Social Media / Internet
1. How does Pinpoint Designs use social media to
its advantage?
Operating as we do in the digital space, it's
essential that we lead by example. We manage several of our own clients' social
media profiles and campaigns, so it's important that we show ourselves to be
active through the channel. We predominantly use Twitter as a means of
interacting with our partners and other contacts who are based across the
world. It's also a good platform for use to use when pushing out press
releases, blog posts and other content we've created. As a smaller company, we
also place a lot of focus on our personality, so we like to include office
goings-on in there too. We use Facebook to a lesser extent for similar
purposes, but it's also a good way of interacting with our clients. LinkedIn
has also been useful in the past from a recruitment perspective.
2. Did the brand voice develop naturally or was it
designed to intentionally engage with a specific demographic/audience?
The brand voice has developed naturally over time.
When Pinpoint originally set up, we didn't target a specific market within
design and development and the original intention was to be a design-led
agency. As we progressed, we moved more into the web development and marketing
side of things, which meant that we dropped the word 'Designs' from our branding
and focused purely on the Magento (an eCommerce platform) market, trying to
push for higher value markets and producing a logo and colour scheme which
targeted this particular audience better.
3. Would Pinpoint Designs be where it is today
without any help from social media and other digital marketing platforms &
how/why?
We wouldn't be where we currently are without the
use of social media and other marketing platforms as this is a key part of
getting our brand name out there. Alongside networking events which are
attended, we keep in touch with key contacts over social media and try to be
active within the community (where a large base is in the USA). Other partners
within the industry then in turn help to promote us over social media which brings
additional leads into the business.
Brand
1. How does Pinpoint Design's visual identity
reflect the company and its values?
Our branding was designed to be clean, professional
and well produced. We wanted to make the brand mark stand out on its own and be
recognisable independently from the word 'Pinpoint'. We then use the rest
of the imagery on our website to show off our creative side and the use of team
photos to show a personal touch. The overall visual identity is aiming to show
that we're a professional company capable of high quality, well produced
website design, development and marketing campaigns, with a personal touch of
being an agency you can build a relationship with.
2. How important is the brand-consumer relationship
& why?
We feel this is very important due to how
competitive the market is around us. A long term relationship means that you
not only have loyalty with your clients, but they'll also open up to you
further which in-turn helps you to deliver a better service and higher quality
product. If a customer isn't happy with your service, it's very easy for them
to find alternatives, particularly in our industry.
3. How do you go about creating and maintaining
them?
The vast majority of our clients have been with us
as a company for many years, which is due to the level of service we aim to
provide. We have regular contact with our clients through email, telephone and
sometimes services such as Skype, engage with a number of our clients on Social
Media and try to build a more relaxed relationship. During events such as
Christmas, we'll send small gifts to clients as a token of appreciation for the
work we've passed across and if we're lucky enough to be nominated for awards,
we include our clients in the success when doing press releases. Finally, we
attend a lot of the community events, which naturally gets us known and builds
relationships with other competitors, merchants and partners that we work with.
Rebrand
1. Why did Pinpoint Designs undergo a rebrand?
The old branding went a little bit too far down the
creative/friendly look. As a company, we've grown fairly quickly and we are now
in a position to handle larger scale projects. As part of that, we needed to
make sure our image came across as more professional and the previous orange
branding didn't quite fit the direction we were going. We wanted a brand mark
which would stand out as being recognisable as our brand name within the
industry and to focus on one particular target market which we can aim to gain
a good market share in.
2. What was the most challenging aspect of
rebranding? (Before, after or during)
As a small company, we didn't have too many
challenges in the rebranding. The biggest problem we've had to date is that we
wanted to go from 'Pinpoint Designs' to 'Pinpoint', but the domains pinpoint.com and pinpoint.co.uk are both taken and
the current owners won't give up control of the domains. This means that we
either need to stick with our current domains, or look for an alternative.
Apart from the that, the most challenging aspect was coming up with the ideas
and being happy with the use of fonts across both print and web - the website
in particular went through several design changes.
3. How did the rebrand affect customer
relationships with the brand?
Most customers received the new branding really
well, although a couple of older customers did like the orange we previously
used as it stood out more. As a small company though, this didn't really affect
relationships in any dramatic way.
4. How would you approach it differently if you
were to do it again?
If doing this again, I would have spent longer on
the brand image when we first started out. Naturally, your business changes and
adapts based on supply and demand so it's very hard to get it perfect, but I
would have ideally looked for a domain closer to 'Pinpoint' when we first
started and tried to avoid going down the 'Designs' route from day one. This
would have allowed us to adapt easier over time and change direction where
required.
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