There has never been more technology available to help marketing teams get things done.
With Canva making campaign graphics easy to create, AI helping with copy, ideas and imagery, and templates letting a marketer produce something acceptable without involving a designer. Even so, plenty of marketing teams are still stretched.
The amount of work expected from a marketing team keeps growing, and much of it still needs to be done to a high standard, which is a bigger strain than any gap in tools or skills. Recent research from Optimizely, based on a survey of 100 UK marketers, found that 74% believe the industry is stuck in “survival mode”, spending much of their time reacting to immediate demands rather than planning ahead. Optimizely research
That reflects what we see, because a campaign needs graphics, a brochure needs updating, an exhibition stand has to be designed, an advert needs producing, and website updates have been sitting on the list for longer than anyone would like. The marketing team still has planning, reporting, social media and email on top, so the design work ends up being fitted in around everything else.
Canva and AI have their place
I’ve got no problem with Canva, and plenty of work makes sense to produce in-house. The same goes for AI, since both save time and let marketers make small changes without briefing a designer. The trouble starts when the tools take over the design decisions as well as the production.
A good marketer understands the business, the audience, the proposition and what the campaign is trying to achieve. A designer brings a different view, looking at the hierarchy of the information, the balance of the page, the imagery, the typography and the brand as a whole, and whether the finished piece says what it needs to say.
Brand guidelines can be very good, but following them isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Someone who works with a brand every day develops an instinct for what feels right, whereas someone working quickly from a template can easily produce something that doesn’t feel like the same brand, even when it sits within the guidelines. As the amount of content grows, those small differences become much more noticeable, and Canva and AI help you produce more without helping you decide what should be produced or whether the result is right.
Consistency starts to disappear
One thing we see with busy in-house teams is that each piece of work is perfectly reasonable, yet put together they don’t look as though they’ve come from the same organisation. One person creates a LinkedIn graphic, somebody else produces an advert, another works on a brochure and someone else picks up an exhibition project. Each of them does their best to get it finished, but without consistent design input the result becomes a collection of different interpretations of the same brand.
That’s where an external designer adds value, by bringing a creative eye and making sure everything being produced still feels as though it belongs together. The marketing team keeps using Canva and AI, and the designer makes sure the output holds together.
When digital and print come from the same people, the brand holds together, as it has on our work with Verto Cloud.
You might not need another full-time hire
When the workload grows, the obvious answer can be to hire someone, and sometimes that’s right, especially if there’s enough work to justify a permanent member of the team. Often the work comes in waves though, with a heavy period for a campaign or a series of exhibitions followed by a quieter spell. An external resource, working as an extension of your in-house marketing team, gives you experience and capacity when you need it, without the financial commitment of another full-time employee.
Setting up that relationship before you need it makes a big difference. If you wait until the team is overloaded, you’ll be looking for someone who understands your business and brand while also trying to get an urgent project finished, which isn’t ideal for either side. Find someone you trust while things are manageable, give them a few projects, and let them get to know your brand, because if there’s little work for a while, that’s fine and the relationship is there when you need it.
Treat external help as part of the team
External support works best when you treat the person you bring in as part of the team instead of another supplier. Someone working with your business regularly should understand what you’re trying to achieve and know enough to make sensible decisions about the work they produce. Teams sometimes keep outside help away from internal issues, which wastes a lot of that experience, since an external partner has as much riding on your success as you do, maybe more.
They should be able to give you an opinion too. Because they aren’t in every internal discussion, they can spot things that have become invisible to the people inside the business, which is worth having when you’ve brought them in for their experience.
We’ve worked this way for years, including with MCS Rental Software and Verto Cloud, where we’ve become part of the team rather than another supplier.
Marketing teams still need designers
There’s a temptation to think that as the tools get easier, the need for specialist design skills reduces, and I’m not convinced that’s happening. If anything, I think the opposite is true, because when producing marketing materials took more time and specialist software, there was more control over who made them. Now almost anyone in a business can create a graphic or edit an image in a few minutes, which is useful, but it also means more content and more chances for the brand to drift.
A designer’s role is to give an in-house team creative oversight, experience and consistency, so they can make better use of the new tools. The best arrangement sits between doing everything internally and sending everything to an agency, with the marketing team keeping control of its day-to-day activity and having experienced design support whenever it’s needed. That’s the model we’ve found works well.
Don’t wait until you’re overloaded
If your marketing team is coping at the moment, that doesn’t mean you need to change anything. If you know there are periods when the workload gets hard to manage, it’s worth thinking about where your extra help will come from before you get there. Find an external resource, establish the relationship and get them familiar with your brand, so that when the next campaign arrives or a dozen jobs compete for attention, you already have someone to call.
Your in-house team can concentrate on marketing while the design work gets specialist attention, and AI and Canva carry on doing what they’re good at. If your team could use extra design and creative help, find out how Chemical Design can work alongside your existing team, giving them the experience and capacity they need, when they need it.