Visuals and Content Marketing | So when you’re looking at the decision of whether you’re outsourcing these visuals or you’re producing them in-house, there are always pros and cons to consider.
Pros Of Outsourcing the Visuals and Content Marketing
Little/No Learn Curve
On one hand, when someone else someone outside of your team is working on these graphics, there’s little or no learning curve because no one inside your company is that your team has to learn how to use the specialized tools so that it can be an advantage in terms of speed.
Immediate Implementation
Now the implementation when you’re working with an agency OR freelancer that’s external to your team immediate there’s seemingly no waiting they already know what they’re doing, they’re already experts at creating this particular type of content, so the learning step learning stages essentially skipped.
Ability To Focus On Core Business Activity
Now while you work with this agency you can go back to focusing on what your real core business is all about. So, if you are in charge of selling some kind of auto repair peas you can go back to your sales. You can go back to your business. Your everyday activities and leave it to the professionals to deal with all of the visual content creation.
Implementation Of Best Practices & Know-how Developed Over Time
Now. Something else that presents a great advantage when you’re thinking about content outsourcing is just the fact that the agency or freelancer that you’re working with houses the ideal we’ve been doing this for a long time.
And what that does is it’ll allow you to absorb all of those best practices immediately without having to make mistakes or go through everything they’ve gone through to learn these lessons over time, so that’s also a great advantage.
Demands Creating Detailed Outlines and Requests
The last advantage that I’d like to highlight is just the fact that organizing your thoughts. To share them with an external team member or an external agency kind of forces you to be very clear and specific about what you need. So these requests, these outlines become a lot more detailed and you have a clear picture of what the final product is going to look like.
Cons Of Outsourcing The Visual and Content Marketing
Now on the flip side, let’s look at some of the disadvantages of outsourcing the visual content production process.
Less Control Over Final Result
to begin with, you’re going to have less control over the final results because inevitably the person who’s developing these visual assets as working outside of your company outside of your team so whenever you deliver your feedback or send your edits what you’ll find is that the final word is usually someone else’s.
It’ll depend on them to accept or deny these changes and even how they go about implementing them is very unique to their own process and it kind of escape your personal workspaces so you might experience a lesson to control over the final results and that is normal it is a part of the whole outsourcing process.
No Internal Capacity Development
Now another disadvantage, and this is where you need to think about how long-term your content strategy is and how involved do you want to be.
There might be some opportunities that you’re missing out on because no one on your team can handle these requests, whereas if you’re outsourcing all of these new lessons, all of the new knowledge all the know-how is literally taking place outside of your team so.
If you’re thinking about a long-term strategy, it might suit you to think about how to incorporate these capacities back into your team. Whether that’s doing it all in-house. So, using the design tools that we talked about before developing all of it from scratch in-house or having that external team. Communicate back to your own team or train someone on your team to know some of the essential tools tips tricks around the creation of these visuals so that in the future, you’re not as reliant on them for the final delivery.
Can Be Expensive
This leads us to the next point, which is inevitably hiring someone from the outside whether that’s an agency or a freelancer can be a lot more expensive than training someone in your own team or just hiring someone from your own team to take on those additional responsibilities.
Now expensive is also relative because they’re such a very high variability in pricing in this space so you can find a freelancer that’s working for you for very cheap and some remote area of the world.
Still, you can also find the very sophisticated agency with very high fees, and in that range is very very spread out so it can become costly to acquire all of these services and it’s up to you to consider what fits within your content budget what doesn’t and if it is, in fact, cheaper for you to develop these assets in-house.
Additional Time Spent In External Communications
Now when you’re working with someone that’s outside of your team that requires some additional time in terms of how you communicate what you need, how you establish meetings how you work with schedules agendas how you set due dates.
Less Flexibility In Terms Of Meetings, Deadlines, and Costs
That brings us back to the last point on this list the previous disadvantage. This is also the fact that you have less control less flexibility around due dates around meeting times deadlines. The truth is that when you’re working with someone that’s within your team there’s a higher chance that you’ll be able to switch things around.
Make small modifications and changes without necessarily changing a contract which is the main problem of outsourcing these are content visuals is that you’re always operating with an external and see whether that’s an individual or that’s a company so anything that you change is usually something that has to go on paper now if you do decide that you’re moving forward with outsourcing I’m providing here an example of what it is I request should look like when you’re talking to an external entity as I said whether that’s an individual or any agency.
The Design Request
- Title
- Intention
- Sample Content
- Persona
- Specifications
You do want a dear to these best practices because any lack of communication is going to hurt your final result. It is inevitably going to hurt the way here from graphics look at the end, so the clear you can be about this from the start just the better results you can experience.
So let’s look at these 5 elements that all fit within a design request template that you can easily adapt in use depending on your needs and then the particular piece that you’re asking for.
Title
the first element is the title, and it is pretty straightforward; it’s just the headline that you’re using for this one piece. Just find something that represents what it is that you want to get from the agency or the freelancer and let them know what that is.
Intention
Next, you need to be very clear about the plan. Be very specific let them know what’s the goal behind this piece. Sometimes you think that’s just something that your team needs to consider but this is something that really needs to come through for whoever is executing these graphics they need to understand what your final aim with this product and that way they’ll be able to deliver something with much higher quality.
Sample Content
The third element here is the sample content you do want to supply isn’t obvious what you think is good design or what you consider is an excellent example of what you need you to need to make that very clear so if you find a competing brand or just a totally unrelated brand that’s doing something. You like what you see make it very clear that this particular design request should go in that direction.
Persona
The fourth element that I’d like to highlight here is your persona. You have possibly developed a character, and you know who this reader who this viewer is, you know what they want you to know what they’re into you know their main demographic characteristics, hopefully, something about their lifestyle.
Be sure to share this information with the agency freelancer working on your graphics because depending on who you’re talking to, these graphics might end up looking very different.
Specifications
And the last element on this design request template is your specifications so make sure to let them know what the size of your vision should be what the length of your video should be and out make sure that they have everything they need to deliver precisely what you’re gonna upload into whatever platform you’ve decided to upload this visual into.
Well, thanks for reading all these strategies to make sure that you can outsource your content effectively if that’s what you desire or to produce it in-house if that’s your choice.
If you have any other questions about visual content creation, the importance of visuals, or any other content topics, be sure to reach out to me at Jibran Khan on Twitter.
