Project Overview
Services
✅ Fractional CMO
✅ Branding
✅ Art Direction
✅ Project Management
✅ Technical Project Management
✅ UX Design
✅ Website Design
✅ Website Development
Business Objectives
- Vibe. Capture as much of the live onsite visit experience as possible.
- Mobile-first. Develop a user experience to easily browse vehicles on all devices.
- Conversion. Persuade visitors to take action in the form of booking appointment, join mailing list or direct call.
- Editorial control. A user-friendly backend to enable staff to enter inventory updates.
- First-world. The clients choice of phrase, they desired a site that would compete with those of major manufacturers with deep pockets.
“Communicreations has been a crucial marketing partner for our business. They’ve provided strategic guidance in a number of marketing and technology capacities. We’ve watched site traffic increase by more than 400% since we started working together. Plus their response time is fantastic! Highly recommended.”
— Tony Williams, Managing Director
A Focus on Discovery
Let us count the ways we love the Discovery phase. We get to do a deep dive on the clients business, their marketplace, and a competitive analysis. The opportunity to see them as their customers do, and flush out their unique selling position (USP). What emergences is a clear understanding of perceptions and organizational pain points. All of which helped to shape our understanding for the next phase of development.
Strategy & Planning
The logo as it stood was identified as challenged despite launching 18 months prior. The icon needed a more modern look. So rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, we agreed to review a few tweaks in order to maintain continuity.
For the website, we also needed to identify and recommend core functions the site would offer. This included reviewing and testing several auto listings plugins that would serve as the backbone for sharing sales inventory. It also meant identifying a plugin for service appointments which would contribute to an overall rise in annual appointments.
Rebranding
Rebranding can be put into two major categories. There is the “anything is on the table” variety and then there is the refresh. Tightening a brand means maintaining as much of what is inherited that makes sense. That pretty much locked us in with the font, which is fine because there were other priorities to tend to. The swoosh was serving as a distraction in dominating the wordmark. The steering wheel had artwork flaws and it didn’t scale well. After proposing alternatives, we received an immediate buy-in in the first round.
The greatest importance to any brand is consistency and the application of usage rules. So we provided a brand style guide to ensure consistent and appropriate applications. This included a revised colour palette that followed the official colours of the Cayman flag.
Before
After
Website
Design
Our goal was to capture and convey the in-person experience of a Tony’s Toys visit. We chose a hero backdrop with video footage representing each business department interaction – a warm greeting entering the lot, comfortable seating in lobby, service bay activity, panning through the parts store.
Development
Historical analytics confirmed that most site visitors spending time viewing an inventory of available vehicles. The auto listings feature was something that had to be nailed. The end result of a mobile-first delivery means that action of browsing vehicles has to work equally well across mobile and desktop. We worked around a number of challenges to make displays and filtering work together.
There was also the matter of working with an image-intensive media library, and making the backend process user-friendly. We added a custom script to automate deletion of media library images when inventory was removed.
Launch Event
The rollout of the new brand, website and facility were front-and-center at an after hours event, and we were more than happy to fly in to celebrate. Notably, after several months of working remotely, the event also marked our first meeting with Sir Tony. Communicreations has remained his marketing partner ever since.
Results
After over 20 years in business, Tony’s Toys experienced growth in a number of areas that can in part be attributed our collaborative marketing efforts. Website traffic skyrocketed and is now 10-20x what it had been. Service booking conversions increased sharply. Comparatively, that feature didn’t exist before, but it provided a point of measurement on which to target future growth.