Strategically using branding, design and marketing to help clients grow their businesses

Introduction

While working for Optimaal Groeien I worked on a large variety of projects and tasks for about 14 different companies. From writing engaging and informative content to helping create new strategies, these all contributed to helping companies grow their business.

To protect the clients’ interests, I had to leave out some details and alter the images used.

Project duration	Type	Role	Deliverables
15.2.2024 – 1.12.2024	Permanent job	Designer & marketer	Content, promo materials,
10 months			landing pages, strategies,
			websites

Disclaimer – these images have been altered to anonymize the clients’ identities

Strategic approach to growth

We created, optimized, and executed strategies for every client. These strategies were based on desk research, stakeholder interviews, (sometimes) empathy map and persona creation, surveys, competitive analysis, data analysis, click stream analysis, and more.

The strategies I helped create were important to define the different target audiences, address user needs, create more effective content, and overall be more effective and deliberate about our marketing and branding activities.

Creating web user experiences

As time went on my responsibilities gradually shifted towards optimizing (and creating) the User Experiences of websites and increasing conversions through conversion optimization.

Below I’ve mentioned a few web projects I’ve worked on and the process I’ve used.

Creating a user-friendly website to professionalize the branding of a construction related company and better inform its users.

This client is specialized in special construction solutions for large projects. This collaboration was mostly focused on branding and design activities.

At the start of the project, I was part of a stakeholder interview. In this interview we discussed the business needs and goals with regards to the website, requirements, the target audiences, competitors, existing research and customer insights, and more. This gave me a good foundation for further research.

The next step was doing extensive research about the target audience and their needs, an analysis of the competition, and an analysis of the current site. Examples of important insights were:

The importance of certifications for clients
The need to clearly communicate what’s offered to clients, due to the fact that these clients work with a lot of different stakeholders in their projects. This also helped give an idea of the decision-making process of potential clients.

Additionally, I was also part of conducting an interview with a sales representative and a production worker at this company. The interview with the sales representative gave me more insights into the added value of the construction company for their clients, while the interview with the production worker helped us understand why people might want to work for this company (a vacancy page was an important requirement for the website).

Concept creation

Using the research, I could start creating a concept for the website. This consisted of a sitemap, functional requirements, and recommendations. I also made a first design (of the homepage) in WordPress.

Feedback session

At this point it was important to get feedback on the concept and the first design. I did this together with the stakeholders of the project. In general, they liked the concept and the design, but wanted some minor additions and changes. After making these adjustments I could go on to build website.

Building the website

At this point I really started building the website. It was already decided which pages were important and what content they should contain, so I could start building them. I used Breakdance to make the different pages, this was an easy-to-use tool to get quick and good results. In the end, I managed to get most of the pages ready in a few days.

A screenshot of part of the homepage on a mobile device.
Disclaimer – these images have been altered to anonymize the clients’ identities

Upgrading a one page website to increase visibility, provide more complete information, and eventually convert more.

A screenshot of part of the “for healthcare institutions” page.
Disclaimer – these images have been altered to anonymize the clients’ identities

This client is running a business specialized in connecting healthcare workers with companies. This collaboration involved broad marketing and branding activities. At the start of our collaboration, this client had a very barebones website. This was a problem because they didn’t manage to reach their two most important target audiences well. Besides the website they have two important products to support their service:

An app for healthcare workers
A dashboard for companies looking for healthcare workers

These two products and the way they worked were a unique selling point for the company.

Stakeholder interviews

This project also started with doing stakeholder interviews. The difference was that it required multiple sessions to get a good idea of what this client wanted and to get the info we needed. During the creation of the web pages, we also had several feedback sessions that helped refine and improve what we created.

Audits, creation of strategy

In this project the scope of our activities was bigger than the previously mentioned one. We were responsible for all marketing activities of this client (including some branding activities), so the process was a bit different.

I was responsible for the content, CRO, and advertisement part of the audit. These audits gave us a lot of information about the current performance of the client’s marketing activities and how we could improve the performance. I also discovered useful insights into user needs that helped in choosing the right functionality and content for the web pages.

Competitive analysis

An important part of the process I used was the competitive analysis. By doing this I managed to discover many improvement points for the content and functionality of the website. I shared these insights with the stakeholders which helped convince them of the importance of having these functions and content.

All of these analyses resulted in creating a new information architecture for the website. Part of this were a sitemap and a content audit. I used these tools to more efficiently and consciously create the new web pages.

Creation of surveys

To gain more insights in how people use and value the app and dashboard, and how they could be improved, I decided to create a survey. Since these were products that differentiated the client from competitors, it was important to specifically highlight them on the website. Through the results of the survey the client got important feedback for the products and we managed to be more precise about the information we displayed to users of the website.

Complete relaunch of a transportation website to increase visibility, inform users better, and create more interest around the company.

This client is active in the transportation of different types of goods. At the start of this project, they did have a website but it was old and dated. They also wanted a focus on their sustainability measures and innovative software which wasn’t properly communicated on their old website. As a result, they were unhappy with its current state and visitors didn’t get up-to-date information about the company. This was also one of the bigger collaborations where we were responsible for broad online marketing and branding activities. I created this website together with another colleague.

Stakeholder interviews

We started with doing a stakeholder interview. Through this, we managed to get important information about expectations, goals, and broad requirements for their website and other marketing projects.

Audits, creation of strategy

In this project I was also responsible for the content, CRO, and advertisement part of the audit. These audits laid the foundations for the strategy and the website we eventually developed.

Competitive analysis

Like in the previous web project, a competitive analysis was also valuable for creating this website. It was clear that the competition had much better websites than this client had, so we analysed the competition to find out what we could take away from their websites and use for our client’s new website.

We used the competitive analysis in combination with the other analyses to create a new concept for the website.

Concept creation

Using the analyses and research, we started creating a concept for the website. This consisted of a sitemap and requirements. We knew we wanted to focus more on things that would separate this client from its competitors, which meant more of an emphasis on sustainability and technology.

Figma designs

We used Figma to create wireframes and higher fidelity designs for the important pages of the website. The wireframes defined the site’s skeleton and gave us and the client a shared understanding of what information and functionality would go where.

The higher fidelity designs were used to gather feedback from stakeholders and some users. They were made mobile-first in order to efficient with the space and because users mostly visited the old site on their phones.

Developing the website

After getting the go ahead, we started developing the website. It took multiple iterations to get to the final website, as we received feedback that meant making some bigger changes to its design. Unfortunately, this client also missed several feedback sessions so the process took longer than we’d hoped. Eventually, we managed to finish building the website.

A screenshot of part of the homepage.
Disclaimer – these images have been altered to anonymize the clients’ identities

Learnings

I’ve learned several things from working on these projects:

The need for strong communication between us and the clients. Many of the clients expected to be completely unburdened, but also wanted to stay in control (especially with regards to the website). This meant that we didn’t always get enough feedback on the websites, and resulted in needing to make changes to the design which could have been prevented. In the end this cost us more time than needed.
The importance of subtly convincing the client that the users’ needs matter more than their personal preferences.