Maintaining a consistent and visually compelling brand is a core component of effective marketing. With nearly two-thirds of the population identified as visual learners, what you say, how you say, and how it looks are all marketing priorities. When engaging a graphic design agency to support your efforts, it is important to prioritize which graphic design projects are best-suited to outsourcing. When deciding what to handle in house and what to enlist to a trusted partner, keep these considerations top-of-mind:
What are your foundational marketing assets?
Your company or cause only has one chance to make a first impression. When deciding which graphic design services to outsource to a marketing agency, put these core assets at the top of the list. Your company overview booklet or brochure, and business cards rank among those key marketing assets.
What materials does your organization need to update on a consistent basis?
Ensuring consistency across your marketing assets is a critical component of building and maintaining brand equity. A strong brand is recognizable (think Nike, McDonald’s, and Coca Cola) and helps target audiences to make the connection between your visual identity (who you are) and what you do.
Maintaining a consistent brand can be challenging when it comes to the assets that are consistently created and updated – presentations and case studies, to name a couple. This is where investing in professionally designed templates can be advantageous. Templates are a graphic design investment that will pay long-term returns ensuring your content looks professional and on-brand time and time again.
What does your internal bandwidth and design capabilities look like?
Having a graphic designer on staff is a luxury for many organizations. When deciding which graphic design services to contract an agency to deliver, consider what you can realistically manage in-house. For example, if you have a junior designer on staff part- or full-time, your ability to customize templates and build upon a well-designed foundation may be strong. On the flipside, if you don’t have a team member who is comfortable working with graphic design software, you may need to outsource more collateral material design and/or rely on templates that can be edited in traditional programs like Microsoft Word and/or PowerPoint.
What is the ROI?
If you are a nonprofit organization launching a capital campaign or corporation recruiting paid attendees for a series of professional development seminars, your marketing materials need to reflect a level of professionalism that will motivate target audiences to make the requested investment. This ensures making your messaging perfectly clear and laying the content out in a visually-appealing and easy to consume format. These designed materials include event invitations, annual appeal letters, annual reports and training catalogues/brochures, to name a few.
Agencies offer graphic design services that can be bundled and tailored to meet the needs of businesses and nonprofits. By investing in a suite of professionally designed materials, organizations can ensure everything from their business cards to their website makes a strong first impression and clearly connects who they are with what they do.
A consistent brand is among an organization’s greatest marketing assets.
