Ever felt like you’re paddling furiously in a sea of marketing demands, only to have your life raft punctured by the dreaded design bottleneck? You’re not alone. In the sprawling ocean of modern marketing, design makes all the difference when it comes to campaigns that work – and campaigns that just don’t cut it. But what happens when the demand increases? Chaos, delays, and the occasional cry for help—or more coffee. But worst of all, lost revenue and opportunity, which can damage or even end a marketer’s career.
The Marketer’s Dilemma
The Never-Ending To-Do List
Marketers, raise your hand if your to-do list is longer than a CVS receipt? In this fast-paced world, our task list rarely shrinks – it only grows – even with the dawn of AI. Prioritizing, context switching, agility, and finding ways to “do more with less,” become daily demands. These to-do lists generally have a lot of creative line-items, like, submitting new design requests, tackling edits and revisions, devising new iterations for A/B tests, personalizing campaigns, updating briefs when campaign details change, and checking in on projects as deadlines approach, to name a few. No biggie, right?
The Vital Role of Design
Here’s the kicker: amidst this chaos, design remains non-negotiable. It’s the make-or-break element, ensuring your campaign is head-turning, engaging, memorable, and, dare we say, more profitable. But securing high-quality visuals? It’s a hidden challenge that’s all-too-common: the design bottleneck.
Identifying the Bottleneck
The design bottleneck is a sneaky situation. It often lurks in the shadows, waiting for your marketing timeline to be at its busiest before striking. Suddenly, you find yourself waiting days or even weeks for designs that should take hours. Your projects come to a screeching halt, and your stress levels soar. There are a few reasons your team could be experiencing this design bottleneck. Let’s explore.
The Design Bottleneck: The Productivity Roadblock
The Shortage of Design Resources
It’s a tale as old as time. In-house design teams are built to maximize the time spent designing, so most teams almost always operate at full capacity. Design support is always stretched thin, or creative leaders are accused of carrying too much overhead (especially with agencies where billable percentages are key performance metrics).
Often, turnaround time estimates are underestimated, or designer bandwidth is already limited due to PTO or churn. Sometimes projects that have been on the black burner finally get addressed and help one team, meanwhile it impacts another team who have revenue-generating designs they’re depending on.
On occasion, a new design project might require new skill sets with a learning curve, or have complex design components that naturally take more time. Resources fluctuate just like demand, and not all of the variables are predictable or controllable.
The Consequences of the Bottleneck
The end result is about as pretty as a traffic jam. Campaigns stall, opportunities vanish into thin air, and branding consistency or campaign cohesion? Forget about it. The frustration is real, folks. But there’s a lifeline that has been saving thousands of brands like yours since the dawn of CaaS and Design Pickle’s subscription model in 2015.
Breaking Through the Bottleneck: Design Pickle’s Solution
Introducing Design Pickle’s Flat-Rate Design Subscription
Enter Design Pickle (it’s like a Baywatch moment), with a lifeline that could save not just your campaigns, but your sanity. Imagine getting access to a team of designated designers with different skills and capabilities, already vetted and ready to work on projects, all at a flat rate.
Design Pickle’s subscription model streamlines your design process, offering on-demand access to a team of designers hand-picked to match your brand’s needs. You fill your queue with an unlimited number of requests, and we’ll work on your requests in the order you drop-and-drag them to sort. Your plan dictates how many concurrent projects you can have moving at once, so you can adjust your volume when the tide rises without panicking. No more bottlenecks, and no more drowning!
Unlocking Your Marketing Potential
With Design Pickle, it’s easy to increase your creative output as fast as the demand changes for your brand, which immediately eliminates the design bottleneck, no matter the design type that’s delaying your team.
Marketers can pivot back to strategy and execution without the hassle and distraction of design delays and lost productivity. Faster campaign rollouts, more high-quality designs to market, with consistent branding, and a significant uptick in productivity—welcome back to marketing nirvana. Imagine the possibilities…
When you have extra bandwidth and added capabilities, you can unlock new marketing heights by tapping into new high-ROI assets without the hassle of finding, hiring and paying for each new head. Think about the possibilities you unlock with access to talented designers, illustrators, motion graphics artists, and video editors.
Plus, this added ability to request more versions enables your team to bring new velocity and intentionality to personalization and A/B testing. The ability to create more assets in additional aspect ratios to capitalize on additional channels and placements within one campaign can help you capture more leads and learn which combinations drive most bang for your buck.
If “new” design capabilities aren’t necessary, but more volume sounds appealing, try offloading production design to your Design Pickle designers to unburden internal teams and empower them to work on more meaningful or complex projects. Have a fun conceptual campaign or visual identity that needs execution? Maybe you’ve been putting off a re-brand? Let our designers bring it to life so you can be the hero, not the casualty!
Maximizing Your Value and Reputation
Delivering More, Achieving More
With backup, always-on design support, marketers can now deliver more, achieve more, and possibly even sleep more. (Ok, that last part was wishful thinking.) But now, with a partner like Design Pickle, each successful campaign makes your assets and team perform better, which makes you look better, and supports your career overall, as opposed to threatening to sink it with every additional design delay.
Boosting your own recognition and propelling your career forward is a nice additional bonus that happens when you become the hero who unlocks the ability to hit creative deadlines that were once impossible to hit. That not only sounds pretty great, it’ll look great for your portfolio.
Building a Strong Reputation
Consistency is important for brand reputation. And with a steady stream of quality designs, your reputation as a brand and marketer will only soar. Become the go-to wizard of marketing in your organization and beyond. What’s more, is your ability to meet deadlines and exceed expectations with design delivery in an innovative way that empowers your in-house design team creates important bridges with in-house creatives who are now enabled to be set up for success instead of always falling behind.
Conclusion
In the marketing world, design bottlenecks are more than just an annoyance. They’re a threat that can sink your entire campaign (and even career). But fear not. With Design Pickle’s flat-rate design subscription, your marketing team — and your job security– sails smoothly towards success and growth.
Scaling your design output with Design Pickle’s subscription model is easy. Leverage our state-of-the-art platform, with an unlimited queue. Add more daily design time anytime to keep projects moving when demand increases. We’ll help you calibrate your design power based on your current and future needs (we’re pretty darn good at that), and show you how to throttle up as needed.
Is it time to finally grab hold of the lifeline you deserve? Explore Design Pickle, and turn the tide in your favor! Book a call with one of our experts today.
