth of expertise of a company dedicated to marketing and advertising production. Even the best and most costly agencies often experience shortages in various skill sets.

Regardless of your business, you need to market to survive. Yes, you could do it yourself but that means you are not covering other important tasks. Even if you are in charge of marketing specifically, you should be focused on strategy, messaging, customer experience and the more high-level functions, not stuck fiddling around in Illustrator or Photoshop. Outsource the design and the headaches, and keep what you love to do. My growing base of internal customers have never been happier, I get the work done that my CEO and Board of Directors measure and value, and I enjoy my job much more since I became a client of Affinity Express.