Every hero has an origin story. Every advocate has an innate drive to create change. Unite the two and you may very well know the incredible Katie Brandt.
Katie is a speaker, advocate, and educator in the greater dementia community. Powered with an authentic voice and the lived experience of caregiving for loved ones suffering from debilitating neurological conditions, she founded katiebrandt.org. Katie is on a mission to enhance funding, advance research, and impact policy for Alzheimer's disease, FTD, and related dementias. After years of reinventing the marketing wheel on an old WordPress website, she came to Morgatize to empower the trajectory of where she would take her business next.
PROJECT OVERVIEW:
Industry: Life Sciences
Client: Katie Brandt, katiebrand.org
Solution: Brand Strategy & Identity Design, Wix Website, Digital Marketing
Katie Brandt, the founder of katiebrandt.org, partnered with Morgatize to redesign and relaunch the brand for her speaking and advocacy business. This brilliant collaboration launched a magnetic online presence that instantly empowered Katie to extend her reach within the greater dementia community.
THE OPPORTUNITY
"Dementia had an emotional, physical, financial, and professional impact on my life. It redefined my identity," Katie explained during our virtual meeting. "Yet, the origin story of my evolution is not exclusively one of loss. In 2012, when my husband passed away, I realized that I would not be able to move on. I could only move forward. The grief that I experienced created incredible energy. I had to push that energy outward – into something positive – to make meaning out of our family’s journey. A new career trajectory emerged."
From a place of unimaginable loss, Katie poured herself into becoming a steward of hope by using her voice. She built a speaking and advocacy business.
In this journey, she tried on various approaches for what to include in a service offering and what to produce in terms of content. She'd identified the successes to focus on recreating in order to take her advocacy side hustle to the next level. When it came down to it though, she just wasn't exactly sure how to go about it next.
So, Katie approached Morgatize through a promising referral. She arrived in my inbox expressing pain points that I could instantly envision as the ingredients for a brilliant brand evolution collaboration:
She did not have a real "logo" and really wished to create a signature look for her brand
She had a dated, DIY WordPress website that desperately needed a facelift and re-organization to better communicate what she offered... not to mention the fact that she struggled with the time and management it took to keep the site up to date
She struggled with how much copy to include on her website and how to speak to her multiple target audiences
She needed a process to attract and capture email addresses
She wanted to begin marketing herself and her business in a real way so she could maximize the opportunity to create community impact - and brand growth - at the same time
I listened closely to Katie, meeting her exactly where she was at, to gain a sense of where she would like to take her business and how we could orient her brand to get there. At the end of the day, the heart of Katie's pain points boiled down to brand messaging confusion. Her website content focused deeply on the caregiver. In order to position Katie for success, we needed to pivot her messaging to leverage the caregiving experience in an authentic voice that speaks to scientists, physicians, and healthcare professionals in the life sciences industry.
Together, we set off to hone her brand, niche down target marketing, and focus her service offering.
THE SOLUTION
With tears of inspiration welling up in my eyes from her story and a heart committed to working with Katie as soon as she articulated her mission, I could not wait to begin this brand evolution.
There is a saying that I love to share with clients on the messaging struggle bus: When we're speaking to everyone, we're speaking to no one. Imagine a sales pitch leading with a line like: "Whatever you need, we can get it for you!" Without context, you have no idea if this gimmick is referring to cars, shoe laces, or cold medicine. The point is that when we communicate specifically to the person that we want to reach, connecting them to what we have to give... they in turn can understand who we are and how we can help them. That my friend is how we set the branding stage for attraction. Overgeneralized messages do not attract wider audiences. They water down messaging and attract crickets.
For Katie's business, we began our work together by first executing a brand audit during her discovery workshop. This allowed us to take inventory and review ALL the content she had created for her business. Next, we looked through it all with a lens to niche down. Following a targeted, agile, and collaborative process, together we produced:
Brand Strategy: Mission statement, tagline, organizational values, target audience profiles, brand persona profile, and writing style guide
Brand Identity Design: Design aesthetic profile, color palette, typography palette, complete logo set, brand use guidelines, a beautiful new business card, and coordinating social media profile graphics
Wix Website: A gorgeously customized new website that features responsive design, SEO optimization, meaningful content organization to encourage an efficient user journey, and lead capture opportunities
THE RESULTS
We timed a soft launch for the new katiebrandt.org to go live prior to Katie's attendance at an industry event in Paris. With a focused brand identity top-of-mind and stunning thick and silky business cards in hand, Katie networked with a purpose and created new contacts with ease.
One month post-soft launch, Katie's analytics show incredible results:
60% increase in site sessions
38% increase in unique visitors
Average session duration 5 minutes and 10 seconds
500% increase in site traffic from Google search
Site sessions with users from over 11 different countries
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