Social & Branding
Leading historic social re-brand for Un.titled
Brand.
Un.titled are an award-winning Leicester/London creative agency, originating at the dawn of digital in the early 2000’s. After celebrating a 20th anniversary, agency merger with TinCan and being acquired by Williams Commerce Group, it was time for a significant brand refresh and repositioning.
We unveiled a slick new website, and with that came an opportunity to create a consistent identity across all platforms; primarily social and communications.
At just 17 and the youngest Social/Content Wizard on the Untitled marketing team, I was placed in a dedicated group tasked with defining a tone of voice, establish core brand values and craft a streamlined social strategy for the brand going forward.
Context.
• Role: Social Lead
• Squad: x1 CMO, x1 PM, x2 design
• Date: Aug 2018 - Mar 2019
• Agency: Un.titled
BRIEF
Un.titled had an incredibly strong design heritage, but after being acquired by Williams Commerce Group in 2017, a lot of its independence had disappeared. Our objective was to define a consistent and recognisable tone of voice, show the agency as the category leader and inject fun back into their marketing.
A unified approach
To achieve the 3 objectives set, we realised early on that pouring time into social alone wouldn’t work. A coherent marketing strategy was required, from which we could then personalise content for social.
Working with the Agency Head and Designers at Un.titled, we crafted a full marketing strategy - which centred around monthly content focuses based on what we wanted to ‘push’. This process would allow us to plan ahead, plan resources and ensure everybody in the business was aligned.
Creating a social strategy
Once a unified marketing plan had been signed off, we could turn our attention to the fun part. Nailing social media for a historic agency.
First things first, we wanted to know who we were speaking to and who we’d eventually like this to be. As a group, we collaborated on persona exercises, and words that we associate with the brand and settled on what channels would work best to reach our desired audiences.
We chose Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn - each for different purposes. Twitter would focus on our updates and opinions, Instagram would showcase our culture and work, whereas LinkedIn was where we put our best foot forward and targeted prospective clients.
RESPONSE
Anyone who has worked agency-side knows a simple fact - internal marketing is always put last. To make things stick for Un.titled, it was imperative we made it easily deliverable, approvable and replicable.
To accomplish this, we ensured a regular (and somewhat predictable) monthly content plan was created and signed off by the right people, at the right time.
We also worked with the design team to create a vast collection of templates, requiring less resource and also allowing us to be reactive on occasion. As you may know, it’s key you keep agency owners on side when it comes to internal marketing - so less resource is always a win 😉.
CREATIVE
We tapped into the many great minds at Un.titled for their opinions, took people behind the scenes of our workshops, built relationships with clients old/new to increase reach, took advantage of cultural events relevant to the brand and most importantly created content that looked f**king gorgeous. Because - that is what the Un.titled audience wanted.
RESULTS
Whilst our KPIs were around engagement and leads, a lot of the early strategy was based on laying the groundwork. The new approach saw an uplift in followers, engagement and reach for the x3 social channels, primarily Instagram, but I, unfortunately, have no tangible figures to hand. One of the other successes of our strategy was moving large quantities of followers from TinCan’s (agency merger) social platforms to Un.titled - which went down like a storm.
Visit @undottitled on Instagram or @undottitled on Twitter between August 2018 and March 2019 to see my work.
Team feedback.
“Charlie massively improved the way we approach social for Un.titled. His enthusiasm to get it right is infectious and unique, a truly valuable asset to the team and a tough one to replace!”
DARREN BARRETT, DIGITAL DESIGNER