Who’s Doing the Marketing While Your Team Does the Design?

This & That is where we get into the parts of marketing that change how your business grows. This edition is about the design work that starts to surreptitiously fill a marketing team’s week.

You’ll probably recognise this pattern. The week begins with the intention of focusing on marketing plans for the next quarter. But by Wednesday afternoon, you find you’re refining a diagram for the engineering team, and saving a sales presentation from a colleague who’d tidied it up by adding four new fonts. None of this is entirely wasted effort – but it isn’t the marketing that you’d planned to do.

In a small company, someone has to handle these tasks, and the marketer with the design software usually becomes the unofficial graphic designer.

Being able to do it doesn’t mean it’s quick

Design tools have evolved significantly. With a good template, most marketers can create a decent visual for social media. However, a marketer fine-tuning a design will tend to take a lot longer than a graphic designer would. This means that they’re spending time on a task that’s not a core part of their job.

On top of this, some projects are harder than they look. For instance, a 40-page report needs to read well on a laptop and also be formatted for print. Larger graphics, such as a pull-up banner, need to be perfectly rendered to survive in a large-scale format. These are design challenges, and they’re rarely tackled effectively last thing on a Thursday.

The real cost is what didn’t get done

It’s fairly easy to track the hours spent using design software. What’s harder to see is the work that was sidelined to make room for these tasks: a discussion with the sales team about the leads that have gone cold; or a campaign idea that deserved an afternoon of proper thinking.

If your board of directors or your investors are watching the sales funnel, they won’t really care about the number of graphics produced. Instead, they’’ll ask what exactly moved the pipeline forward. And the answer won’t involve exporting PNG files.

Lots of hands make a patchy brand

There’s another cost too. When different team members do a bit of design, brand consistency begins to waver. Perhaps a logo gets stretched to fit a space, or a sales deck ends up with so many different versions that no one’s quite sure which one is the correct one.

It’s simply what happens when design is squeezed into the margins between other tasks. But buyers notice, even if they couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was that they noticed. And it becomes harder to trust a company whose image looks a little different with every new interaction.

Decide what’s worth handing over

We’re not going to pretend that everything needs an agency to be involved. For instance, quick social media posts, built from a graphic designer’s template, are usually fine done in-house. In these cases, speed and budget take precedence.

On the other hand, it’s worth trusting an agency with anything that a buyer sees as part of the decision-making process. That might be sales presentations or any documents likely to be shared with the person who approves the budget. It’s also worth handing over any design work that supports bigger budget activities, such as exhibitions or conferences. It’s also a good use of funds to have an agency produce your templates; once a designer’s created them properly, quick in-house tasks become quicker while overall visual consistency is maintained.

Where we come in

This is a significant part of what we do at Foster & Scott. We carefully craft presentations, ad visuals, reports and brochures, often under tight deadlines. It means that small marketing teams can focus on their core work. And because we’re a small team ourselves, you’ll always know exactly who’s working on your project, and you won’t have to wait days for a response.

If this sounds useful, please drop us a line.

Short on time? Here’s a quick exercise.

For one week, ask everyone in your team to make a note whenever they open a design tool, and to also note roughly how long they’re using it for. Then ask what that time would have been used for if somebody else had done the design. If the answer is “all the things we keep saying we’ll get round to”, you’ve found a way of getting your team to work more effectively.

More of This & That in a fortnight’s time.