Clarity Insights is a big data and data science consultancy which, when I first began working with them, were actually called Clarity Solution Group. The company had grown mostly by word of mouth and had not invested a lot in marketing beyond attending some events and doing some PR.
Original Clarity Solution Group Logo
The company did not have a clearly defined brand strategy, so I undertook in-depth interviews with employees, clients, prospects and industry analysts. From this, I identified an issue many companies were having with data and analytics, but no one was talking about or addressing. Frequently, large companies were not seeing the return from their investments in big data technology because of poor work or bad data, but because they were failing to turn insights into action The reason for this was a failure in change management. Asking a senior executive to trust advanced data analysis and ignore their gut or experience was a big ask to make without adequate work in that area.
Clarity, however, was beginning to do a lot of work in this space. In addition, the company put a big focus on empowering their clients through knowledge transfer and other means, giving them more ownership over the end system. The idea that Clarity did more than just provide insights, but turned them into action, was one that appealed to prospects and industry analysts, and lead to the new tagline we developed for the firm: Unleash your Insights.
Brand Identity
With the strategy in place, it was time to address the company's brand identity. The original logo used a font that, when put next competitors logos (as was often the case at events), disappeared. In addition, the color blue was overused in the category making it harder to stand out. Finally, and most importantly, the name Clarity Solution Group was similar to many other firms and did not say what the company did.
The name Clarity Insights was an obvious one and for which we managed to secure the URL. Working with a design firm, we developed several new logo designs before settling on the one you see here. In addition to the logo, we produced a set of brand guidelines, new letterhead, Powerpoint templates, pens, notebooks and more.
Website
The redesign of the brand identity meant there was a need to redesign the website. The prior site had been light on content and had not been designed or written with SEO in mind. At the time, the budget to redo the site was almost nonexistent, so we took a "lean startup" approach, using a Hubspot template to build the site, customizing the CSS as needed.
The site and IA we redesigned to focus on customer problems, not industry expertise, as well as to encourage customers to engage with the firm. There were many more call to action buttons and blog signups forms added, slide in panels that appeared promoting content as a user moved down the page and more case studies that were promoted across the site.
From an SEO perspective, we identified core keywords and ensured that these were featured in headlines, alt tags, etc. We also created and implemented a backlinking strategy to increase the site's authority.
Demand Generation
Clarity's target audience is senior executives, the kind for whom time is a precious commodity. That meant we need to provide them with something of value in exchange for their attention, and that something was content.
We defined a content strategy and calendar based on around core issues we saw our clients having. We then hired an outside agency to write content for us, as previous efforts at generating content from employees had failed (due to lack of time). In order to publicize the content, we used a combination of advertising and email, using sites such as CIO.com, industry vertical specialty sites (e.g. American banker), and ABM platforms such as Terminus and LinkedIn.
Once someone raised their hand, they were fed into an email nurture campaign to encourage repeat engagement. These nurture campaigns were set up in Hubspot, the marketing automation I selected to replace Marketo, which had bee to complex and unwieldy for a company Clarity's size.
Results
In 12 months, marketing driven revenue increased 3x and marketing driven pipeline increased by 4x. Site traffic increased by 10%, email opens grew and the CTR we were seeing for ads was double the industry average.