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When it comes to outsourcing marketing, you’ll want to avoid working with marketing agencies. So this could be like a PR firm or a social media management company or an all in one marketing agency.
The reasons for this is because with marketing, we’re expecting more social media followers, more traffic to our sites, and ultimately, more sales right? So we want to see, if I spend $500 a month on PR, I want to make $5000 back from my investment, right? Unfortunately in the realm of marketing, no one can guarantee you results or sales. I would be very skeptical of anyone who claims and guarantees you’ll see results. I don’t doubt that some agencies do good work for their clients, but it’s such a great risk. I once spent $12,000 on a PR firm that’s very reputable and I got absolutely nothing out of it. No features, no press mentions, nothing. That $12,000 was as good as flushing it down the toilet. I don’t want that happening to you.
Secondly, it’s low ROI and why this is because these types of agencies are usually designed for larger sized companies. Companies who are already making multiple six figures to millions per year. And they’re never specific to handmade business. So all the packages you see these types of agencies offer, it just doesn’t make sense. For social media, you would find packages that sound like this. Post 10 posts per month to your Facebook page for $200 a month. That’s very expensive. Or like with the PR agency I hired, I paid $1000 per month and they’re only pitching me to like 10 magazines every month and these are editors they already have relationships with, so they’re not spending time researching like we would. That’s $100 per pitch. How long does it take you to write a pitch after you have a template, and I’m sure the PR firm has a template as well. Probably 10-15 minutes tops. For $100? Again, these are really high prices. And the reason for that is partly because they’re the experts. You don’t need to train them. They already have the systems, strategies and connections in place. But personally, this is a high price to pay for most of us small business owners.
What you should do instead is outsource the individual tasks to specialized contractors. For example, let’s talk about outsourcing PR, right? You spend a lot of time doing research then you have to write pitches and send follow ups. You would then hire someone who’s amazing at research and hire another person who’s great at copywriting and who’s also really organized so they’ll be on top with those follow ups. You’re going to get so much more bang for your buck this way. So your ROI will be higher and honestly, you’ll also have more control over the quality of the work being done. Maybe you have a very specific way you want your brand to be represented. Or if you’re not getting your emails opened by the magazine editors, you can give feedback to your contractors to change the subject lines. Hiring a professional PR firm doesn’t mean they’re going to do it better than you, especially now that you’ve had all this A Sale A Day Business System training. The only downside is now you have a larger team to manage, which is only a problem if you don’t have systems in place for communicating between team members. Also consider that hiring agencies are expensive because they have to make profits too so they’re marking up their prices. Whereas if you put together your own team, the money you’re paying your contractor goes straight into their pockets, you don’t have to pay extra.
This ensures you’re having your money go further and getting better results.
Now, we’re going to move on to creative work.
When I talk about creative work, I mean really subjective stuff like graphic design and branding. These are notoriously hard to outsource and I’ve had more negative experiences than positive ones and I know of other people who’ve been in similar boats. You’ll notice I don’t have copywriting listed on here, and that’s because copywriting is very much a formula and it’s easy enough to ask a copywriter to provide you with samples or ask them to write a product description for you on a test product to get a feel for their style. It’s with visual work specifically that’s really challenging.
So I really don’t mean to knock on graphic designers because like with any market, there are more and less experienced people, right? But I want to share with you a little bit more of the graphic design community to make you at least aware of what’s going on so you know where to be careful. The first thing I want to point out is that when you check out a designer’s portfolio on their site or maybe you found someone on Etsy, bear in mind that whatever you’re seeing is exactly what the designer wants you to see. You are not seeing all the failed projects or less pretty work because they’re not going to put those on their portfolios. I’ve hired graphic designers before who’ve done work for me that look nothing like the other work on their portfolio at all. So keep in mind that this is a possibility. Always ask for references from people you trust who have good branding and design work done for them. It’s best to find designers through word of mouth.
