More and more businesses are relying on untrained marketers and designers to do marketing tasks in-house
While it does save a few dollars in the short term, it cheapens your brand in the long term
There’s a meme going around on Instagram these days about “Millennial Midlife Crises” activities. These are big endeavors such as training for a marathon, experimenting with sobriety, and going on impulse trips to places like Japan. At 36, my millennial midlife crisis is pickleball. But that’s not the story.
At the pickleball gym I go to, there are TV’s with ads everywhere. Many of them are national ads with high quality video, making the products seem impressive. However, many of the local businesses that advertise have opted to make their ads in-house, often with people who probably don’t know what they’re doing. The end result looks something like this:
This graphic technically gets the job done, but does it build trust? Does it make you say, “Damn, I need to work with these guys!” Or does it make you think that this lawyer, whose services might cost thousands of dollars if not more, is cutting corners and looks cheap as hell?
For years graphic design was done in Adobe’s Photoshop. Photoshop is VERY hard to use out of the box, and it is almost exclusively geared towards real graphic designers.
In the last few years, a company called Canva has become the go to app for a large portion of the market. Canva is awesome, and I use it everyday. It makes designing easy for just about everyone, allowing those with little to no graphic design experience to create their first ad in minutes.
The problem is that is allows people who have never created a graphic or ad before to produce their first ad in minutes.
Just because we CAN do something doesn’t mean the end result is good. It took me a few years before I finally understood the basics of design and started making ads that actually made people say “wow”. It turns out there’s a reason why people go to school for graphic design – there are rules and guidelines for making something that’s visually appealing and makes people want to work with your brand.
I understand small businesses are often strapped for resources and people wear many hats. It’s easy to say to your receptionist, “Hey can you make a social media post about our upcoming sale?” They open up Canva, make an ad, post it to socials, and the job is done without speaking to a designer or hiring anyone from the outside.
But that ad isn’t going to look good. It will look like an intern hastily threw something together. Even if people don’t say, “they didn’t set up their font hierarchy correctly, there’s no contrast in the colors, or there’s no negative space,”, they’re going to feel like what they’re seeing is low quality.
What saves you time and a little bit of money in the short term, is going to cheapen your company to everyone who scrolls past the post on Facebook.
The Main Takeaway
It makes sense to do graphics and posts in house when you first get started. But once you have the budget, consider grabbing an outsider to make your brand look better to your customers.