Lean Creative Production Tips
For most of my career on the agency side, I've had the privilege to work with brands with significant budgets to spend on creative resources for their ads. As a freelancer who's helped consult with many small brands, I've advised many founders with wallet anxiety on how best to allocate their funds for their business. After too many conversations on the topic, I'm putting this down officially on (digital) paper - THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CREATIVE PRODUCTION FOR BOOTSTRAPPING TEAMS (read that back as dramatically as you can, aloud or in your head)
How much time are you willing to give?
Before we get into the tools and resources for bootstrapping creative teams, I want to be transparent that although these options will help your wallet, they will cost you time. So before you spend your money hiring a price-friendly, outsourced freelancer, be prepared to spend significant time on the following:
1) Creative strategy and brief writing
2) Clarifying instructions and giving feedback
3) Fixing spelling and grammatical errors
As someone who has worked extensively with these teams, I can confidently say that you should expect to spend 5-15 hours a week on the above. The investment of your time should go down the more you work with outsourced teams, but this isn't always guaranteed, as turnover on outsourced teams tends to be high. With that being said, here is my go-to suite of tools for lean teams:
BILLO UGC
Billo is an excellent option if you're looking for UGC content and aren't picky about the footage. Remember that this cost-effectiveness comes at a price, which is often quality. These creators are often new and learning, so you may have to spend more time ensuring that your instructions are perfect (which you should be doing anyway).
Fiverr UGC
Fiverr is a great place to find content creators since you can view their past portfolios without paying upfront access to the platform (which is the case with many UGC platforms/agencies). Many content creators will take on projects for cost-efficient prices, but these will come with strict guidelines on timeline, length, and content.
No Limit Creative
NLC is an excellent option if you need a creative team for basic designs and video editing tasks. Their platform is intuitive and easy to use, and their teams are responsive and quick to execute new ideas. Since most of their team is outsourced, you'll have to provide the exact copy you want on your content, and they won't bring a new creative vision to your content.
Canva Pro
As a savvy performance marketer who isn't necessarily the best at design and art directing new ads, I consider Canva Pro a must for creating new static ads and finding inspiration. I recently used Canva Pro to create 24 ads with only 2 hours of planning by finding templates, sending them to No Limit Creative, and giving them the exact copy I wanted on the iterations.
With these tools, you can create everything you need to test and find wins in your digital marketing campaigns for under $2,500/month. Remember that generally, you should launch 6 new ads every 2 weeks, and you'll need more as you scale, especially if you start finding wins quickly. A significant amount of effort goes into creative strategy and brief writing to create winning ads, so as soon as you have the budget, schedule a consultation with me so I can help you scale your brand :).