Enabling EdTech. Empowering Education.
Enabling EdTech. Empowering Education.
Created as an Interview Project for Tutored by Teachers
Brand book and website redesign created in Canva
Market Research and Strategy to pursue Albuquerque Public Schools
Sample Email targeting District-level personas including Superintendents, Curriculum Advisors, and Intervention Leads.
Created as an Interview Project for Tutored by Teachers
Brand book and website redesign created in Canva
Market Research and Strategy to pursue Albuquerque Public Schools
Sample Email targeting District-level personas including Superintendents, Curriculum Advisors, and Intervention Leads.
I like to begin at the beginning.
When considering a new direction for a company or when looking at creating collateral for a company that is looking to update, modernize, or otherwise pursue a different avenue for branding, I start by reviewing the basics.
In this case, the company’s original brand used a bright blue and sharp yellow in a minimalistic style that, while clean, felt geared toward primary or elementary schools specifically. There was also substantial white space on each page of the website, which was not consistent with the collateral that I was able to find.
Collateral should be consistent and exhibit the same brand feel across all domains.
Creating a brand book encourages consistency between content, even when multiple designers are involved. Including acceptable accents, images, and exemplars is another way to ensure that materials feel unified.
White space is important in discerning important information within a page.
The more information being presented, the more minimal the design should be to encourage reader engagement. While this is a personal belief, I base this on data I found through both my experience as a marketer as well as from anecdotal experience when teaching.
Having only 2 dynamic and very bright colors limits the ability of the designer to create engaging and visually appealing content. By incorporating several colors, including differing “sharpnesses”, the brand has the opportunity to create more visually appealing content by simply incorporating a diversity of tones. Colors that are less easy to read, like the green I included in this pallet, act as accent colors and highlights, functioning as a visual cue or content break.
Movement and texture within content are essential to visual engagement and should be paired thoughtfully with customer-centric images or graphics. By pairing simple bullets and accents with the more complex visual texture of torn paper, it’s easy for readers to identify critical information or links while having some visual stimulation as they scroll. The page is never bland.
For webpages, readers typically lose interest after the first 2 – 3 scrolls. If information is so scattered on the page that the page is significantly longer and has little to no incentive to continue scrolling, expect high bounce rate and reader attrition. The line between easy to digest and boring is finer than one might think.
In keeping with the purpose of the previously created brand book, it’s important for the website, particularly the home page, to immediately capture a reader’s visual interest. By juxtaposing simple single-colored text, white space, and complex, interesting images, the website is intended to give the reader a visual and mental break between digesting important information like the company mission and the variety of programs the company offers.
As I mentioned in the previous Engagement section, it’s important to keep must-know information at the top of the page. Much like when you open a book or a magazine, the first page gets the most engagement. The farther a reader is required to move forward, the less likely they are to progress if they aren’t interested in the content, if the materials aren’t compelling, and if the messaging isn’t clear. Bearing that in mind, it’s important for the most important information to be located within the first screen. Important that is also important should be incorporated within the first 2 or 3 scrolls. Depending on the content layout and menu options, I personally like to keep web pages between 3 – 5 scrolls, though in some instances that isn’t feasible.
When creating a marketing strategy from scratch, I tend to over-plan, which has never hurt me!
I include an executive summary if necessary, particularly if the campaign involves departments that are less involved in the marketing process. Having that purpose stated and clear gives us all a common goal to work toward and a place to start with if there are any questions about intention.
Market Research, SWOT analysis, target customer segmentation, and competitive positions is essential for any plan to be successful. All of these require substantial time and energy to create but will save so much headache later. These steps help to focus persona research and positioning statements within campaigns and collateral. In my experience, this research and planning has increased click rates by as much a 8% on a cold campaign.
Tactics and timeline are critical to keeping the project on time and on target. One of the most common struggles I’ve encountered within marketing is ‘mission-creep’, additional tasks, add-ons, etc. that crop up during a project and can feel productive in the heat of the moment but turn out to not add value to the project.
I find that writing out my sequence strategies helps me visualize what I’m trying to accomplish.
I don’t typically write out my pipelines; however, for this project, I wanted to make sure that I clearly outlined how I approach lead generation and MQL processing.
When completing this project, I felt it was important for the hiring manager to see how I would style emails, again, based on the brand book and my own experience.
I gravitate toward interspersing white space and critical information with colored dividers serving as content breaks. I also like to include facts and figures in larger colored text to draw the eye.
In this case, when marketing toward Albuquerque Public Schools (APS), it was important to highlight that this company focuses specifically on high-needs students which would be a benefit to APS’ large population of disadvantaged students who are not proficient in Math or English Language Arts.
I strongly believe that if you want something done well, do it well. This project took me about 18 – 20 hours to complete and I’m proud of the content and strategy that I created. If implemented with fidelity, I believe that this multiprong approach would lead to a more universally inclusive branding strategy as well as a successful campaign to bring on APS as a customer of the company.
I strongly believe that if you want something done well, do it well. This project took me about 18 – 20 hours to complete and I’m proud of the content and strategy that I created. If implemented with fidelity, I believe that this multiprong approach would lead to a more universally inclusive branding strategy as well as a successful campaign to bring on APS as a customer of the company.