The Brief
Day One is a marketing agency that specifically works with dentists, supporting them with digital marketing, from strategy to online advertising. The founder of the agency, Jamie DiBease wanted to level up the company’s brand and therefore its business. He wanted a visual brand that was professional and appealing to dentists, while conveying his personality and standing out from the other agencies. He also wanted an external perspective on his on marketing activities and recommendations for marketing strategies and tactics to achieve his growth goals.
The Approach
For this project, Crabapple Communications collaborated with Diane Pauley from Gimme Sweet Words and Gili Wolf from BigBad Industries.
1. Marketing audit
To kick off the project, we conducted an audit of Day One’s existing online presence, visual brand, social media, marketing and sales collateral. This gave us an overview of what Day One was trying to do and what was missing from its marketing efforts. The key thing missing was a robust brand foundation – we didn’t know what Day One stood for and why it was different from other marketing agencies targeting dentists.
2. Brand strategy
a. Identity, personality, and Unique Selling Point
Over a series of weeks and multiple workshops, we defined who Day One is as a business, as well as who it’s talking to. We delved into the company’s identity, developing its mission, vision and values and helped it to articulate its brand promise and purpose.
The brand identity lead to the brand personality, which enabled us to create a range of tools for Day One to be able to talk about itself more effectively such as the brand tone of voice, the brand story, a brand biography and an elevator pitch.
From this starting point of understanding the motivations behind Day One, we looked at three of the company’s competitors and analyzed their online presence, what they said about themselves and how they presented themselves visually. This enabled us to define what made Day One stand out – what its Unique Selling Point is.
b. Audience persona development & messaging
Next, we moved on to breaking down Day One’s target audience to explore their motivations and habits. This work is critical to be able to create effective messaging that resonates with an audience, as well as work out which marketing activities will reach them best. We determined that there were three audience groups of dentists with differing mindsets and approaches to marketing their businesses. This insight enabled us to build up full pictures of these audience types as individualized personas so that we could create personalized strategies for reaching them.
Once we knew who we were talking to, we created high-level messaging to share the critical information that all clients should know about Day One. From there, we tailored the messaging to the specific audience groups we had identified.
c. Visual brand
Once we had worked out the brand foundations, we brought it to life through a comprehensive visual brand system. To develop this, we conducted concept and mood board research to determine design and color direction informed by the brand strategy. We established a color palette to create the foundation for the brand and all branded materials.
3. Marketing & content strategy
The first step of creating a solid marketing strategy was to review the business’ goals and objectives including, but not limited to, marketing and sales goals, hiring goals, and growth goals over the short, medium, and long term.
Once we understood what the business was trying to achieve, we were able to recommend marketing goals and strategies to reach those goals, supported by a range of relevant marketing tactics. These were underpinned by identifying the user journeys for each persona type, allowing us to recommend specific tactics at different points along the user journey for each of the personas.
First and foremost of these was the new website. We created a multi-page sitemap and recommended a range of keywords to support SEO to optimize the new website.
The Deliverables
Brand strategy components
Vision, mission, values – the long-term goal of your brand, the steps to get there and what matters to you
Brand promise – the result your brand delivers
Brand purpose – your brand’s North Star
Unique Selling Point – how your brand stands apart
Tone of voice – how you talk about your brand
Brand personality – what makes you unique from everyone else
Brand story – who you are and how you deliver value
Brand bio – how you talk about what you do
Elevator pitch – how you compel someone to learn more
Three full audience personas with demographics, psychographics, motivations, pain points, influences, key insights, and how to talk to them.
Key messages, including top-level messaging and messaging targeted to each persona
Website content strategy
Website sitemap
SEO keywords
Business and marketing strategy
Business goals & strategy
Marketing goals & strategy
User journeys for each persona
Overview of marketing channels and recommendations for tactics
Final visual brand elements
Using the color palette and brand strategy direction, we developed a brand mark that visually articulates Day One’s brand strategy and personality. To enable Jamie and his agency to use these elements over the longer term, we created a detailed style guide outlining guidelines for brand usage, fonts, colors, etc.
The Result
With the brand foundations solidly established, we took the brand out into the real world, supporting the company’s presence at a trade show for dentists. We developed the design for a trade show booth and created a single-page website specifically for the trade show, creating a wire-frame, drafting the copy, and creating the visual design.
If you'd like to find out more about how we can help you, get in touch with georgina@crabapplecomms.com.