- So I work at a tech company
and when it comes to our internal brand
and marketing design resources,
there are only two of us with that skillset on the team.
But the design needs from across the company,
well, they're much more
than what two designers have capacity for.
If you are on a small design team
or a maybe a solo designer at a company,
I'm sure you can relate to this.
So how do we handle all of this work
without just being super stressed all the time?
Come here. I'll tell you the secret.
We outsource.
In this video,
I'm gonna share with you how that works for us,
what we outsource, and who we outsource to,
as well as what I've learned about outsourcing
over the years to make it really effective
and a good use of my time and budget.
(gentle upbeat music)
So first of all,
what is outsourcing and why should you do it?
Outsourcing design work
means getting someone outside your company
to handle design tasks that usually you do in-house.
And whenever you're in a situation
where the design needs of the business
outweigh your capacity to actually do that work, do it well,
outsourcing is a great option.
In my experience, brand design teams
are often the smallest in a tech company
and it is just unrealistic to think that as a designer
you can just keep taking on more and more work
as the marketing team grows
and as the business has more and more design needs.
So if you are in that situation,
you need to advocate for outsourcing
and I hope this video is going to help you do it.
If you choose the right partner to outsource to,
it can actually be cheaper
than hiring another full-time employee onto the team.
Especially when you add in the cost
of like providing benefits and the time to manage them.
And with outsourcing,
you can actually better scale up or down your resources
with the ebbs and flows of the design needs.
There are three main ways we outsource work right now
where I work at ConvertKit.
The first is on a project basis.
So if it's a project that comes up
and we don't have the right skills or perhaps time
to work on it ourselves in-house,
we will outsource it.
Usually to a freelancer with a specialized skillset
who's gonna work on the project for us,
like to create an illustration or some motion graphics.
We did outsource once to an agency
to create a brand campaign on a project basis for us,
which I do have some thoughts on, and I'll share them later.
The second way we outsource is with a retainer.
So this is where we pay a graphic designer
to essentially reserve a certain number of hours per month
to work on our design needs.
A retainer can be really great
because you know there will be someone there to help you
when you're overloaded,
but the hours are kind of like use them or lose them.
So if you have a lighter month
of projects needed to outsource,
then you'll still pay the same amount
as if you had used up all of those retainer hours.
Then the last way we outsource right now
is a much newer method and that is using a creative
as a service solution,
namely the sponsor of this video, Superside.
Superside offers subscription packages
where you pick a plan
that suits what creative services you need.
We have the Digital Advertising package at ConvertKit
and that includes all of these things, and then you pay
based on how many hours you want access to per month.
We have 95 hours a month in our package,
but unlike a retainer,
any hours that we don't use
get rolled over to the next month, which is fantastic.
So with this type of outsourcing,
you're not gonna waste any money
if you have less work to be outsourced one month.
I think when a lot of companies
want to outsource a bunch of design work regularly,
getting an agency on a retainer
is probably the first thing that comes to mind
because you get access to a bunch
of different types of creative skills
without having to find individual talented freelancers
to do all those things.
And I did consider that too, honestly,
when I first realized that we needed to outsource more.
But the agencies that I spoke to
seemed to really only be interested in
working on like the big impressive branding projects
and not so much on the smaller things
like the production work of resizing ads,
making variations or like polishing a presentation.
And I knew that we needed
to be able to outsource both types of work
and to have a partner who would do both types equally well,
which Superside does.
I also knew from my past experience working with agencies
that they tend to be extremely expensive.
I guess they're like used to
working with higher budget, bigger clients than us, I dunno.
And the process of working on something together
with an agency can feel really bloated.
Like you're on calls with more than a dozen people
who are all working on your account
and concepting takes weeks,
then design takes more weeks or months.
And if they need to bring in someone with a specialist skill
to like act on those concepts,
then you need to pay extra for it.
I don't know, don't get me wrong, they do great work,
and for high budget like traditional campaign projects,
I can understand the value of an agency,
but we wanted a partner
who would more feel like an extension of our team,
who would get to know our brand,
do high quality design work,
happily work on projects that are big or small
and stay really efficient with time
and get things done quickly.
And Superside checks all those boxes for us.
So what exactly do we outsource
and what do we keep in house?
We outsource pretty much all of our social media
and ad imagery work.
A lot of our presentation design,
motion graphics, illustrations,
print design, and layout work like eBooks and PDFs,
we're even starting to dabble
in outsourcing some landing page designs to Superside.
So with all that, you might be asking,
"What the heck are we doing internally
if we outsource all of that?"
