MarketEase

Incorporating The Business 

When we partner with start-ups right from the beginning, we get to structure tasks and goals in a much more logical way than most other start-ups – we have the benefit of experience in launching many new brands and companies. 

We ran a smaller branding exercise that focused on defining core values and brand name, to avoid having to change all of the legals further down the line. We paused just before officially registering the company, knowing that their unique setup would benefit from VAT registration from day one. This meant an extra 6 months without financial, tax and legal compliance kicking in. 

Dedicated financial and legal experts from our professional network supported this process. 

Creating the Strategy

The expectations were high and our task was to create a strategy that allowed the company to launch having already secured paying customers. 

We got to work creating business, brand, sales and marketing strategies that would deliver highly detailed user experience and app feedback through a pilot, and a strong pre-launch sales campaign before a full public launch. 

Working closely with the founders, we helped them to refine their vision and ensure all of their thoughts and ideas were woven into each strategy, whilst also defining the KPIs and metrics that would later be used to measure success of the launch and our strategies. 

Crafting the Brand

Our challenge was to create a brand that looked strong and professional but that wasn’t perceived as boring or ill-thought out. We’re pretty good at helping brand new companies look much, much more established than they are, so it was important to everyone that the brand didn’t make us look like a one-person developer trying to cobble something together. No, we needed to show that this was a credible team with the expertise and resources needed to create a robust app that has a significant and positive impact on business’ lives. 

We utilised a number of different techniques to generate viable brand name concepts and ideas over a number of weeks, but we eventually settled on MarketEase, for its direct reference to “easy marketing”. 

We were very pleased with the brand mark, which is a chart-ified version of the company initials (ME) that references the app’s dedication to clear and concise data and insights to help guide users towards a more successful marketing strategy. 

We were pleased that the end result was derived from one of the concepts presented in the first round. Our qualitative approach to brand building usually sees us secure client sign-off on a primary concept in the first presentation, because no-one enjoys going round and round in circles for months on end. 

The brand, we felt, needed to be fun, simple and memorable. Making sure to avoid similar styles to our researched competitors, we opted for calm, soothing blues with a splash of purple, pink and orange to highlight the fun element of the brand.

App Planning 

This was a challenging app to build, for the reason that marketing strategy is no simple thing. Our goal was to build a new brand that would make sure in almost every instance, users would come away feeling confident in their new marketing and growth strategy. We even planned an entire marketing campaign around supporting users who struggled to find success with the app, with our experts coming in to give advice and guidance. 

Initially, the app needed to cater for smaller companies but we felt it made sense to plan the architecture in a way that could be easily evolved to cater for more complex strategies with larger businesses. 

We ended up creating our own growth process that incorporated a few fundamental sales strategies. We didn’t want to create an app that just led to a digital version of what’s already saturating the market – an overwhelming focus on boosting vanity stats, which doesn’t translate well into new sales. 

We analysed every possible type of marketing activity and broke them down into components to allow for a plug-n-play approach to building your own strategy, with the app providing guidance and giving warnings if the user tries to build an incomplete or illogical strategy. 

The step-by-step growth process we developed ensured that users were considering each stage of their customer’s buying journey, rather than what would otherwise usually end up as a random and very short-lived focus on one type of marketing activity that, unrealistically, is expected to generate new sales in a short space of time.

The most challenging part was documenting an algorithm that would allow users to enter details about their business and goals to be matched with a custom matrix of cohesive marketing strategy components, covering each of the five main stages of marketing. 

Planning & Designing the App

One thing was clear, we had to make the app easy to both understand and use. Too many apps bombard users with incomprehensible data and jargon that overwhelms users. 

We developed a User Interface and Experience that guided users through each stage of the process by giving users the ability to hover over almost anything that may be even slightly confusing, to reveal more information and would link to additional private content. As much as our platform was designed to give users a great marketing strategy, the planning acknowledged that sometimes users would simply have to spend a little time learning about marketing too, so we found a way to break it down into fun, bite-size chunks that could be digested in small bursts without overwhelming the user. 

The look and feel of the app itself was designed and iterated with our target audience firmly in mind; non-marketing professionals. 

We opted for bright colours with a heavy focus on making text throughout the app as short, concise and plain-spoken as possible. 

Marketing, Pilot & Launch

Our aim was to generate sales before the initial launch of the app, which was no easy feat! 

We decided to run a pilot launch which would allow us to refine and improve the app based on real user needs and preferences. The algorithms and huge amount of strategy content in the backend was very complex, but we had to make sure the user experience was easy and approachable for our audience. We utilised our network to find groups and communities we already had relationships with to act as our pilot testers. Our existing relationship with these groups ensured we would get honest and reliable feedback which we knew we could put to good use. 

The key to any launch of a new product or service in our experience, is getting the word out and generating interest. We developed a robust marketing strategy for both the pilot and the official launch that was planned around the main goal of driving awareness and excitement. 

The first step in our process was to create a modern website that would showcase the key benefits and features of the app. It would also point people towards a newsletter sign up form so we could keep them up to date with our progress and create a buzz ahead of launch. We knew there would be some time between the pilot and official launch dates and so we created an email reach out campaign to keep people engaged with the brand and excited about the app becoming available. 

We carried out extensive research into relevant SEO keywords being used by our target audience and used this information to optimise the website, making sure that potential customers would be able to easily find the site. 

We also planned a range of social media campaigns on the top platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to attract new potential customers and build up an engaged following. In addition, we created a plan to conduct PR and outreach activities to raise visibility for the brand among key influencers and tech journalists in the marketing industry. 

Through our extensive planning, we understood that the platform would be a highly effective tool, but that it wouldn’t be able to solve every marketing problem for every single scenario. That’s why we offered to support MarketEase by running an ongoing Bootcamp course for their users. Our marketing experts would help businesses set a realistic marketing goal, build a strategy (using the platform) and help them get better at executing their own strategies. We wanted to build a community that supports founders in every possible way without extreme charge, and the Bootcamp sessions were a key part of that approach.