Should You Hire a Graphic Designer?

Refreshing your website or advertising regularly requires you to regularly update its look as well as its content. If ads for your restaurant cycle to social media, they need to be updated in appearance to make them relevant to your target market’s discriminating eye. If you design your own advertising in-house, you need to keep all the material fresh, eye-catching and relevant.

Eventually, your creative juices will run dry, which leads to recycling content that will eventually be ignored because it has already been assessed and dismissed by people visiting your website, searching for your restaurant online or people skimming their social media feeds. The solution to this potential situation is to hire a graphic designer. Here are the pros and cons of hiring a graphic designer to help you produce fresh, relevant content for print and digital advertising sources.

The Pros:

Save Time

If you are running a successful restaurant, chances are you do not have time or inclination to dabble in developing the print and digital media that you need to establish your brand. Hiring a graphic designer allows you to pass the responsibility and the hard work of developing logos, a color palette, and media design theme from blog videos to your online ordering interface to someone else. There are expenses involved, but compared to the money you will lose by spending time doing it yourself, you will get far better results at a minimal cost.

Stand Out From the Crowd

The more professional and attractive the graphics and style of your brand, the more it will stand out to prospective customers. Graphic designers are the high-end tailors of branding. Smart restaurateurs know that the better your designer is, the better the public’s perception of your brand will be.

Save Money

Good graphic designers are exceptionally skilled at choosing the most cost-effective ways to design your material without overspending on printing costs or online advertising fees. They can design, organize and have your content printed so that you end up with attractive and easy to read menus and eye-catching, productive ads that are not difficult or expensive for your printer to produce while maintaining the highest possible ROI for your advertising dollars.

The Cons:

Designs Need to Be Updated Regularly

Hiring a graphic designer for your business should not be a one-shot deal. You should invest in freshening up your content and branding at least once or twice over several years. If you do not consider the long-term, your business will suffer. Unchanged designs become a stagnant part of the scenery and do not drive new business to your online ordering site or through your doors. To keep making your advertising earn a solid ROI, you need to keep updating your graphic design.

Expectations may not Connect With Reality

No matter how skilled a designer is, they are not mind readers. They can only provide you with what you ask for by drawing on their own knowledge of advertising and marketing design and their experiences with successful branding in the past. Sometimes that means you are going to be disappointed with the end result, or it may not meet your expectations.

Everyone has their own perspective and bias about visual content. So, while the designer may have done everything right, what they produce may not be what you want. This may mean hiring another designer, taking additional bids on the job or adjusting your expectations according to what you learn from an experienced designer.

Text Usage With Images is Limited

Sometimes it is not possible for a designer to incorporate all of the information you want included with the design that is created. This situation can cost you significantly more money and clutter your website, online ordering interface and advertising with text-heavy components. You will need to make some tough decisions on what to keep and what to cut on your site.

Final Thoughts

Hiring a graphic designer makes good sense from a business and marketing perspective. It allows you to save time, money on your marketing costs, and you will earn a better ROI on all your marketing efforts with your superior quality branding and graphic design. There are certainly some drawbacks, but the benefits of hiring a good graphic designer far outweigh the concerns.

Before you refresh your website, printed materials, and digital marketing and ordering systems content, consider hiring a graphic designer to help you get the most for your marketing dollars.