If you’ve gone through your budget for the year and realized you’re operating with limited resources, it’ll affect how much you can allocate across the organization, including marketing and design.

While these financial constraints are challenging, they also offer an opportunity to be creative with how you use them, and we have a few suggestions for small- to mid-sized businesses who want to make their design budgets go further.

Smart budgets and realistic project scopes

You’ve got a plan for marketing your business, and you’ve spent countless hours imagining the end result. Now, the question is, does your plan align with your available design budget?

If not, it’s time to concentrate on the essentials and remember that you can do some things a bit at a time.

This means focusing on projects with a higher impact on the business. For instance, you may not need to shell out the money for a large website when a single landing page could do for now. And instead of having a professional designer hand-draw custom icons for a brochure, it might make more sense for them to work with preexisting assets.

In both examples, the cost increases as the project scope does, but one of the benefits of hiring a graphic designer or a design agency is that they can provide estimates to give you an idea of what to expect.

Breaking down larger projects into phases allows you to spread out design costs over time, giving you some breathing room to create better marketing materials that help you meet extremely targeted goals like generating more leads, increasing sales, or exposing more people to your brand.

Consider budget-friendly packages

When you want the expertise of a design agency but don’t have the funds to go all in, some designers and agencies provide a cost-effective alternative with budget-friendly packages. These packages bundle several design deliverables into an affordable option and follow a process optimized for speed while maintaining quality.

They also offer a one-and-done option for businesses with a defined project scope and a set budget, which removes any uncertainties about price.

Leverage your in-house resources

Using existing resources is one of the easiest ways to stretch your marketing and design budget. Whether you have a larger in-house design team, your marketer is doing double duty, or you want to bootstrap it yourself, in-house resources can knock out the tasks that need to be done quickly or don’t require a lot of iterations to get to a final result.

Another way to reduce design costs is to use DIY tools for smaller projects. Applications like Canva and Visme provide plug-and-play options for creating social media posts, web banners, and other smaller design materials.

Keep in mind that while utilizing your in-house team or digital applications is convenient, they’re limited when it comes to more intricate projects like rebrands, website redesigns, or other design-intensive or conceptual projects.

When encountering these more complicated design needs, you might be better off engaging with a design agency that combines business sense with creative expertise.

Embrace multi-purpose designs

Instead of reinventing the wheel, templated designs are a tool that enables you to take one design and reuse it across different channels. Templates also ensure these repurposed designs remain uniform in appearance.

Let’s look at an example.

There’s an opportunity to buy space in a national niche magazine that would be seen by thousands of people, who are the exact audience you want to reach. You decide to start with a half-page ad to promote your products in this publication with the intention of buying more ad sizes in the future.

After getting the specifications from the magazine, you ask your designer to create a vertical and horizontal version of the same ad. Since they know you want to purchase more ad insertions, the designer created the initial creative to serve as a template that can be easily resized and adjusted.

You don’t have to commission them to produce a new design every time. Instead, the designer will copy the template, make minor changes to fit the updated specifications and change any other pertinent information, such as dates or prices.

Building long-term relationships that save money

What happens when you partner with a design agency over the long term? You get experts who understand your brand and know how to design for it.

As your company grows, your designers can help you plan for future design needs, such as larger trade show appearances, direct mail campaigns, and eventual company rebrands. They can also help you reduce print costs by helping you navigate conversations between your business and printers and packaging companies.

The value they bring to your business as the relationship develops extends well beyond their ability to design. Your creative team will be a true ally in helping you communicate with customers visually, so they understand how your business meets their demands.

Making your overall budget work harder

For your own business, you want to ensure every penny spent on your marketing yields a return. Making your budget work harder for your promotional efforts means having a plan that prioritizes campaigns and tactics with the greatest impact.

As you look for those future creative partners, it’s important to ask the right questions that make you feel comfortable working with them. They should offer open and transparent solutions that work best for your budget and strategy, whether you’re starting out or are well-established.

Time is our most precious resource. It’s the one thing you can’t get back once it’s gone. With that said, building efficiencies into the marketing and design process is essential as more organizations have to do more in less time.

So, let’s review a few of the most common problems when time constraints impact marketing campaigns and how to prepare for them.

Problem: Quick Turnarounds

Some opportunities, requests, and even demands force you and your team to put everything else aside and focus on only that one thing. These last-minute projects can be defined as those that have to be completed by a hard deadline that’s shorter than the standard delivery timeframe.

Projects like:

• – Producing print ads for a publication that needs it by the end of the week
• – Designing and printing sales slicks that must be designed and printed for a trade show within 48 hours
• – Making edits to graphs for a presentation taking place in 30 minutes

In some cases, rush projects are unavoidable. However, hurrying the design of your creative assets can compromise their quality because of its compressed schedule. It also limits the time allotted to produce something innovative.

For some businesses, it’s an acceptable sacrifice. But others, not so much.

Solution: Streamline your workflow
Having an agile process already in place makes it easier for your team to shift its focus and resources. From a design perspective, having approved design templates gives you a solution that can shave hours off of creating something from scratch.

When you work with a design agency, they’ll have a process to handle normal projects and address sudden requests.

Problem: Delayed Feedback

Tight timelines condense projects, affecting the number of eyes on them and, in some cases, increasing the likelihood of delays. These setbacks can happen for several reasons, ranging from internal politics to indecisiveness, and ultimately, they put a lot of pressure on schedules without any wiggle room.

For designers, delays often mean balancing working within the existing timeframe while providing the same level of creativity and quality expected from them. In some cases, this means having fewer opportunities to iterate on the design to improve it.

When there isn’t enough time to enhance the design, it can limit its effectiveness.

Solution: Get everyone in the same “room”
When delays occur, they can derail the progress of the entire project. But you can fix this by getting everyone in the same “room” to give and receive feedback in real-time.

First, it removes the back-and-forth that comes with email. Second, getting the decision-makers, creatives, and other critical team members together makes it easier to get a progress report, plan your next steps, and identify what is or isn’t feasible moving forward.

Problem: Choosing to design reactively instead of proactively

Jumping straight into designing campaigns without a sound marketing plan means the result isn’t based on long-term goals or strategy. Instead, it’s reactive, potentially sabotaging the design from the beginning.

When the approach is to create assets based on “we have to do this because [X date] is coming up” (reactive) instead of “we’re doing this because it solves/serves [X] purpose (proactive), then you’re setting yourself up for the campaign to not to go as far as it could if there was a pre-established plan.

Solution: Embrace strategic, proactive planning
Before asking your designer to create a deliverable for you, it’s important to map out your marketing plan and strategy. We’ve discussed the reasons why this is so necessary here. Creating this guide first streamlines your entire design process because there is a rationale for the assets created.

Managing your design schedule under tight deadlines

Doing your job is harder when you’re constantly under pressure to produce, and as time constraints grow, it’s easier for things to fall through the cracks.

Brand and graphic designers give you another set of tools to meet the limitations and challenges you face in marketing your business. Their expertise is your secret weapon in helping you meet those tight deadlines because they act as partners.

When you have a creative team behind you who takes some of the weight off your back, you can be more efficient with your time and increase your overall productivity.