How a creative studio can help your small marketing team achieve more

Campaigns, content, social media, events, websites, presentations, sales materials and brand management can all end up sitting with the same one or two people. That's a lot of responsibilities to cram into an 8 hour day!

The problem that arises therefore isn't a lack of ideas, it's having enough time and the right skills to get everything done and to give each task the amount of attention it needs.

This is where external creative support can make a big difference. By reaching out for extra help, a good design studio gives an in-house marketing team extra capacity, access to a wider range of skills and the confidence that the work being produced will remain at a high standard.

The obvious initial concern is the extra cost but think of it this way - what could your existing team achieve if they had experienced design and development support ready to step in when needed?

Get more done with the team you already have

One of the clearest benefits of external creative support for your internal marketing team is that they can get more done in the same amount of time.

Your team are already great at planning campaigns, shaping messages and managing the wider marketing activity but creating every asset, building every landing page and preparing every presentation can quickly slow things down and create a bottleneck within the business.

With an external studio in place, those jobs can happen alongside the work your team is already doing. While the marketing manager is planning a campaign, a team of designers can be creating the assets. While content is being written, developers can be building the landing page.

That means campaigns are more likely to launch on time and good ideas are less likely to sit on a list waiting for somebody to find the time to make them happen.

It's a matter of ROI

Keeping work in-house can feel cheaper because there isn't an extra invoice attached to it - but the work still has a cost.

If a marketing manager spends half a day trying to fix a presentation, build a web page or resize graphics, that's half a day they aren't spending on the work they're really there to do. Over the course of a year, those small jobs can add up to a surprising amount of time.

External support can free your team to spend more of their time on planning, campaigns, customers, content and the other areas where they add the most value. Not only that but because you have a designer working on designs, an illustrator working on illustrations or a developer developing a web page - you're not talking half a day for this, a whole day for that - artwork, assets and pages are built quickly and professionally by an expert that's doing those sorts of tasks daily.

So try switching the mindset from "How much will the design work cost?" to "What could the marketing team achieve with that time back?"

Design retainer vs full time staff

When a team reaches capacity, recruiting another person may seem like the obvious next step - but that brings a much bigger cost and commitment. There's the salary itself, along with National Insurance, pension contributions, equipment, software, holidays, sickness, training and management time.

You're also still hiring one person with one particular set of skills.

A good graphic designer may not be a web developer. A developer won't be the right person to design a report, campaign or exhibition stand. Someone who is good at marketing strategy may not have experience in branding, illustration, print or more complex digital work.

Working with an external studio gives you access to a whole team instead.

You might need graphic design this week, development the next and help with a larger campaign after that. Rather than expecting that 'unicorn' staff member to cover everything, the work can go to whoever is best suited to it within your creative studio.

For a small in-house team, that can offer much more flexibility than trying to bring every possible skill into the business.

An outside perspective

When you work inside an organisation every day, it's easy to get very close to the way things have always been done - an external creative team can bring a useful fresh perspective.

They might spot that a message makes sense internally but is confusing to customers, that important information is buried in jargon, that a call to action is unclear or that the website has become harder to navigate than anyone inside the business has noticed. They can also bring ideas from work they've done with other clients and sectors.

You don't need an agency to challenge everything but having another experienced team involved can often improve the thinking as well as the final design.

Protecting your brand

When a business is stretched, marketing teams are often not the only people creating marketing materials. Sales teams make presentations, HR produce recruitment documents, event teams create signage and other departments put together their own ad-hoc graphics.

Giving people the freedom to create things themselves can be useful but it also makes it easy for the brand to drift out of shape. Inconsistencies like fonts changes, alternative colours, previous versions of your logos creep in and slowly but surely the brand becomes a blur.

A design studio can not only help with the day-to-day work but it can also make the brand easier for other people to use properly. Better templates, clearer guidelines and organised asset libraries can allow internal staff to handle simple jobs themselves while keeping the overall look much more consistent.

Your website becomes easier to improve

Websites are a common sticking point for small marketing teams because even fairly simple ideas can require design or development support.

A new landing page, case study layout or campaign feature can sit on the list for months if nobody inside the team has the skills or time to build it. Having access to web designers and developers means the website can keep moving with the marketing.

Pages can be created when campaigns need them, layouts can be improved when they stop working and new ideas don't automatically have to wait for the next full website redesign.

That makes the website much more useful as an everyday marketing tool rather than something that gets rebuilt every few years and then slowly falls behind again.

How to tell if your team needs more support

If you're not sure whether external creative help would make a difference - think about where work is getting stuck.

• Are campaigns being delayed regularly?

• Is your marketing manager spending too much time producing materials themselves?

• Do you regularly need skills that aren't available inside the team?

• Do you find yourself making compromises with your website?

• Is your brand consistently applied from one department to the next?

If any of these problems sound familiar - your team may need more creative capacity.

Achieve more

Good external creative support should make a small marketing team feel bigger and, most importantly, your own marketing team gets more time to focus on the work they're best at.

If your marketing plans have started to outgrow the time or skills available inside the team, we can help fill the gaps with flexible design, web and creative support when you need it.