This year Stone’s Throw Creative Communications will be celebrating 30 years in business. Headquartered in Historic Cranbury, NJ, we’ve experienced so much. From the current pandemic to 9/11 to Superstorm Sandy, we all persevere with a lot of help from each other.

Heritage Park

The engraved stone pictured above can be found in Heritage Park. The park features a fountain with granite pavers commemorating Cranbury’s tercentennial anniversary – yes, that’s 300 years! Dedicated in 1997, the fountain is laid with pavers sponsored by area businesses and families who contributed to the fountain’s construction through a ‘buy a brick’ fundraising campaign. Literally etched in stone, Stone’s Throw is proud to be a small part of the community’s history.

Photography copyright © Deanne Napurano. All rights reserved.

Whether you’ve re-engineered your workforce to meet the changing demands of working during the COVID-19 pandemic or find yourself needing new or different communications than you did pre-coronavirus, where do you begin to determine if it makes greater financial sense to tackle marketing communications projects internally or to tap the services of an outside consultant? Evaluating the cost of a product may be straightforward – adding up the expenses of research, development, raw materials, manufacture, and packaging, for example. Evaluating the cost of services takes a more roundabout route requiring qualitative, rather than quantitative, assessment. If you’re considering hiring creative support from outside your organization, the following ideas may help you determine whether the move will represent true value.

Contract with specialists.

As marketing options simultaneously expand with today’s technological advances and narrow with new safety concerns, it’s challenging for all but the largest organizations to employ a full team of talented specialists in design, copywriting, photography, programming, illustration, and animation. One approach to curbing costs while keeping your competitive edge is through utilizing staff managers who are free to engage supplemental outside creative or contract marketing consultants who pull in team members as needed. In that way, your organization can leverage high-quality resources while staying lean and nimble.

Consider the actual money spent.

Contracting with outside creative talent can actually be less expensive than handling the same work internally when considering the actual cost of internal labor. According to Creative Business: “Most commonly, internal department cross-charges only accommodate actual payroll expenses with a small factor thrown in for overhead expenses. When all costs—salaries, benefits, and overhead—are included, studies have shown that charges for outside creative vendors actually average about 5% less than the same work done internally.” What’s more, creative fees often account for only a fraction of total costs of any marketing effort. Consider, for example, the cost of copywriting and design for an advertising campaign compared with the costs of the media space buy (paying for placement in online and print publications).

Do you have the in-house talent?

Some marketing communications projects require special know-how, some don’t. When it’s important to your business, the scales may tip in favor of engaging an outside resource. Many can attest to the experience of using available, well-meaning internal staff that winds up being an expensive choice in terms of failing to meet marketing objectives and missing opportunities. It also deflects internal staff from the jobs they’ve been hired to perform. “When effectiveness is critically important, hiring an outside specialist is always the least expensive and most productive alternative,” according to Creative Business.

Can in-house staff perform well under the extra strain?

Consider disruption, deflection, and squirrel chasing. When staff is already working at or near capacity, even a small assignment can clog the machine. We’ve seen situations in which the overworked employee simply gives the project her least attention and effort; she resents the imposition. We’ve also seen more enthusiastic responses in which the overworked employee drops her routine duties in favor of the special project, gumming up the works of the department. Unless your staff has excess capacity, think about bringing in an outside resource.

Do you want to retain more control?

Years of reports from many clients reveal that it’s just tougher to control marketing projects internally because management faces obstacles assigning tough deadlines or giving critical feedback to team members who have taken on special projects outside of their usual duties – forget navigating through office politics and disagreement around ultimate responsibility. “When you absolutely, positively have to have it done, your way, and on schedule, hire an outside vendor.”

Do you need a little objectivity?

If you’re looking for someone to stroll into the middle of your challenges and throw open the window to let in the sunshine, it may be hard to find that kind of perspective within your team. Working very closely with a product or organization over time may create blinders that you and your team no longer sense. An outside creative partner can help bring much-needed objectivity to your marketing communications and create fresh brand language that resonates with your target audiences.

It’s a scary time right now. A lot of people are suffering. Our focus, like yours, is on keeping ourselves and the people we care about – our communities – healthy and safe. A lot of our clients are suffering. As they pivot to set up efficient and remote workspaces for employees, they are making hard decisions about laying off or cutting back employees and employee time. They are cancelling all kinds of contracts from building maintenance to marketing communications, which is the business we’re in. Some businesses are moving forward with their communications as though it’s business as usual.  Others are taking a good look at what their gifts are, what their strengths are, and framing their communications so people can hear that they understand that we are all in this together…so people can hear that they plan on responding appropriately to support their clients, customers, and community. They are working hard to be here for the long run even though we don’t know what our state of commerce will be after this pandemic.