Remember we're a small team
and we focus most of our internal design time
on our marketing website, on evolving our brand,
creating systems, I actually have a whole playlist
all about design systems at ConvertKit,
and we work on setting the creative direction
for all of the things that we outsource.
As in-house designers,
we have incredibly valuable context
and a deep understanding of both our product
and our audience.
And so I believe our time is best spent
focusing on our most valuable marketing asset,
which is our website.
And on being the ones to keep all the design work
happening internally and externally consistent
and in line with the direction
that we want to go with our brand.
I was definitely nervous to outsource at first,
feeling like you know, no one could do as good a job
as I could do with my in-house context,
but you've really gotta let your ego go a bit
and realize that that is not true
and that by letting go of some projects,
by getting help on them, you're gonna be able
to play a more strategic role internally
and you won't be as burnt out.
So here are some advice
for making outsourcing really efficient and effective.
First, you should invest time in giving context
to your external partners.
It's definitely gonna be more effective
if you work with a regular partner
rather than like bopping around different freelancers
because then your external partner
can build up a lot of important context
that you also have as an in-house designer over time.
And this is absolutely worth investing time in
because the more that you teach them about your brand
and your audience and what good design looks like to you,
the less assumptions they're gonna have to make
and the quicker that we are
to produce the right solution for you.
How Superside works is that you have a couple
of regular creative leads and project managers
that you focus on building this context with
and they become the representatives of your brand
with all of the designers
who work on the projects themselves.
Because that is gonna vary based on what the project is,
what timeframe you need it in,
and what specialized skillset is needed.
So it's really handy for us
to have those key points of contact
to build relationships with.
You've gotta keep track of who is working on what
in a project management tool.
So we have a pretty simple form
that anyone in the company can use
to request a creative asset
and all of those requests come into a backlog
in our monday board.
Every week we go through those requests
and we decide if it's gonna be something we outsource
or something that we work on ourselves.
For the things that we're gonna work on internally
or have our own graphic designer, Holly, work on,
we just attach that person directly to the item in monday.
And then for anything we wanna get Superside to work on,
we tag it with Superside
and then submit it through Superspace.
This is their tool that makes briefing really easy
by giving you questions to answer,
which I very much appreciate,
'cause writing briefs can be difficult.
And then you can keep track of the status of the project
and any conversation around it in here too.
And for every project that we outsource,
we have an owner internally
who manages our stakeholder feedback
and is like the point of contact
for our external partner.
Tip number three is to have your outsourcing partners
use the same design tools that you use
so that you can edit something later if you need to.
And so that they can make use of any systems
that you have built.
You should be working with a partner
who is happy to use the same tools as you.
We work in Figma internally in ConvertKit
and so our Superside team works in Figma
and delivers us Figma files
and so do any other freelancers that we bring on.
It just makes it easy.
Tip number four is to give clear feedback.
This is kind of related to spending time,
giving context to external partners you work with regularly.
If you give them really clear feedback
on the work they've done,
they'll get to know your preferences
and deepen their understanding of your brand.
We give feedback to Superside directly in Figma comments
and we also really like to make Loom videos
talking through any more nuanced feedback asynchronously.
That's something that we often do internally as well,
so it feels really natural to us
and it's a very efficient way to give feedback.
So the important question, is outsourcing actually worth it?
Clearly you've heard from me talking about our process
that when you outsource,
you do still need to spend some of your time,
briefing your external partners,
giving them context, giving them feedback.
But I promise you that if you have the right partner,
doing this is gonna allow you to get much more done at scale
than if you'd spend that same amount of time designing.
Outsourcing leaves you as the in-house designer
to focus your creative energy on the projects
that you are most excited to work on.
Plus, you can get the benefit of having access to skill sets
that maybe you don't have internally.
And it's always great to be inspired by the fresh takes
that your external design partners
might have on a project too.
We can learn a lot from each other.
Outsourcing does cost money, obviously,
but at ConvertKit we feel like Superside
takes great care of our budget
and using the hours that we pay for really efficiently.
For every single project, they'll scope it up front
and tell you how many hours they expect it to take,
and we've found them to be very accurate in their scoping.
So if you are an in-house designer
and you are struggling to keep up
with all of the design assets that you need to be producing
and all the iterations that you need to be making,
I feel you, I see you,
and it is time to start outsourcing before you burn out.
reach out to Superside at superside.com
to chat to them about your specific needs
and see if a creative as a service solution
might be the right fit for you,
which I have a hunch that it will be.
You should also check out the Superside YouTube channel.
They have a bunch of really helpful videos
and, in particular, I think you should watch this one
about our Design 101 to pick up some tips
about designing really effective ads.