The next problem I encountered is that many designers don’t have a great system for getting information out of you to fully understand what you want. So usually what happens is after you sign up to work with a designer, they’ll send you a questionnaire, a list of question so they know what you’re looking for. What I’ve noticed is the designers that I’ve loved working with have been the ones who have been very strategic about the questions they’ve asked. And we’ll go through some of these questions in an upcoming slide. You can call it a communication problem, but it’s really hard to describe the stuff you have in your head for what you want your brand or packaging or website to look like. The problem is, we’re not trained in this kind of work the same way a really great designer is. So it’s really the designer’s job to help everyone all be on the same page. My negative experiences with designers is partly because they don’t spend as much time in this phase as they should or they don’t ask the right questions
So what ends up happening is most designers kind of expect YOU to bring the vision to the table. They’re waiting for you to tell them what type of font to use and that you want a butterfly in your logo and you want them to use muted colors. That’s really specific stuff that the designer should be making decisions on, because they’re the expert, not you. So what turns into a bad experience is hiring a designer who doesn’t have design or branding sense but is simply just someone who knows their way around Photoshop. We don’t want that.
Part of the problem is that as the business owners, most of us have no clue what we want. We have a general idea, but nothing specific because again, we’re not the branding or design experts. We don’t know that this certain hue of yellow makes you feel more happy and a different hue of yellow can look really aggressive. That’s why we hired a designer. So we approach a designer with our half baked ideas and most designers are going to create exactly that, a half baked idea. They can take your ideas very literally. If you can find a designer who just gets you and who takes the time to understand where you’re coming from with your half baked ideas and who has the knowledge of branding and isn’t just someone who’s good at Photoshop, that would be amazing. They’re not easy to find, and luckily for you, I have just the right person who is all of this. Check out my Ultimate Favorite Resources file under this video for a list of the most up to date graphic designers and branding experts I highly recommend because I’ve worked with them personally. I’ve worked with some really reputable design and branding companies that I’m sure you’ve heard of before, and who charge thousands of dollars, only to be disappointed with the outcome. That’s another thing, the more expensive their rates doesn’t mean they are more experienced or better so don’t fall into that trap!
A mistake I see happening so often is people who are really new in their business hiring a graphic designer to work on their branding. This usually ends up costing at least a thousand dollars. But it goes back to us not knowing exactly what we want yet, it doesn’t make sense to invest money into our brand before we know who our ideal customer is, or who our market is. We covered this in the Branding module in the course. Try to DIY your own branding or avoid the large agencies for your first iteration of your brand.
And wait to outsource this kind of work until you’re more established and you know who your audience is and how you want to position yourself in the market.
So let’s say you’re ready to hire a graphic designer or branding person. How can we make the most out of the situation? How do we effectively communicate our creative vision, even though we may not be so sure about the details?
First, use feeling words. How do you want your packaging or logo or website to make someone feel when they look at it? This goes back to Branding month where I asked you to think of feeling words. Example would be empowered, happy, love, safe, trust and pampered. A savvy designer will know how to translate those feelings into visual art.
You’ll need to be clear about your ideal customer and be prepared to talk about who they are. Just a general demographic profile is fine as long as you are focused on this one type of person. For example, women aged 40-50 who do administrative work, have children and a few grand children, love crafting and shopping at Michael’s, Joanns and learning from sites like Craftsy and CreativeBug. Not very affluent, but comfortable.
That’s it. That’s a profile. We don’t have to get into what their name is and where they live.
What’s also super helpful for the designer is if you do some of your own homework and show them 3-5 examples of other branding work or graphics that are aligned with what your vision is. This helps them get a sense for your style in a visual way. Since as you know, art and style can sometimes be very hard to communicate with words. It’s best to just show them instead of tell them. I want to note that you should avoid giving them too many examples, because they need to stay focused. More is not always more.
The designers I’ve loved working with have all asked me these questions and the ones I didn’t have a great experience, did not. So I know it sounds simple, but it really does help.
Let’s recap.
We talked about why outsourcing marketing can burn a hole in your pocket and how to do this in a smart way that saves you money.
And then we spent the rest of this lesson talking about the challenges with hiring a graphic designer or branding professional and how to avoid making the same mistakes that I and many other small business owners make.
We’re at the final stretch of this module. In the next lesson, we’ll talk about mastering Upwork.