Regardless of the type of business you have, once it reaches a certain size, you’ll find that you will start requiring all sorts of visual assets. These can range from business cards, and flyers, to posters and billboards, all the way to Facebook and Twitter images. You may perhaps need a website redesign, a few Youtube videos and various animated gifs for product demonstrations and similar applications.
Producing these assets to highly-polished, professional levels is no mean feat, especially for a small company that offers products and services that are not directly related to creative fields.
If the needed volume of assets is high and constant, it may be necessary for some small to medium enterprises to hire at least a few in-house designers or artists to help produce the required digital assets.
What are the drawbacks of internal teams?
There are drawbacks to this approach. Most companies that do not specialize in creative work have to make tough decisions on where to spend their resources. In most cases, it has to be on their core products and services, and not on their internal creative teams.
The inevitable result is that internal creative teams do not have the opportunity to do many deep dives into any single creative area required for marketing. Instead, the usual demands of a small-to-medium enterprise make it more likely that they will be working on a wide variety of different projects.
They might be working on a website redesign at 9 AM then start working on an executive’s business cards after lunch. In short, they have no choice but to do everything, and that usually means less specialization is possible.
How can a digital design company boost your capabilities?
However, there are times when the services of an external digital design company may become necessary, even for businesses with their own creatives. Agency workers can typically work faster due to higher specialization, and these agencies often hire specialists in very niche fields like animation that would be impractical to retain in most companies that also have an internal creative team.
This allows digital design companies to become a powerful way to augment the capabilities of any internal creative team in certain situations:
- When the internal team is unable to meet the demand for visual assets within the project timeline
As many more businesses shift to an eCommerce business model, they often find that they may need to create thousands, if not possibly hundreds of thousands of separate high-quality visual assets continuously, not just for their site, but for associated offline promotions as well.
Hiring the services of a digital design company can do much to help take the burden off your team, which can then be used in a QA capacity for the assets, as they are more familiar with your brand.
- When your business lacks the capability to create different assets
As we mentioned earlier, it makes little sense for most businesses to hire animators full-time. The same can be true for videographers, sound editors and voice talents. Yet, in today’s web-based eCommerce environment, these types of creative specialists are now more necessary than ever, as live-action videos and animation are now a critical part of marketing and advertisement in that space. They are now also increasingly important for product and service demos for offers that might be too abstract to demonstrate through text alone.
On the other hand, the projects that require them tend to be infrequent for many businesses. This makes hiring an outside digital creative company an excellent way to produce those assets you only infrequently need to professional quality.
- They help you familiarize with the industry’s best practices
Well-regarded agencies such as 500 Designs, for instance, have worked with thousands of top businesses and renowned organizations, not only facilitating their growth but helping them to be more efficient in their marketing and branding processes at well.
Working with a top-level agency can expose your internal teams of creatives and managers to contemporary marketing methods and processes, including ideas on creating more efficient workflows. Even after the contract ends, such experiences could continue to create positive effects throughout your entire organization.
Conclusion
External creative agencies do not have to replace your internal teams. As a matter of fact, they can be synergistic, helping your organization grow faster and in a more controlled manner than would be possible than by just employing one or the other alone.
Not only can they augment your capabilities while their contract is active, but their positive effects of collaboration can also continue on years later, provided you choose the right agency to work with.
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