If we can give any support or advice to the clients who have turned to us for marketing execution (writing and design) or marketing strategy (consultation) over the past three decades, it is that you be extra careful not to appear tone deaf (we know no one is), but look carefully at your language. People are making decisions now based on how their partners, vendors, and colleagues are responding. They are making decisions based on the experiences they’re having right now with, and the pandemic response narratives emerging from, the people who provide services to them and their businesses. So we say, if you haven’t reached out to the people you do business with, do that. Do that. It’s not the time for marketing as usual…or worse, radio silence. And, as you reach out there’s every reason to think about how your bundle of services or products can support folks, if not now, then for where we are going to be a few months down the road or next year. I wish you all well and I hope you stay safe.  I’ll see you on the other side.

Listen to Deanne’s message

We hope that you are doing well. These are extraordinary times and we’re all doing our best to take care of each other while keeping our spirits up. As we all adjust to stay-at-home status and try to ensure that we’re keeping ourselves, our families, and our communities safe and healthy, we’re all also being hit hard logistically and financially.

In case you’re in need, we continue to provide communications support to our clients and have added some extras that may be helpful at this time:

• Writing and editing for public-facing COVID-19 messaging
• Complimentary consultations via GoToMeeting/computer video
• Free project planning and estimating
• Preferred pricing
• Curbside pickup for copy and design (it’s actually delivered via email or secure online portal)

Please stay safe. We look forward to seeing you soon.

We’re already seeing communications needs being dramatically affected in response to COVID-19. Some of our clients are rethinking investment in tradeshow materials, for example, but are reinforcing public-facing messaging about their commitment to employees, clients, and community. We know that even if the vehicle for the conversation is changing, the importance of your voice remains vital to your business relationships.

We remain here to help. As the focus of homebound employees narrows to essential client, customer, and patient work, outside resources may be more useful than ever. We value your trust in us. Below, we’ve listed a few areas in which we can provide support, but if you’d just like to strategize a bit over the phone or via video conference call, we’d be more than happy to talk with you.

Consultation, writing, design for:

• Website messaging/content
• Social media planning and content
• Email messaging and development
• Blog planning and content
• Online advertisement/announcement
• Press release writing and submission
• White papers and thought-leadership materials
• Employee and member communications
• Questionnaires and surveys
• Staff training course creation via learning
  management platform

The New Year sweeps in with lots of hype: a rose-colored-glasses look back on the last year and heaps of often-unrealistic expectations for the year ahead. If you like to have a fresh starting point once in a while, January gives you a boost. But, if January 1^st feels like just another day, dragging with it all the same issues that plagued December 31^st, how do we conjure the wherewithal to get through the winter, let alone meet our marketing and business goals? 

Like most of us, I know that the New Year is both a state of mind and a calendar date. I’m not going to wake up on New Year’s Day with superhuman energy or to find that a marketing version of the shoemaker’s elves has done all my work. I can choose to see that life is chaotic and challenging, joyful and satisfying, and try not to deny any of it. That translates into planning for 2020 marketing activities, too.

Even if you only know the broadest or most general goals of your organization, you can easily identify a few promotional tools that will move you in a positive direction. Of course, that’s the [deceptively] easy part: Once you know the people you serve and understand where they get their information, meet them there with your brand, your know-how, and your compassion. The rest may seem hazy or even overwhelming; the rest is all about the how.

“Break it into pieces” may be the best advice I’ve ever heard about anything. If I make no other resolution for the new year, I vow to default to a “pieces” view when issues become too cloudy, complex, or challenging. That’s especially true for marketing.

You’ll be able to get more done and be better understood when you focus on single, well-articulated ideas. Break your bigger ideas into smaller parts. List smaller pieces of the larger initiative. Make flow charts and lists to your heart’s content, but try to narrow your energy to one piece at a time. If overhauling your company website is on the horizon for 2020, the very idea can shut you down before you start. After you segment the project into a list of to-dos or an itemized spreadsheet (we all have our preferences and organization SOPs), isolate one piece at a time. A website redesign, for example, may include steps like a content audit of the existing site (what works and what doesn’t), an audit of the host’s performance, and identifying an outside design partner to help realize your vision. That’s a lot to wade through. With the “break it into pieces” approach, confining your efforts to the content audit first (and alone) may greatly reduce the overwhelm and provide data that will help redefine other steps, potentially lightening the overall weight of the project.

Whether you’re looking at January as a month of brave new days, or seeing it as the same-old-same-old, I hope that when you break your goals into manageable bits, you’ll move mountains.

Deanne