Creative crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks through an open call to a large group or community of designers, writers, musicians, filmmakers, etc. In other words, a crowd. Buyers post their creative projects and name their own price and, in turn, creatives worldwide submit their ideas and the buyer chooses the one they like best.
Creative crowdsourcing is quicker, less expensive, easier and offers you far more choice than working with a single freelancer or agency. If you’re thinking of giving it a shot, here are five areas where this approach tends to work best.
1. Logo Design. Small businesses often make the mistake of using a poorly designed logo. This is a costly mistake. The logo is one of the most important elements of a brand. A good logo builds trust and will help to pull your brand together. [For more on designing a logo, read this interview from last year—ed.] By building your marketing and advertising activities around your logo (online and offline), it will become associated with your business and help you to better communicate with prospects and customers.
2. Web Design. Like any creative crowdsourcing project, when you crowdsource your web design, you see work from dozens of talented designers, use simple but effective tools to manage your project and choose from a large number of original custom designs. A quality creative crowdsourcing service will also offer a money-back guarantee. In addition to web design, small businesses can crowdsource the design of landing pages, blog themes, headers for their websites or blogs, email templates and icons and buttons.
3. Flyer Design. Many small businesses worry about the added costs of flyer and brochure design and settle for poorly designed, amateur-looking or generic flyers and brochures. Flyers and brochures help you get your message out. Instead of using templates that your potential customers have seen from many of your competitors, why not design totally custom flyers? This is a chance to stand out.
4. Stationery Design. When you send someone a letter or meet someone for the first time, your stationery and/or business card is often one of the first impressions someone will have about you. Unique stationery and business card design can help you to more effectively promote your brand, product or service. Many small businesses make the mistake of printing cheap looking stationery and business cards in order to save money.
5. Banner Ads. Banner design involves the design of small banner ads for use on the Internet. Banners are intended to work the same way as traditional advertisements; you want the banner ad to persuade the consumer to choose the product or service you are marketing. Effective banner ads can substantially improve your click through rates (CTR) and your conversions from display advertising.
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Mike Samson is the co-founder of crowdSPRING, crowdspring.com, and resides firmly at the bottom of the company’s ping-pong totem pole. Prior to starting crowdSPRING, the world's #1 marketplace for buyers and sellers of creative services, Mike was an Emmy Award®-nominated producer and production manager in the film and television production industry. Around the office, Mike is known for randomly belting out television theme songs from the fifties.
