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.