Like people, every brand has an identity. A perceived personality, carefully formed through every interaction you have with them. For tech scale-ups that are serious about their brand identity it's vital to communicate consistently and on-brand through their marketing in order to truly connect with their audience. You’ve invested in taking your (new) brand identity to the next level and you’re now ready to show it off to the world. But you need to move fast and resources are scarce. Do you make beautiful custom marketing assets, or utilize the pace of templates? These are challenges I’m all too familiar with. After partnering closely with fast moving tech companies, we’ve helped them find solutions that fit the needs of their organization.
In this post, I’ll help you do the same. At the end of this you’ll have the tools and a marketing design strategy that matches not only your needs but also your available resources.
Understanding Custom vs. Template Marketing Materials
When creating marketing material, for instance for social media posts, companies often face a difficult decision: “Do we invest in custom designed marketing assets or use ‘pre-fab’, off the shelf templates?”. Both approaches offer their own advantages or drawbacks. The right choice always depends on your goals, resources and the vision for your brand.
Tailor made marketing material
Custom, tailor-made marketing assets can be uniquely designed to align with your brand identity, messaging, and audience preferences. The great thing is that these materials are created from scratch based on your wants and needs, and offer total freedom which allows you to showcase your beautiful brand to its fullest potential. If you’ve also invested into a strategic brand identity, full creative control helps you stand out from the crowd, something invaluable for highly competitive sectors. If you go fully custom, chances are you’ll want to use Figma. Besides marketing this tool can also house the designs for your platform or website which gives you the nice benefit of a consolidated toolset and one less subscription.
With all the upsides of going tailor-made, I’ve also worked with plenty of scaleups who opted not to go for this route as it also has some drawbacks. For one, hiring an agency or freelancer to create the materials can become quite costly where they often charge per hour or per social post for example. Sadly, taking the task in-house isn’t always an option. Creating stunning, on-brand and consistent marketing assets from scratch requires some serious design skill and mastery of design tools which might not be available. Even if the budget isn’t an issue, time itself might be. If you’re in a fast paced organization, working with an agency might not be as fast as you like if every single asset needs to be made from scratch and in-house designers could spend critical time that could be used elsewhere.
Some pros of working with tailor-made marketing materials:
Stand out from competition: A unique design ensures you stand out in a crowded marketplace.
Strategic messaging: Tailored marketing aligns perfectly with the needs of your audience or campaign goals.
Full creative control: Designers can be intentional about every aspect of the design, creating stunning material and showing your brand in all its glory.
Consolidated toolset: Leverage a tool like Figma to centralize all design work.
Possible cons:
Can become costly: Outsourcing to an agency or freelancer can make a dent in the marketing budget.
Hard to do in-house: Making tailor-made marketing assets from scratch requires a high level and a mastery of design tools.
Time as a resource: Agencies could have a slower turn around time and an in-house designer might be needed elsewhere.
Off-the-shelf template marketing assets
Standardized, one-size-fits-all marketing assets can be a game-changer if you’re looking to create content without the time and cost involved with tailor-made designs. They don’t offer the same level of craftsmanship but they are efficient and consistent; a viable choice in many scenarios. The rise of Canva, an online tool for creating marketing materials has made this even more accessible. Besides being able to make one-off designs, the app also offers countless pre-made templates for routine content like blog images or social media posts. Making it possible for non-designers to create consistent marketing output, fast.
However, off-the-shelf material assets might not be enough for you. By using a lot of templates, designs can lack originality. The templates themselves are also faced with branding constraints. The accessibility of Canva comes with a trade-off and is widely more limiting compared to the creative control of tailor-made designs in –for example– Figma. This also means they might not be able to fully match your brand strategy, audience needs or campaign goals.
A few pros of going for off-the-shelf template marketing assets:
Cost effective: Using templates in-house will be less expensive than outsourcing everything.
Fast turnaround: Working with templates allows for fast and consistent output.
Ease of use: Limited to no design skill is required to edit templates.
Some cons:
Branding constraints: Canva comes with a lot of creative limits and may not fully capture your brand identity.
Risk of overuse: Using publicly available templates risks feeling generic.
Hybrid: tailor-made templates
Lastly there is a secret third option, one that’s a mix of both: the intricacies of tailor-made designs and the scalability of templates. The most streamlined option leverages some powerful features in Canva. The first: it allows you to document and systemize the visual elements of your brand (like colors and typography) and then use them to make it easy for contributors to create om-brand marketing assets. Even if they have limited design knowledge. The second feature allows you to create custom branded templates; Designs you set up once and then are able to edit in order to create new on-brand variations. This hybrid model works by hiring an agency or freelancer in order to first set up the brand document and then use it to create custom branded templates. This way you get to have unique, visually pleasing and on-brand marketing assets while leveraging the scalability of templates.
While this combines with a lot of the previous options' upsides, it also has some of their drawbacks. While being cheaper than fully custom designs it still requires some financial investment in the beginning and later on if you want to expand your template options. And while offering visually pleasing solutions, Canva still has some limitations which means you won’t reach the creative control of the fully custom option.
Pros:
Cost effective: Although it requires some investment, it is way more financially effective compared to fully tailor-made marketing assets.
Fast turnaround: The custom templates can be set up fast and it allows your non-designers to create new marketing material fast.
Ease of use: Limited to no design skill is required to edit templates.
Cons:
Branding constraints: While Canva has some powerful features, it still has some creative constraints.
Financial investment required: While the hybrid model is very cost effective, it still requires some investment.
Conclusion
Out of these three options there truly is no wrong one. It all depends on the needs of your organization’s marketing department. Figure out what your budget is, how fast and often you need to output marketing assets and how much you want to align with your brand strategy. If you ever decide you need fully custom designs or want custom branded templates, let us know, we’re here to help.
