Driving Engagement
How do you grow an audience and drive engagement for a chain of service shops? When the client is an iconic Canadian brand, you have a pretty good head start, but you still need something outstanding to really jump out of endless scroll. We needed the Mr. Lube profile to be remarkable from an aesthetic perspective, but almost every post also had a role within the social media strategy.
“What if we tried one of those puzzle-feed things?”
What’s important to know about complex IG grid schemes is this:they’re an absolute nightmare.
For an influencer with advanced graphic design skills? Totally doable. But for an agency, there just aren’t many clients who fit the criteria. The most obvious factor of incompatibility is that last minute changes to the calendar are not happening. Period. (iykyk)
And if you, like us, were thinking that a plug-and-play template is out there somewhere, waiting to be licensed…please let me save you the time and heart ache: that’s not happening, either.
So, we started brainstorming. There were a lot of sketches and a lot of ideas on the cutting room floor. But soon the project moved to Illustrator, where a “Number of Layers” record was broken and Artboards became a critical tool rather than just a canvas. After client approval, we published a partial feed in October of 2020 and a full set of 18 posts the next month. By February 2021, however, we had hit a wall. Or designed ourselves into a corner. Either way, producing a calendar that met our expectations had become arduous. We needed help to get back on track.
Upwork to the rescue.
While I admit my experience with the platform has been hit or miss, in this instance – huge win. Huge. The April feed clearly shows an experienced art director had worked their magic. The feed was cleaner and even more cohesive.It also happened to be much easier to create, so implementation of the new look in the design in subsequent calendars was a breeze.
I should mention Design Pickle also had a role in production, but the size and complexity of these projects really jammed-up the queue and required enormous amounts of review/feedback time.
Results
The team absolutely smashed their KPI objectives for this OG Hook + Ladder client. If I recall correctly, one of the more aggressive goals – 10,000 IG followers – was surpassed a few weeks into the quarter. By the end of 2021, a fresh design concept was rolled out, but this insanely ambitious endeavour will always be one of the achievements I am most proud of. #illustrator…Driving Engagement
How do you grow an audience and drive engagement for a chain of service shops? When the client is an iconic Canadian brand, you have a pretty good head start, but you still need something outstanding to really jump out of endless scroll. We needed the Mr. Lube profile to be remarkable from an aesthetic perspective, but almost every post also had a role within the social media strategy.
“What if we tried one of those puzzle-feed things?”
What’s important to know about complex IG grid schemes is this:they’re an absolute nightmare.
For an influencer with advanced graphic design skills? Totally doable. But for an agency, there just aren’t many clients who fit the criteria. The most obvious factor of incompatibility is that last minute changes to the calendar are not happening. Period. (iykyk)
And if you, like us, were thinking that a plug-and-play template is out there somewhere, waiting to be licensed…please let me save you the time and heart ache: that’s not happening, either.
So, we started brainstorming. There were a lot of sketches and a lot of ideas on the cutting room floor. But soon the project moved to Illustrator, where a “Number of Layers” record was broken and Artboards became a critical tool rather than just a canvas. After client approval, we published a partial feed in October of 2020 and a full set of 18 posts the next month. By February 2021, however, we had hit a wall. Or designed ourselves into a corner. Either way, producing a calendar that met our expectations had become arduous. We needed help to get back on track.
Upwork to the rescue.
While I admit my experience with the platform has been hit or miss, in this instance – huge win. Huge. The April feed clearly shows an experienced art director had worked their magic. The feed was cleaner and even more cohesive.It also happened to be much easier to create, so implementation of the new look in the design in subsequent calendars was a breeze.
I should mention Design Pickle also had a role in production, but the size and complexity of these projects really jammed-up the queue and required enormous amounts of review/feedback time.
Results
The team absolutely smashed their KPI objectives for this OG Hook + Ladder client. If I recall correctly, one of the more aggressive goals – 10,000 IG followers – was surpassed a few weeks into the quarter. By the end of 2021, a fresh design concept was rolled out, but this insanely ambitious endeavour will always be one of the achievements I am most proud of. #illustratorWW…