2022 Marketing at LiveLoveApp: A Year in Review

2022 Marketing at LiveLoveApp: A Year in Review

Fresh Start Feelin'

Don't you just love that fresh start feeling of a new year?

I'm that to-do-list, goal-setting enthusiast, and when it comes to work, I'm certainly no different.

The opportunity to reflect, creates, in my opinion, a great catalyst for moving forward with new insight, intention, and actionable steps.

So, let's peek at the past year here at LiveLoveApp in the marketing department, which has been both an exciting and rewarding opportunity to help to establish and build alongside our leadership.

From Scratch…

Let it be said, when I came on board, the cake was baked. I didn't so much as have to stir the batter, it was beautifully presented to me ready to be iced and decorated, asking where and how it should be placed in the storefront window. The cake already smelled, looked, and tasted delicious before I ever walked into the store. Brian and Mike, along with the helping hands of SonCreative had an impressive hold on what they wanted LiveLoveApp's brand identity to look like from the start. I cannot personally take credit for our inclusive and beautiful color palette, our friendly Brian the Lion logo, playful yet professional fonts, or our overall tone, which so effortlessly showcases our brand voice of being welcoming and professional while complementing our corporate culture where we aim to be inclusive, sustainable, introspective, respectful, and candid. With our brand's foundation being so well laid out I was set up for success, and I loved it even before officially joining the team. I knew it was going to be one of those rare opportunities to bring a brand to life in both a tangible and digital sense through storytelling and strategy. A dream for anyone who loves both creative design work and the power of positioning.

First 30 Days

We got straight to work and created a marketing strategy, or more intensively, an integrated marketing communications plan that was constructed heavily from data-driven market research and how we would plan to position ourselves to ensure we were delivering a cohesive message across multiple channels and reaching our target audience. “What's the competitive advantage? What's our unique value proposition? I don't know what this term is… let me create a tech glossary!”

30 days later, after finding joy in perceptual mapping and SWOT Analysis, we were able to further define, sharpen and strengthen our brand voice through this 100-page internal document, that's right… 100 pages. We continuously refined and finessed as a team, and step-by-step it all came to life.

We outlined everything in this manner knowing our key objectives as a young company would be to build a strong foundation and brand awareness both internally and externally and deliver a consistent experience for our valued customers at every touchpoint, with a strong focus on content marketing. 


Curate and Create…

We had the ideation, now it was time for execution. Our #1 goal was to create compelling thought leadership content focused primarily on owned and earned media.

I was given quite a bit of room to play and create. I think when you have great leadership who fosters your unique skillset, removes barriers, and regularly communicates it allows you to flourish. Thanks, Mike and Brian!

Compliments aside, we began designing content, gathering assets, and building our archives. In the following 90 days, we developed:

• Social media content, themes, and oversaw content calendars
• An Employee Handbook
• Posting schedules pulled from data analytics
• Brand story scripts and shot lists
• Our first podcasts
• Blogs, blogs, and more blogs 🙌

We really fell in love with our “squiggly” lines.

Hurdles and Hiccups

For the sake of writing this in chronological order, we won't gloss over our greatest hiccup early on…when you hire a marketing strategist and content creator but then they very suddenly become out of commission within the first 90 days due to a non-work-related injury.

Just as we were gearing up for some exciting off-site productions together, real life got in the way. We had to pause, due to an injury, surgery, and recovery.

Key takeaway? Don't try to go back to the gym and think you're 21 years old again.

How did we cope and carry on? With a lot of grace and positivity, we designed and scheduled 90 days of content ahead of time. This was simply one of those moments where you put your head down, do the work, and keep checking off each to-do on your list without losing focus.

Truer words were never spoken

“Inch by inch, life's a cinch. Yard by yard, life's mighty hard,” ― John Bytheway.

Back on Track (no pun intended)

6-8 weeks later we were back on track, but travel opportunities would be limited for some time, so it was on us to get creative while maintaining consistency. With the notable NgConf just around the corner, we began creating promotional items and planning with the creation of:

• Trade show banners, QR codes, and company stickers
• A logo reveal
• Video productions directed remotely
• Upcoming workshop logistics and promotions
• Lead page and lead magnet development
• Refreshed website HERO designs
• Producing our first video in a video tips series to be continued

During all of this, we still managed to sort through the data and analyze what was working and not working and we showcased measurable increases in traffic overall with captivating content being top of mind.

