Marketing is the lifeblood of sales but it’s still easy to look at the bottom line and wonder if you can’t make sacrifices to make the expenditure go further. You may even end up asking yourself, how can a design agency help me? Saving the money, at first, may seem like a great idea. You could directly hire a freelancer or take on some of the work yourself, after all, no one knows the company as you do and it won’t take you long…The fact of the matter is, like all things in life, things always seem so much easier before you get into it and you pay for what you get.
Where marketing is concerned, a cost-cutting exercise can quickly escalate into a major expenditure until it finally spirals out of control and ends up costing a significant amount more than it would have to hire a design agency. The only thing more heartbreaking than not doing it right in the first place is having to pay twice as much after a long delay and a lot of time-wasting to clear up the first mess. A design agency can help and cost you much less than you imagine.
When you hire a design agency you get:
Answer this question, when your completely vital, stuffed with facts computer at work breaks down do you take it to a vet to look at? Why not? It may be OK if your vet used to be a computer engineer, but the idea seems absurd to trust something as pivotal as the technology of your company to just ‘any’ professional, other than the one trained in that industry. Yet, we see it all the time. We often have clients that have turned to a graphic designer for a project, which ended up going south after the graphic design phase was done because of a lack of experience in other areas.
Every project goes through different stages and by hiring a design agency you are paying for their expertise and capabilities for successful completion in every area of your project, in effect, making your project fit for the purpose it was designed for. Whilst you may think that you know everything that you need to do a professional job, the chances are a design agency does know exactly what you need to complete a project. Unless you are an expert in marketing it’s easy to miss important aspects like leveraging the SEO content on social media, optimizing the back end of your website and the tying in of print and video media. If you don’t know it can be done, you may just miss it and not get the most bang for your buck.
Another huge advantage of using design agency services is the ability to keep everything under one roof. As you bring on another service or professional, your charges increase. For instance, bringing in a company to apply the SEO or provide dedicated servers will cost more in time and money as you set up the project than using your design agency’s services. The more you take advantage of what is on offer, the bigger the discount. Not only that, but you also cut down the time that it takes to coordinate the whole process as all the professionals are in house and used to working together, cutting out any scheduling issues or personality conflicts, making everything run much more smoothly.
The advantage of this ‘herd’ mentality is a great value add to any marketing campaign. Think about it…if you are trying to design a logo you only have the ideas you come up with the play with. If you have four people putting in ideas and critiquing them, then you usually come out with a more impressive product. It’s also much easier to look at work objectively when you haven’t been involved right from conception and you are strangely frustration-free, so able to look at it with a fresh eye and move the design along. You save all the blood, sweat and tears of quickly trying to become an expert in field alien to your experience, and all the time you wasted trying to produce professional work. How professional can you be? About as professional as a computer engineer trying to neuter a cat.
The Design Council conducted research to find out how much of a return on investment the average company received from design agency services. They found out that for every $100 spent on design, turnover increased by $225. That’s a huge return! Any way you look at it, spending money on the services of a design agency actually saves money! It’s something to think about.
When you hire a professional design agency you get to invest in the latest technology, trends and marketing tactics, with the added advantage of being able to rely on years of experience in the field to make sure the effect of your money is maximized. You also end up with analytics you can trust.
This may seem like a non-event, but understanding your marketing analytics is one of the most valuable takeaways you can get from working with a design agency. Constant monitoring is essential to understand your customer’s needs and their buying habits, but you have to monitor the right data. Analytics is how a design agency tracks its success and works out marketing strategies that work. Learn from them! It will only benefit your bottom line.
If you really want to get the most out of your marketing, hiring a design agency is really the only way to go. They know how to leverage your audience and your marketing to maximize the return.
Isn’t that what marketing is all about?
