5 Best Practices for Offshoring Your Creative Services This Year Looking to outsource your creative services this year? Here's a quick guide to help you get started.
By Derek Gallimore Edited by Chelsea Brown
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Every aspect of a business is crucial nowadays, especially for virtual companies. More than selling products, you need to boost your branding and reputation to gain more customers and traffic. And what better way to achieve this than producing meaningful and creative content for your website?
Creative services are there to help you advertise your company and brand better. However, a simple mistake and missed deadline in your design and content can hurt your customer relationship, therefore affecting your business. Offshoring creatives will help you improve your entire business when done right. While there's no formula in offshoring functions successfully, you can make things work on your side with the best practices in offshoring creative work.
Some mistakes you will make in handling creative services
Creativity gives life to digital marketing. Creative services provide better brand representation in the form of design, content creation and other functions. Everything a customer sees in your page, from its interface to its content, is crucial in attracting them to your business.
While it's good to have your creative services done in-house, you may unknowingly hurt your brand by doing it incorrectly. Some of the most common mistakes you'd make in handling creative services include:
Ignoring best design practices: You might design a good logo, website or marketing material on your own. However, following design theories and visualization will enhance your designs and make them more impactful to your audience.
Letting your content stale: You should regularly optimize your content if you want search engines to notice and rank your site. Ignoring outdated content will drag your website rankings down, making you seem "irrelevant" to search pages.
Being inconsistent with your brand: You cannot just throw random designs and content on your page. Everything has to stay consistent with your branding and expertise to establish your identity better.
- Juggling different functions: Understandably, you have to do everything – even creative functions – on your own at first. However, you could get so used to doing this so often that you either create low-quality content or not finish anything at all.
Not considering your creative team's conditions: "Creative burnout" happens even to the best teams. They could get exhausted and feel overwhelmed once you give them an increasing volume of workload without any help.
Best practices in offshoring creative services
Creative services outsourcing is still the best way to manage your growing creative functions. It can move your brand forward, helping you attract more audiences and establish your authority in your industry. It even helps in improving your customer experience. By utilizing communicable designs, your audience can easily navigate your page and find what they need — and more.
The key to successfully offshoring your creative services is through proper planning and strategizing. Aside from that, here are the best practices in offshoring creative work:
1. Know what roles to delegate
Determine the functions to delegate to an offshore team and those to keep in-house. Assess what your team needs, what your goals are in offshoring and how long you'll need your offshore team.
Depending on your needs, you can hire offshore teams on a project basis or delegate your entire creative department to another country. One-time functions, such as logo creation and website designing, are also possible.
2. Look for a suitable location and provider
The Philippines is among the top locations right now for offshoring creative services with the abundance of creative workers it produces. However, it is not the only country you can tap for creative work. The best way to get the most out of your services is to find the right location and outsourcing provider that will fit your needs.
Related: What Not to Do When Outsourcing
3. Communicate your brand and expectations to your team
Avoid just leaving your process to your team and letting them "figure out the rest." Rather, establish good communication with them, and learn to reach out about your expectations and concerns.
Nowadays, most service providers will let you incorporate your work culture into your offshore teams. Grab this chance to teach them your work culture and the output you expect from them.
4. Let your in-house and offshore team collaborate
The best way to become successful in outsourcing is to treat your team like your actual employees. As much as possible, communicate with your in-house teams about your plans to delegate services offshore. Let them know what to expect and how outsourcing services can help them with their workload simultaneously.
Introduce your team to their in-house counterparts. Let them get used to each other and have them collaborate on some of your projects.
5. Start with small tasks
Always start by delegating small tasks to your team when offshoring. Starting with small things helps you establish your functions and implement work culture more gradually, making your team more incorporated with your company.
These days, companies need more focus and efficiency on their core strengths to succeed. Even when you are used to doing certain functions yourself, it's still best to delegate your tasks to an expert who will help you. This is why you need a team to count on for your designs and content. With the help of online tools and resources, outsourcing creative work is much easier to get the rest of your business going. All it takes is a call to your preferred service provider today.
Related: 7 Things to Outsource Immediately to Scale Your Business