Fortunately, much of our content is educational-centered, and Mike and Brian have continued to deliver! This is where a little trial and error marketing (not always favored) was implemented, and we discovered what works well for us. For instance, we loved our podcasts, but the time commitment may not have been feasible in a business sense, at least at the time. So, it's been important to us to recognize how can we deliver the greatest value to our customers and community.

Strong and Steady

During the final quarter of this year, we had several exciting speaker events to look forward to, but one that stands out was the opportunity for Mike and Brian to present as the closing keynote speakers at NGRome. This was going to be a great chance to do something a little different, and we delivered. In a collaborative effort, we storyboarded, produced, and edited a video paying homage to Rome's mid-1960s cinematic era of spaghetti westerns by creating our very own colorful duel followed by some epic bloopers. Due to time and schedule constraints, we really had to work together and get a little extra creative. This involved a cell phone and little extra enthusiasm on Mike and Brian's end, extra thank you to our fabulous filmmaker Bonnie for this one! I also really enjoyed getting creative during post-production for this one and we can't forget Roger's help scripting and sharing his dynamic voiceover talents with us.. I think we can all agree that it was a fun memorable project to round out the year.

As we approached the holiday and travel season, it was important to us to maintain the same consistency we had been with content creation while developing new marketing campaigns and marketing channels to reach new leads.

Our data has shown that in addition to our blogs, videos are performing well. As a big video marketing advocate, we decided we would dedicate our attention to product and service videos to finish the year on a high note.

We'd love to invite you to peek at our product services pages to learn more about what LiveLoveApp has to offer and how we can provide you and your team value through our consulting services.

That's a Wrap: Key Takeaways

Now, for the retrospective. We believe strongly in transparency and helping to build up our community through education, resources, and tools. We're inviting you to see what did and didn't work for us. Maybe it will inspire you or save you just a bit of time on your end.

Ways in which we Thrived

• Bringing our brand to life on paper - Creating our one-pager was an eye-opening collaborative design effort that keyed in on what we wanted our brand to look like on paper.

• We had a variety of expert skills and talents that complimented one another - Everyone brought unique creative talents to the table and gave it their all, all the time. We always rolled with the punches with enthusiasm and energy which made every product that we created together a joy to be part of.

• Not necessarily taking the easy road - Video productions can be technically complicated, even more so when not everyone is geographically within reach. It would have been easy enough to avoid them altogether and pursue different ways of reaching our audience. However, had we done so we would have missed out on quite a bit of fun and some creative content. Each individual project has been diverse, intentional, and effective. We have showcased a variety of tones within our productions that manage to complement our brand voice overall, and I'm proud of our team for being up for this challenge.

• Creating quality content - I think we can all be proud of each blog, graphic, video, podcast, lead page, and tangible promotional item. We each played our part in the execution of the development, design, and distribution process. Knowing content marketing would be a valued part of our strategy this past year we did an excellent job to produce a cohesive brand voice that was both friendly and professional at every touchpoint.

Overcoming Obstacles and Opportunities for Growth

• A lengthy hiatus - 🙋🏻‍♀️ raise your hand if you've ever had a totally unexpected event in your life and were grateful for leaders who stood by their company values and word. I hope that if this ever occurs to you, you have the same kindness offered to you. The number one lesson here was patience and perseverance. As a team we overcame, we learned, we took the necessary steps, and we got right back to work without missing a beat. Health matters, physical and mental! Cheers to a hopeful healthy 2023 ahead!
• Travel Restrictions – Working remotely absolutely has its benefits, and we pride ourselves on being a remote-first company. Trust me, I love making coffee and sitting down at my home office to get to work avoiding the rush hour traffic, but one fallback in the production world is not being able to hit record whenever we'd like. So, with that small obstacle, we've gotten creative at every turn. From this, we've challenged ourselves and strengthened our skillset. I'll call it a win! For example – when you need to film your team in a desert, but due to scheduling conflicts and time constraints it means you get scrappy with a cell phone, we still aimed for an epic on-brand delivery of a finished product, and it was an all-hands-on-deck success.
• No one starts as an expert - Items that weren't heavily mentioned were paid media and the nitty gritty tactics such as building lead magnets, all of which we dabbled in this year and will continue to do so. It's a learning process and one we're being very intentional with.

2023

Well, for this one, we invite you to stay tuned, as we continue to strategize and implement new methods and create more content. Thank you for not only being a valued client and member of our community but watching us and cheerleading us as we continue to grow our knowledge, efforts, and team. And as always, we value your opinion so please join in the conversation and let us know what you might like to see from LiveLoveApp in the coming months.