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Squaredot
Work | Arkphire
Squaredot
Brief
Squaredot
Solution | Brand positioning
Squaredot
Solution | Creative direction
Squaredot
Solution | Website
Squaredot
Solution | Content
Squaredot
Results
Arkphire

Rebranding a fast growing B2B tech brand

The challenge we helped to solve:

Build a brand and marketing to reflect the business success and attract more customers to accelerate the growth

What we delivered:

Brand positioning strategy, brand identity and brand guidelines, website, creative & art direction, content & brand advertising campaigns

The difference we made:

“Squaredot took our senior leadership team on a journey of self discovery as we honed in on our true identity and place in the market.” - Aisling Bolger, Head of Marketing, Arkphire

The brief

Positioning B2B tech for exponential growth

Arkphire is a fast-growing international B2B tech company with Irish roots and a heritage that dates back to the 1960s. Over the last decade, the company has witnessed astonishing international growth, with a clientbase that now includes the likes of Facebook, Google, wework, Dropbox, Hubspot, Wrike, and Asana.

They approached us with a challenge to help them update and evolve their brand so it does justice to the business, its values, offering, success and potential. It was clear from early in our conversations that they wanted their ambition and ethos of continuous evolution reflected in how they show up in the market. It was essential they demonstrate how what they do aligns with, accelerates and augments their client’s digital transformation strategy.

Most examples of B2B marketing projects involve multiple internal and external stakeholders from a variety of business areas. They bring different personalities into the company vision and each comes at it from a different perspective. It can be challenging to bring everybody on a journey and all end up in the same place. During the briefing stage, we helped to bring all ideas out into the open, unite the thinking and hone the output briefs and the journey ahead through rounds of feedback. Because of this, all stakeholders were in agreement and fully behind the vision and plan for the project we were about to embark on.

original branding

Arkphire_original-logo

 

original website

Arkphire_original-website

 

The solution - Brand positioning & new identity

Helping Arkphire gain perpetual edge

Taking cues from our research and  insights we identified and aligned Arkphire’s strengths with key client values, needs and business decision criteria to develop a relevant and compelling proposition. Digital transformation and the move to cloud is fundamental to modern organisations. The move to being a digital, data-driven organisation is a priority with the insights, agility, efficiencies and improved performance this brings. Enabling business transformation and bringing technology change, Arkphire helps its clients to gain a perpetual edge.

The market and brand insights also helped to intuitively organise Arkphire’s services offering - with the company’s growth over the years, the services list has been expanded without much restructuring. We suggested streamlining, grouping and reorganising 15+ different services into a clear list of 7. With the IT Procurement target persona being very different to the rest of the IT services, we also suggested introducing a higher level categorisation into IT Procurement and IT Services. 

With a firm grasp of the business, the industry, the competition and the target personas, we rebranded their identity and evolved their logo, honouring the legacy of the spiral symbolism but transforming it into its 21st century modern version. As part of the rebrand, we produced a new brand guideline book that would help the brand to be consistently applied across all marketing touchpoints.

arkphire_primary

 

 

The solution - Creative direction

One brand: two perspectives

In an industry that sometimes lacks strong visual identities, dominated by template driven landing pages and stock imagery, we helped Arkphire stand out through an aspirational, clever, fresh and contemporary brand identity and tone. With two very distinct lines of business - IT Procurement and IT Services, the audiences for each were very different and content and a visual style guide was created for each.

IT Procurement

Targeting big American companies expanding into Europe, we communicated how Arkphire will help you evolve your potential by sourcing and deploying the latest workplace technology in your new European offices, at scale, speed and with ease. Our visual concept was to portray American landmarks, symbols or icons in a European context to project international success.

Arkphire_Visual_ITP

IT Services

Targeting local Irish based companies, we illustrated how IT is becoming increasingly complicated and with the volume exponentially growing all the time, data now fuels the modern Irish economy. Our concept drove home the message that in this digital first era, Arkphire will harness and manage that energy for you. 

Arkphire_Visual_ITS

 

The solution - Website

A new online home for a brand with global ambitions

The next challenge was to design and build the new website to house the new positioning and marketing comms. Using the differentiated messaging, arresting imagery, an intuitive user experience, user behaviour triggered animations, we brought life to every design element. 

Using UX & UI best practice and the latest trends, we created a fully responsive website that is visually rewarding, and most importantly, makes it easy for the user personas to find and see what they need to see at each step of the way. Using progressive disclosure techniques we defined the steps of the various journeys through the site, strengthening the case for conversion at every step. 

We filled the site for the launch with brand new content assets which included whiteboard videos, ebooks, whitepapers, tipsheets, infographics and a series of blogs.

view live website

The solution - Content

Thought leadership and engaging content

Arkphire are kind of a big deal. They are one of Europe’s leading IT procurement providers. They help local Irish and UK companies with all their IT services. With the right tools, these companies can go forward and achieve anything, with Arkphire at the beating heart of this innovation. With such thought leadership credentials and a wealth of experience to draw upon, they have much to tell and lots of advice, anecdotes and opinions of interest to pass on. After studying persona pain points and industry trends, and guided by SEO, we drew up a content marketing plan to draw leads from campaigns on social media channels that included ebooks, whitepapers, tipsheets, thought leadership articles, infographics, whiteboard videos, paid promotion ads and magazine brand ads.

Assets

Click and drag to view

The results

An Irish success story with international growth ambition

  • Website visits went from 5,000 to 15,000 over a comparable 7 month period
  • 1500% increase in contact us requests through the site 
  • Monthly ‘contact us’ form submissions (people looking for a sales call) increased from 1/month to 16/month with the new website
  • Improved quality of marketing generated leads
“Squaredot took our senior leadership team on a journey of self discovery as we honed in on our brand positioning, marketing strategy, identity and place in the market. The resulting rebrand work, new website, creative, positioning and content assets are enabling us to realise our vision for the company which is to create a global brand that will resonate with our target personas. Our brand awareness has grown exponentially and we are generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL’s) that are a marketers nirvana.”
Aisling Bolger
Head of Marketing, Arkphire