Great design starts with a strong brand

In this context, you might equate the word “brand” with visual identity and logo. After all, that’s where most designers think a brand starts and stops. Instead, we see it as the embodiment of how you are perceived by your prospects. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, design goes beyond what a website or ad campaign looks like and instead dives deeper into how it works.

Many of Kula’s clients are well-known brands with a long history and visual guidelines to match. Other manufacturers need our help crafting or refining their brand messaging, or creating a new product identity. Our design and marketing strategist teams relish the opportunity to develop and expand brands through the definition of an archetype, messaging strategy, tone, and visual standards.

Episode 141

Musings on Design, UX, User Testing, and Visitor Analysis

Craig Edis

Featuring Craig Edis, Creative Director at Kula Partners

July 13, 2021

Continuing our showcase of the Kula Partners team, Craig Edis, Creative Director, discusses the central role of design in modern marketing for manufacturers. Drawing on more than 17 years of experience, Craig shares insights about what goes into developing outstanding brands, why user testing and visitor analysis is so valuable, and how to always design with the end-user in mind.

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Websites Designed to Perform

We strip away the clutter to bring your brand online with beauty and confidence.

Leading manufacturers’ websites need to accomplish a lot of goals. They need to be optimized for search performance in very niche categories so they can be found by today’s B2B buyers. They need to showcase brand, innovation, and expertise while serving visitors who are in varying stages of the customer journey.

Intuitive navigation, clarity of message, and a seamless user experience for every device, browser, and screen size are design trends that never go out of style. 

Most importantly, our creative team knows how to take that beautiful interface and optimize it for conversion performance. A gorgeous web presence is still a failure if it doesn’t help educate and convert early-stage leads or drive brand- and solution-aware prospects toward sales contact.

Kula helps manufacturing marketers create B2B websites that:

Are accessible to everyone

  • Leverage brand palettes while maintaining contrast ratios for low-vision users
  • Work on any device or browser, including assistive technologies like screen readers
  • Use intuitive design for navigation and wayfinding

Bring the online buyer’s journey to life

  • Align content structure with that journey, while also making it useful for sales
  • Test alternate visual approaches to optimize conversion
  • Consider future extensibility of the site and visual integrations with numerous platforms

Integrate with sophisticated account-based campaigns

  • Extend the creative approach from targeted display ads
  • Drive conversion by focusing attention on what really matters for the prospect 
  • Use automation and intent to enable account-level customization

Working with Existing Websites

A complete website redesign is an ambitious and all-consuming process, but many B2B companies have an existing web presence that can serve as the foundation for digital growth and optimization. As part of our initial work with manufacturers, we conduct a UX analysis of the performance and features of the current site. This deep dive highlights brand consistency issues, accessibility concerns, missed conversion opportunities, information architecture changes, and the design revisions that are required to support the buyer’s journey.

The output of our audit provides a roadmap to align the digital fundamentals of our clients’ websites with strategic marketing goals.

The output of our audit provides a roadmap to align the digital fundamentals of our clients’ websites with strategic marketing goals. Kula’s design and development teams can then bend to the task of improving the performance of the digital platform in an iterative fashion, without the investment required to bring a wholly new presence to life. We’ll also know if it makes sense to plan for a fresh start instead of realigning the current platform.

Integrated, Creative Campaigns

Beyond intuitive user interface design for the web, Kula’s design team also deeply understands how to craft eye-catching, targeted campaigns that are activated both online and in traditional media. Our multidisciplinary teams work together to enable:

Digital Display Campaigns

With sophisticated targeting systems and intent triggers, it’s more complex than ever to design digital advertising that meets prospects where they are in the journey. This is especially true with the account-based customizability enabled by today’s ad platforms, and it takes a designer with experience to leverage the possibilities. Ensuring that ad clicks lead to conversion by designing landing compelling destinations helps keep the media spend in check.

Complete Tradeshow Experience Design

Manufacturing brands come to life in an incredibly holistic way at tradeshows, especially those that are activated digitally. We have decades of experience designing booths for maximum impact, whether you’re a new manufacturer at the back of the hall or an A-list destination at the center of attention. We create the entire visual experience, from account-targeted ads to presentation decks to sales-closing collateral.

Point of Sale

In the omnichannel sales environment of many B2B manufacturers, there are opportunities to make an impression at the distributor level, or on-site with customers during technical service visits. Kula can craft product launch campaigns that stand out at the counter, as well as high-performing leave-behind items to help drive niche revenue. Our designers love the challenge of creating print pieces (it’s not dead!) that are activated online, allowing you to track campaign effectiveness at every step.

Kula has certainly exceeded our expectations from minute one. They have a remarkable ability to quickly grasp the scope and requests of the client and turn those ideas into a comprehensive action plan. We were particularly impressed with Kula’s dedication to deadlines, and their aptitude in balancing technical strategies with creative, attractive content focused on customer experience. We look forward to partnering with them on future projects.

Beth Munro

Regional Programs Manager, EMCO Atlantic

Episode 78

Common Mistakes Marketers Make When Building Websites

Jeff W. White
Carman Pirie

Kula Ring hosts Jeff and Carman discuss factors that impact website design and common mistakes marketers and designers make when they build websites.

April 7, 2020

Websites that marketers and other stakeholders are being asked to create are more and more complex, and at the same time, generic templates are on the rise. On The Kula Ring, Jeff White talks to Carman Pirie about how marketers can move beyond the aesthetics of the web build to thinking holistically, considering how information is organized and ensuring it meets accessibility requirements.

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CONTACT KULA PARTNERS

Jesse

I’m Jesse Mawhinney, Vice President at Kula Partners. If you’re searching for creative design solutions that will communicate the essence of your brand in both digital and traditional media, contact me today. I’ll review your message, do some research about your organization, and reach out to book a call.