Building Brand Equity
Art Direction, Creative Strategy, Graphic Design
Kearley & Company
Context
As one of the most tenured marketing and branding agencies in Fort Worth, Kearley & Company has a commitment to maintaining the relationships it has built over the years. The agency’s social media accounts and emails are crucial touchpoints for staying connected to its current clients and attracting new clients and advocates.
Problems to Solve
01
In the past, the agency has relied on frequently recycling the same designs and a content strategy that revolved around celebrating birthdays and quirky, non-major holidays. This pattern has led to creative fatigue, does not accurately position the agency as a leader in the industry, and does not contribute to the audience's understanding of the agency.
02
With a bold, bright color palette, the agency faces the challenge of maintaining a professional image. When these colors are not used strategically and are used in combination with colors outside the brand guidelines, the agency’s visual identity becomes disorganized and inconsistent.
03
While the agency has featured team members on its social media, these features focus on birthdays and holidays such as International Women’s Day. With bare-bones captions and repetitive templates and headshots, the graphics are shallow and one-dimensional, providing little insight into who the team actually is, what they actually do, and what value the agency provides.
Solution
Departing from featuring holidays irrelevant to the agency, I led the digital team in developing a content strategy centered on content pillars focused on topics such as thought leadership, client features, promotion of services, and company culture. I contributed to and oversaw the brainstorming, concepting, and planning of monthly content. By being more intentional and proactive with planning content, the team became more adaptable and had the ability to incorporate trending topics and formats.
Creating content pillars
I was responsible for establishing a creative strategy that featured a more refined and consistent visual identity, with core components to make the agency clearly and unmistakably identifiable. Previously neglected, I dedicated energy to curating a cohesive, visually appealing social media grid. To create agency-wide alignment, I guided the digital team in the employment of the updated creative strategy, providing direction and feedback when needed, in addition to executing the creation of assets myself.
Ensuring visual consistency
Prioritizing content that promotes growth
While previous social media content primarily consisted of static graphic posts, I led the team in developing an updated creative strategy focused on integrating reels and carousels. Scheduling a healthy balance of posts, reels, and carousels led to superior reach, higher engagement rates, and algorithm prioritization. Furthermore, prioritizing reels and carousels provided a greater capacity for storytelling.
The after
When visiting the agency's profile, a cohesive visual identity is clear, and the brand communicates professionalism and expertise while remaining fun and personable.
The before
Previously, the agency’s social media presence was chaotic and did not offer any insight or meaning into who the agency is.
Video content
With a more comprehensive, proactive creative strategy, the team had the ability to create reels that supported the agency’s marketing strategy. Planning within established content pillars, reels were designed to showcase the team, their work, and their expertise, leading to a more in-depth, personal understanding of the agency. One of the components of the agency’s creative strategy that I spearheaded was developing a new approach to posting about content from the agency’s blog, illustrated in the Member Relations 101 post below. In the past, a static graphic adapted from the header graphic of the blog post was the standard. I saw a missed opportunity for storytelling that could highlight the team’s expertise and put a face to the blog content. By capturing and posting an informal, conversational video of the author of the featured blog content, the agency told a clear story that increased trust and relatability.
Static graphics
Updating brand guidelines to establish typographic treatments, color usage, and visual motifs was critical in creating a polished social media presence that is clearly recognizable. By developing a cohesive visual identity, I gave the design team a clear framework to work within that allowed the creation of unique, fresh graphics that could also exist harmoniously together to clearly represent the brand. In order to achieve a more professional look, I refined the usage of the agency’s color palette, relying on dark green and purple as primary colors, using bright green primarily as an accent color, and selectively adding blue and orange as secondary colors.
Carousels
Along with the addition of reels, the agency’s updated creative strategy included regularly developing carousels. This allowed for a greater capacity for in-depth storytelling and an additional opportunity for proving expertise through thought leadership. By taking advantage of the versatile formatting of carousels, the team could successfully break down content, such as blog posts, in a digestible, educational way, which led to higher engagement rates.
As one of the primary channels of communication between the agency and both its clients and prospects, it was critical that the email marketing strategy was updated to reflect the changes in social media strategy. Working closely with the Email Marketing Lead, I established the creative strategy for email and oversaw and directed the design process. In addition to the updated visual identity, I aligned the content strategy for email with the content on social to ensure the agency was communicating a strong, consistent message.
Art Direction: Christine Marquez // Copywriting: Jay Overstreet // Graphic Design: Christine Marquez + Addi Myers // Social Lead: Kylie Gruender // Email Lead: Jordan Guilmart