Not much good happened amid the dumpster fire that was 2020, but we found a silver lining at Outsource Marketing: We doubled down on creativity and our clients, our company, and our team all benefited.
When we locked down back in March, we realized we needed to find ways to keep the team positive and focus on everyone’s mental health. This was going to be tough, and we didn’t know how long it would last. And one other thing became clear, and we all agreed—we needed to make it our mission to help every client that we could get through this.
Creating quality, strategic creative is hard in the best of circumstances. Now, we had to find ways to muster the energy and enthusiasm to help our clients during a global pandemic and economic downturn deeper than anyone had ever seen. We had clients in crisis, fighting for their very survival, and prospective clients looking for a savior.
So yes, no lie, there was pressure here at Outmark®.
But the challenge of doing more work that mattered, even with constrained budgets, got our creative juices pumping. In fact, our creative team was bouncing around, hungry to dig deeper, be bolder, and find new ways to break through during COVID.
It didn’t take long before we realized not every company that needed our help could go all-in with a year-long marketing services agreement. Helping companies would mean doing some project work to help get our friends over the hump.
We paused. We pivoted. Then we proceeded.
Our founder, Patrick Byers, put it this way: “We decided as a group, you know what, let’s go after it. Let’s double down on the creative services we offer. Let’s expand what we do in social. Let’s bring new ideas to the table in digital. Let’s rethink the way we do design, copywriting, and art direction. Can we do it even better without charging more? Let’s find new ways to help our clients communicate their unique and meaningful differences.”
This push for new creative may seem counterintuitive during COVID. But we’ve actually found the opposite to be true: the pressure made Outmark’s solid creative processes even better.
Since our founding in 1997, we’ve worked to offer fully integrated marketing services: Research, strategy, planning, management, and execution—all bundled together to help our client gain strategic, seamless, and sustainable results.
But we’ve learned that our project work can make a real difference for companies trying to find ways to survive (or thrive) amid COVID.
