Branding and design are critical to any business, as it gives your potential customers an immediate first impression before they know anything else about you. But as a digital marketing agency, and perhaps any business that sells a service rather than a product, visual design is everything.
Socratik, the SEO agency I co-founded two years ago, has gone through three versions of branding. Our first branding was very clearly rushed. We were a new business, primarily concerned with throwing up a website and email signature with any logo, any design, to look and feel like a real business.
We quickly outgrew it. We were growing our business and starting to work with more clients and needed something sharper and not so home-made. Thus, the Socratik brand evolved into a much-improved variation, but ultimately lacked the look and feel of a digital agency.
After a business trip to meet with clients in New York City, we realized we still did not feel like our branding and design inspired confidence in our abilities as experts in the field. So we finally moved into phase three of our branding, which we still have today and are proud of.
The newest Socratik branding uses bold and simple black and white, with a Florida-themed teal as the accent color. The concept features a design framework that represents critical thinking, leveraging lines, and grids. It portrays order and structure, showing that we provide order in a world of digital chaos.
The simple color palette of black and white in our design speaks to the binary nature of solutions – good vs. bad. Then, the handwritten note adds a human touch to analytical underpinnings.
Though we were thrilled with how this turned out, we got stuck at how to implement the website design in a way that worked. Cue LBMG Marketing team to bring it to life.
Lauren and her team took our design and amplified it by looking at it from every angle with a microscope. Her suggestions for our web design were so specific, which my partner and I really appreciated and may have never thought of.
One example is when Lauren was providing suggestions for our “About” page. We’re a completely remote team, and portraying our culture to potential clients and potential hires is important to us, so we wanted this to depict our company accurately. She put together mock-ups that incorporated branding elements in the design that pulled the page elements together in a cohesive way, like adding a black bar underneath the header photo to anchor it and using our accent color to highlight the footer.
We rinsed and repeated this process for our “Services” page and “Our Process” page, thanks to Lauren’s recommendations and assistance with how to implement the changes onto our website in a practical way. It is clear the LBMG Marketing team took their time because they are invested since they would give us such detailed suggestions and even options to consider.
I learned a lot about design and branding throughout this process. I can’t say I knew the foundation of what makes a strong visual brand before we started working with Lauren, but through her explanation of why she was suggesting what she was suggesting, I started to see how different cues or concepts would prompt a user to navigate or feel a certain way when on our website.
Our end result is cohesive and truly aligns our design with our core values and what we are trying to accomplish with our website. It has also carried over into more of our marketing assets, like our capabilities deck, design for social media posts, our blog post design, and more. It’s been more beneficial for our business than we can say to have branding that accurately portrays who we are as people, as a team, and as a company.
By Andrea Barnhill, Co-Founder | Director of Ops of Socratik
