Creating a Data-Oriented Brand to Take You On an Adventure
DataDrive was founded with adventure in mind, and though DataDrive is a data analytics consultancy, the founder was adamant about keeping a sense of adventure as part of the brand. Developing DataDrive’s brand was an interesting challenge, as the adventure theme had to work for highly technical and data-focused content.
Highlighting DataDrive’s team of consultants was a primary focus of our branding efforts as our team was a main selling point of our services. We wanted to create a sense of community and familiarity between our consultants and our users. As an additional element of community, we wanted DataDrive’s design to feel personal to our audience. We didn’t want our brand to seem templated or repetitive. Partnering with DataDrive meant joining a community and embarking on an adventure, together, and we wanted that to be felt throughout the brand.
My Roles
Graphic Designer
Creative Director
Marketing and Content Director
Copywriter
Our Starting Point
When I arrived at DataDrive, the founder and director had decided on a logo, their brand colors, and their typography. They also had a strong sense of DataDrive’s brand voice. They had started a deck, but were open to any and all new ideas. DataDrive’s brand was a rough outline with ample opportunity for creativity and fun.
Crafting an Adventure to Bridge Business Users and Developers
One of the first assets I created were our values patches. These appear throughout DataDrive’s graphics identity. We established early on that highlighting our consultants was going to be a big part of how we positioned our brand, and these patches were primarily made to support graphics featuring team members.
The patches were featured as part of our values website page, and as part of each consultant’s team member webpage. They were also used by the sales team for pitch decks.
The values patches were modeled after scouts’ merit badges, the idea being that these patches were earned by our team through actions and initiatives. Upholding these values was a core component of being a ‘DataDriver’.
The creation of the values patches was followed by the development of our service offering badges. While the values patches would be used to highlight developer interests and core values, these badges represented their areas of expertise. Because they represent a developer’s role, I modeled the service area badges after the badges we see on rangers in our parks and national forests- a shape reminiscent of expertise, ownership, and agency.
The visual theme of badges and patches continued through the entirety of the site, with each case study getting its own plate, and ‘team’ and ‘values’ getting shields to be used throughout the brand.
The entire collection.
Taking Users on a Journey
We knew from the onset of our branding endeavors that the website was going to be the biggest undertaking and our most active brand asset- we were going to drive as many eyes here as we could. We wanted to create a website that stood out from our competitors, most of whom were following the same simple, blue, modern, stock photo-filled tech trend.
We had already decided on an adventure-themed, illustration-driven brand, but didn’t want our website to stop at using adventure-based assets. We truly wanted to create a sense of adventure, and to take our users with us.
To accomplish this, I created a homepage with one long image as its background. The background image started with mountain tops as a nod to DataDrive’s logo, and traveled downwards through a forest, a basecamp, a lake, an underground cavern, and finished under the sea. Each location on the homepage was assigned to a webpage within the site. When visiting the webpage, you’d continue to explore in the same theme as the homepage. Each landing page connected to a webpage that continued that section’s theme.
Visit the website case study here to see the project in its entirety!
How Did It Do?
Launching the website was how we first introduced DataDrive’s new brand to our social media audience and existing users. The brand was immediately well received. We received frequent feedback through our technology partners that our website made customers looking through long lists of potential consultancies reach out to us, as we stood out from our competitor’s sites. Overall, the site’s traffic increased from 12,000 users in 2020 to 84,000 users in 2021.
Creating Consistent, Killer Content
One of DataDrive’s design and marketing goals was to create a content marketing engine that consistently released high-quality content to drive leads and brand awareness. An important element of that content was the design that supported it.
As the sole member of the marketing and design team, it was my responsibility to lead the creation and development of content. Our most popular content was the DataDrive blog, and we released two blogs per week. This content was written by our team’s consultants, and they did an incredible job writing reliably good content.
When marketing this content, we again wanted our brand to stand out from our competition. For the most part we moved away from our adventure theme in fear that the imagery would become repetitive. Instead, we leaned into our brand goal of highlighting our consultants and creating a brand that felt customized and personal. We wanted users interacting with our content to feel that we had created content intentionally and purposefully and were not using templates.
Targeting Two Audiences
DataDrive’s content had two key audiences: developers and business users. Developers were our largest audience and drove most of the traffic to our blog, but there was little chance they’d convert to a lead that brought in revenue. For the most part, the developers visiting our site were looking for resources and tutorials. We didn’t want to lose this audience, but we also wanted to reach business users looking to convert. Additionally, DataDrive was experiencing a period of fast growth and needed to recruit new consultants frequently. So, we developed three distinct approaches to content.
Developer-Focused Content:
Developers saw DataDrive as a reliable, free resource and we wanted to honor that sentiment as we created more content. The data analytics community is a close-knit group of developers that refer to themselves as the #datafam, and we wanted to put our developers front and center in this area of our brand to appeal to that sense of community and to highlight the stars of the show- the authors/ developers. Developer-focused content used a sticker/bobblehead approach or an ‘inside joke’ approach to content. This content still utilized our brand typography and colors, but was not adventure themed.
Business User Focused Content:
Our business user-focused content took two separate approaches. The majority of content highlighted our consultants as experts and professionals, and we occasionally made use of well-circulated news stories to release satirical thumbnails and drive more views to our blogs.
Recruitment-Focused Content:
For our recruiting content, we chose to once again highlight our adventure-theme, as joining DataDrive was an adventure. We utilized our chosen brand illustration style for these graphics. This illustration style is used in all DataDrive blogs.
How Did It Do?
Our blog went from having 4,500 visitors in 2020 to having 42,000 visitors in 2021. The majority of this traffic came from LinkedIn and Twitter, or from repeat users visiting our blog directly.
Social Media Graphics
Part of my role at DataDrive was running our social media marketing on LinkedIn and Twitter. Our primary goal with social media marketing was to raise brand awareness and increase traffic to our content. I developed templates for our primary posts, which included welcoming new team members, recruiting consultants, sponsoring community events, and promoting webinars.
Team Member Welcome Posts
We wanted to highlight each new team member on our social media as our consultants were a main selling point for our brand. We wanted each post to feel personal. Each new team member chose their favorite values patch to display and had their areas of expertise highlighted.
Recruitment Posts
Our recruitment posts followed the same theme as our recruitment blogs. We wanted to create plenty of room to highlight DataDrive’s awards and role requirements while also following our adventure theme.
Sponsored Community Events
DataDrive sponsored a variety of community events for our partners. Because these events took place outside of DataDrive, we weren’t confined to our brand when posting. We still wanted to stick to DataDrive’s personalized feel in these graphics.
Webinar Registration
Our webinars were developer-focused, and as such followed the same theme from our developer-focused blog branding. These graphics highlighted our consultants while providing the necessary webinar information to drive registrations.
How Did It Do?
Our social media strategy saw consistently high rates of engagement amongst our audience. In 2020, DataDrive’s average engagement rate was 3.6%. In 2021, our average engagement rate was 17%. Additionally, our LinkedIn following increased from 322 followers in 2021 to 1,188 followers in 2022.
We Also Made Videos!
A big goal of DataDrive’s director was to begin releasing videos. I handled every part of the video-making process, from production to editing to animating. We wanted these videos to feel like we were spending intentional time with our viewer- again, we wanted to avoid the sense that our videos were templated.
More Fun Stuff
