Top 10 Benefits Of Hiring A Full Scale Design Service
So you’re ramping up your marketing effort.
Your website, app, and marketing materials need a design facelift to enhance communication and engagement.
You’ve done your homework and you have a list of freelance graphic designers and design agencies with their corresponding quotes and proposals.
But you’re yet to make a decision.
Should you just hire a full-time employee?
Bring in a freelance contractor?
Or partner with a design agency?
These three options have their benefits and setbacks. They all have a role to play in the marketplace. And depending on your unique design needs, one of these three options would be perfect for you right now and hopefully in the future.
We’ll examine 10 benefits of hiring a web design agency. With the cards laid out for you, decide if this is the path for your business.
Reliability
A lot of brand building is anchored on first impressions. In my experience, clients and prospects tend not to leave such responsibility to new hires. No one wants a potential customer seeing their business through the mistakes of a design intern, new hire, or an uncommitted freelancer. This is often the case for already established businesses looking to grow in the frontier i.e the internet.
Here’s what a reliability nightmare looks like in this scenario
An established business wants to build or revamp its website. They hire a graphic designer to work in-house or bring in a freelance contractor. It’s a gamble. The new hire could take weeks or months to settle into their job. A freelance graphic designer could be less effective because the website project is one of many other projects from other projects.
And if the website is poorly designed and optimized for search engine traffic, you have one or all of these happen.
- Low traffic
- High irrelevant traffic
- Damaged reputation
Low traffic shows design doesn’t bring business results. A loss. Irrelevant traffic means more than a loss as churn brings negative search engine optimization (SEO). Your site gets demoted or even penalized. At this point, poor user experience dilutes brand reputation painstakingly built offline over the years.
Design agencies look like the best choice for companies looking to maintain their brand while expanding into new markets. These design agencies have a bank of case studies proving their reliability over time.
There’s solid expertise and experience to show they can bring in business results with their design efforts.
Expertise and Quality Service
So much goes into the design process when we talk about marketing and building brands. Take web design for instance –
You first have to nail site use and strategy, then you have to have the tool to grasp buyer attention and shape perspective through contemporary design. There’s media (videos, pictures/ graphics, and text) and SEO to work on.
My point?
It’s difficult to find expertise for every part of this design machine to create great service. You could do it by developing a team in-house but it costs money and time to hire, train and assimilate talent. And hardly any freelance contractor is an expert in design, marketing/sales, and SEO.
Design agencies however have the advantage of scaled services as they can have scores of domain experts working to optimize every aspect of your web design project.
Speed
Design agencies have the advantage of speed because of a myriad of reasons including a respectable depth in domain expertise, service and industry experience, and resource allocation to solve design problems for businesses like yours.
The opportunities to grow your business online are staggering. The size of the markets online make it so. For instance, Google processes more than 3 billion searches a day and a good portion of those searches buy products and services from businesses like yours.
Thing is, resources like time, money, and talent are limited. If you don’t have the best hands running your design and marketing campaigns, another company has them and they’ll beat you to become the market leaders in your industry. Design agencies seem poised to be the fastest, most reliable way to grow your business.
Experience
A major peck of working with a design agency is that they’re experienced in designing business communication to get results. This experience is multi-layered. There’s service experience gained over the hundreds of projects done partnering with companies just like your business.
They’ve probably made all the mistakes one can make in such partnerships and you get to benefit from this in form of a smooth highly profitable partnership if you hire them.
Then there’s the experience individual domain experts gain in their fields and in teams to achieve the design and marketing goals. It’s all there to tap into by hiring design agencies.
Professionalism
Design agencies bring a level of commitment to solving design and marketing problems that is difficult to find in employees and freelance contractors.
For one, they’re companies with hired staff, from the CEO to the creatives on the design floor, dedicated to helping businesses with their design and communication needs.
There’s a name and brand to uphold so they focus on business results for their clients and would work to improve as they go from project to project and client to another. It’s hiring and training, it’s purchasing tools, it’s market research. Improvement never ends because it’s a process.
Costs
Say you want to hire a graphic designer as a full-time employee. You might pay them $45,000 per year and then an extra $10,000 in time and effort, training them to get up to scratch with their design, workplace, and team skills in context of your design needs.
But all that is nonexistent with design agencies whose price would be less than half your employee’s salary with expert designers and experienced technicians working to achieve not just your design needs but overall marketing and business strategy.
And although they usually have more than one client, they have the staff size to share the workload. Freelancers have more than one client but one person bears responsibility.
Great Results For Great Campaigns
Consistent results across different campaigns take expertise, experience, and professionalism that design agencies offer businesses.
Businesses that run big campaigns demand results and many times such pressure and accountability can only be shouldered by agencies, not a freelance graphic designer or an employee.
At this stage, everything counts. Design agencies are built to fine-tune every part of your marketing campaign to get results.
Resources
We’ve talked about how design agencies have good resource allocators who work towards the common goal of creating campaigns that bring results.
They have domain experts in all aspects of design. There are graphic designers, content creators, researchers, creative directors, SEO experts, and engineers all working together to bring marketing and design ideas to life.
The resources of an employee or freelance graphic designer are dwarfed by what’s available when you partner with a design agency.
Creativity
When you have more than one professional trying to solve your design needs, a need they’ve happened to solve many times in many different ways, it’s difficult to not have a creative process.
There are just too many ideas to explore when a design agency works on a project to get stuck in the process. These sparks of creativity open doors to the speed of operation, ridiculously outsized returns from marketing campaigns, or even breakthrough consulting services when it comes to product development and general business operations.
Competitive Advantage
What is a design agency other than a combination of the motivation to solve business problems with design, a breadth and depth of talent and expertise, and managerial talent to allocate all these resources to give you great marketing and design services.
To partner with a design agency is to have an edge over your competitors. When they’re going through the mill of cheap mediocre freelance graphic designers, your design agency is off to work getting professionals and experts to solve your design needs.
And even if they find costly and competent freelance graphic designers, they’ll miss out on the broad range of services you’d be getting at your design agency at the same or at cheaper costs. Hiring an in-house graphic designer would still require time for onboarding. This process can take weeks and months.
These scenarios all serve as opportunities for you to outperform your competitors.
Conclusion
As I said in the introduction, employees, freelancers, and agencies all have a role to play when it comes to the design needs of businesses. But if you need fast reliable results and don’t have experience with training and managing design talent (full time or freelance), design agencies are your best choice.
What else would you like to know about hiring design agencies?
