Why Small Businesses Need Marketing Designers

Before you decide to take on the creation of your own marketing assets, learn why hiring a design professional is beneficial to your business.

With so many useful DIY design software out there you might be tempted to try and create marketing visuals yourself.

However, while you might save some money in the short term, this can seriously harm your brand image and therefore compromise the success of your business.

Here are 7 reasons why you should hire a professional graphic designer instead of doing the design yourself.

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Building a strong brand image

The point of marketing isn’t just to sell a single product or service. Rather, it’s building brand awareness, which will develop into brand loyalty and customers that keep coming back to your brand and bring a steady influx of revenue.

So good marketing materials aren’t the ones that speak the loudest, but those that are perfectly on-brand. Your marketing design needs to reflect your brand identity, that is your missions and values and convey this to the target audience in a visual way.

When we see the Coca-Cola logo or packaging we don’t just think of the taste of their iconic drink. We think about memorable Christmas ads, the Share a Coke campaign which made a simple soda a social experience, childhood, fun, etc.

Marketing materials done in their branding style (color red, a sense of nostalgia, the idea of family and friends coming together) have helped generations to create positive brand associations, which is why the brand is so recognizable and loved today.

Adobe XD

Ads of the World

Finally, remember that branding design is also a part of marketing. Creating your own visual identity (anything from a logo to business cards) can mean that you have to rebrand very early on, which is costly and could potentially lose you some clients.

A sales deck presentation created for a ManyPixels client.

It saves time and money

When you think about the time needed to find and hire a graphic designer, as well as the regular salary costs, coming up with your own designs (especially if you already have a branding guide in place) can seem like a very good idea.

However, although you might save up a bit in the short term, you will actually lose a lot of money in the long run.

For one, even if you have a brand guide in place to ensure that you keep your marketing design consistent, without creativity and skill it’s likely that your designs will attract new customers to the business.

Next, while a drag-and-drop program like Canva might seem like a breeze to use, the design process can be a very long stream of trial and error for a layperson. Something as simple as centering, or organizing different design elements according to the right hierarchy can require several iterations taking up hours and hours you could spend researching the market or finding potential leads.

For example, one report suggests that sales representatives spend 31% of their working hours creating sales content. That’s one third of their time! And on top of that, ugly presentations can seriously harm the prospect of acquiring new customers or getting funding.

A skilled designer can create an awesome sales deck in no time letting your sales team focus on perfecting the sales pitch.

Attract the right audience

You don’t need to be a designer to assess whether a graphic looks professional or not. But it takes a lot of skill and research to make sure that the visual style speaks to its intended audience.

For years Old Spice was known as a brand for the older generation. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that but this company decided to extend their potential customer base and they did it with very clever marketing design.

The “Old Spice guy” (currently NFL player Isiah Mustafa) became an internet sensation thanks to the witty commercials and marketing materials. The company didn’t even need to change its logo. Thanks to clever copywriting and a fun design the brand became much more appealing to millennials.

Beat the competition

Creating designs that look professional and speak to their intended audience is difficult enough. But making sure your designs are better than your competitors’ is another beast altogether.

Many professional designers go into the field due to a natural predisposition towards creative work, or what you might call talent. While practice, skill and research are necessary prerequisites to any successful design project, creativity can help make it truly unique and memorable.

To be fair, creativity is also a skill you can acquire and perfect. However, small business owners usually don’t have the time to work on expanding their creative abilities, nor to perfect the necessary technical skills needed to design.

Focus on user-friendliness

Marketing design needs to look good for sure, but it also has to help you reach your marketing goals. Different marketing campaigns have different goals, from lead generation, to upselling or building brand awareness.

You’ve probably heard of the term user-friendliness in connection with UX/UI design. User-friendly design is what helps people use apps and websites as their creators have intended.

However, this is also applicable to marketing design in general. Ad design usually includes a call to action (CTA) and you need to make sure that people know what to do and that they have all the information necessary in order to take action.

Look professional and trendy

Digital marketing is awesome because it allows you to get detailed data on people’s behavior and even interact with potential customers directly on platforms like social media. However, it’s also a very competitive arena where new trends emerge almost daily.

It can be difficult enough to keep track of all the relevant trends in your industry when it comes to things like product and service development, so staying in the loop on what’s hip in marketing design is quite a challenge.

A marketing agency or designer likely already knows what’s trending and can help suggest which of these trends would be relevant and useful to your business.

Diversify your marketing approach

As mentioned earlier, marketing design includes a variety of different types of design projects. Mastering all of them can be quite a tall order for someone with little to no previous experience.     .

Hiring a professional design service means that you can create different marketing assets and make use of both online and offline marketing channels. This is sometimes called an omnichannel marketing approach and it means that different channels provide a seamless and coordinated experience for users. Here are some stats on the benefits of the multichannel approach:

• 89% higher customer retention
• 30% increase in lifetime value
• 9.5% year-on-year annual revenue increase for companies with successful omnichannel marketing
• 51% of companies use at least 8 marketing channels

And it’s not just about the difference between off- and online either. Each digital channel comes with its own set of specifics and ad design trends. However, remember that this is the aspect where working with freelancers can become quite expensive since they usually charge on a per-hour or per-project basis.

An in-house designer will cover everything you need, but sometimes one person might not have the skills to match all your needs. A design agency is a great option for those who can afford the hefty fees.

For a flexible and truly affordable solution, be sure to check out an unlimited design service like ManyPixels. Different designers working on all the projects you need always at the same flat monthly rate!