Your marketing team is busy, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do more—experiment with new trends, ramp up output or pull off a big, special project—without draining your existing bandwidth.
Agencies on Upwork can help marketing teams like yours scale their output with amazing results. Their contributions can be as focused as an animated video or as all-encompassing as a top-to-bottom rebranding package. And without the big commitment and overhead of a traditional agency of record, these boutique agencies are poised to help you tackle more, quickly, and affordably.
Here’s a look at six stand-out marketing projects that agencies on Upwork have rocked for companies like yours.
1. Run a comprehensive market and customer research study—then put the findings to work
Market research agencies can be a marketing department’s secret weapon, mining deep into consumer and industry data to uncover key findings you can use. But their value doesn’t stop there. An agency partner can analyze findings and deliver a polished, strategy to guide your team’s next moves, big or small.
When UK-based agency Great Blue Research’s client needed a better understanding of how to engage millennials—their target market—Great Blue Research conducted extensive quantitative and qualitative research, coming up with a plan of attack to expand their customer base. The results? The client was able to tailor messaging in a way that resonated with this new audience.
2. An interactive infographic explaining key data and metrics
How you present data and metrics can be the difference between engaging readers and losing them in a sea of numbers. It’s the thinking behind data visualization and infographic design—and when you can make them interactive, data comes alive.
Cypress, a content-focused agency located in Tampa, FL, was the perfect partner to create this interactive infographic for Airbnb. The resulting graphic is an engaging journey through Airbnb’s economic impact in some of its biggest cities.
3. Get a full, top-to-bottom rebranding package
With all the channels available today, putting out a unified, thoughtful presence—whether it’s for a new product, a seasonal campaign, or a rebrand—takes coordination and production power, especially when you factor in today’s most important medium, video. Branding goes beyond a logo, and an agency has the manpower and breadth of experience to support a brand’s every touchpoint.
Americord, a biotech company leading the charge in umbilical cord blood banking, needed a pro digital branding partner for their rebrand. They tapped Milk Bar Design, specialists in brand strategy, web, and corporate brand identity, to redesign their website and make it fully responsive, and also to improve other marketing tools including ads, landing pages, and printed materials.
Simplifying complex topics is no easy feat, and Milk Bar seamlessly handled every aspect of the multi-faceted rebrand, including restructuring an information architecture and user experience for the highly complex process of stem cell banking. That meant redefining the existing copy, sitemap, page layouts, illustrations, and product icons, and art directing a photo shoot for an entirely new set of marketing imagery. The agency also restructured the user checkout process, handled the collection kit design, and created all instructional materials.
Beyond the site, Milk Bar has gone on to deliver ads, landing pages, emails, and print marketing materials for Americord. View Milk Bar’s portfolio for a full look at all the refreshed brand assets.
Talent: Visual Design, UX, Photo art direction, content strategy + project management.
4. Create a monthly magazine layout
For most marketing teams, the effort to produce an entire monthly magazine—copy, articles, layouts, graphics—could quickly drain bandwidth and eclipse all other functions. But partnering with flexible talent and agencies like Etcetera makes it possible for teams to scale production quickly and affordably.
It’s how the Gallup Journey magazine, a monthly free community magazine in Gallup, New Mexico, can print a polished monthly layout on top of the other services they provide area clients.
Etcetera’s team created a layout flow with ready-to-print pages. Each month they collect the copy, create graphics, flow the content into the layout, and ready the entire piece for print—like a virtual publication house. They make the entire process very turnkey, even making final prepress corrections and tweaks on behalf of the client so the final deliverable is always polished.
Want to create some regular content like a monthly magazine or online publication? An agency just might be the ticket.
Talent: Graphic designer, advertising designer, layout and Pre-press designer, and project manager.
5. Launch an ongoing multi-channel campaign to drive awareness
In digital marketing, you’re rarely messaging will target one channel and one channel alone. More often than not, you’re coordinating messages across different channels, target markets, devices, and mediums—and that requires a good amount of production and planning.
To launch their multi-channel campaign announcing their ongoing renovations, Los Angeles International Airport tapped the team at Perceptive, a marketing, branding, and communications firm based in Pasadena, CA. Perceptive created printed construction mitigation collateral throughout the airport’s ticketing area, people movers, and terminals, including barricades, interior posters, and digital boards. That messaging extended to a website and social channels, and each time messaging needed to be updated, Perceptive handled the incredibly complex process of removing and replacing each physical communication seamlessly throughout the entire airport.
The resulting 2-year-long “Re:LAX” campaign kept travelers informed about what was going on, and what the benefits of the $4 billion improvement project would be. The campaign successfully sent the message to visitors of one of the world’s busiest airports that while change can be inconvenient, it can also be worth the wait.
6. Videos for every channel and strategy
These days, you almost can’t talk about marketing projects without mentioning video. Videos are often the most effective and engaging way to get your message across, whether they’re short introductions, interviews, animated explainers, or branded ads. Check out these 5 video projects agencies have done on Upwork for a more in-depth look!
