Discipline
Brand Strategy, Web Design, Visual/Brand Design, Copywriting
Timeline
Jun 2020 - May 2021
Tools
Figma, Illustrator, Photoshop, Squarespace
Team
Design - me as Marketing VP
Copywriting - imagiCal Executive Team (Vicky, Danny, Tyler, Kelly, Amber)
Summary
As Marketing VP for imagiCal, UC Berkeley's creative strategy agency, to enter the competitive club recruitment cycles and adapt to a virtual semester, I spearheaded a rebranding of the club, created a website, design branded collateral and launched social media campaigns. Through these efforts, we increased applications by 27%, increased event attendance by 257%, and generated 19k impressions.
Background & Context
imagiCal is a student-run creative strategy agency dedicated to fostering students into creative business leaders through consulting projects, competitions, and workshops.
Having been a part of imagiCal for two years, I wanted to give back to the club. Thus upon becoming the Marketing VP, I was given the opportunity use my experience in branding, design and marketing.
Problem Statement
At the start of summer, to understand with the executive team on how we could prepare for virtual recruitment, I wanted to see what was lacking about our club. Thus, from informally researching and talking with members, alumni and general students, we found that:
imagiCal lost its reputation and unique positioning amongst Berkeley business clubs.
From talking to imagiCal alumni, what we found was our club used to be considered a "top-tier" and well known club, but that dramatically shifted over the years where newer students would not have heard about our club (from word-of-mouth).
When recruiting for prospective members, we often found ourselves confused on how to introduce our club: an advertising agency? a creative consultancy? a business organization? As our club structure was not a typical consulting agency, there was often debate on where to shift our focus to.
Additionally, while we did compete in a marketing competition and had an in-house design team, our club marketing did not reflect the caliber nor quality we are capable of.
Design Opportunity
Thus, given the lack of brand presence, there was an opportunity for a repositioning of our club branding, and a need for a stronger visual identity. We established the following goals for our rebrand.
Differentiate ourselves from other business organizations in Berkeley
Increase word of mouth awareness and impressions
Increase recruitment applications and event attendance
The Solution
After weekly discussions with the members, alumni and students, we’ve rebranded imagiCal as Berkeley’s award-winning creative strategy agency. To differentiate between other professional and sophisticated Berkeley clubs, we established imagiCal as having a fun, quirky identity with a foundation in creativity. This is reflected in the branding, messaging, and marketing assets - all to engage prospective students and increase unaided awareness within a crowded virtual advertising space.
We’ve defined our vision, mission, values and imagiPal (persona) to realign and motivate our members.
imagiCal Website
Visit the website! All illustrations created by me.
The purpose of the website was two-fold: to inform prospective members about the club and attract clients to be interested in working with us. However, given our priority was to recruit new members, the architecture and copywriting was intended to accurately describe what we do and pull them in, rather than sell a service.
After optimizing SEO, our website was the first result for the keywords “imagiCal / imagiCal Berkeley” and on the first page for “advertising club Berkeley”. Our page also had 2.7k unique visitors and 6.7k total page visits, resulting in an 2612% increase in visitors, compared to the previous website.
Even one of our newly recruited members said he only found our club because of searching for advertising clubs at Berkeley.
Marketing Campaigns and Social Media
To recruit members and increase our presence, I created social media campaigns for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn marketing, to highlight the multi-faceted aspect of our club.
Campaigns ranged from member spotlights, email campaigns, speaker events, and social media posts. It was imperative that our online club presence was strong with the lack of in-person channels.
Our campaigns generated 19,000 impressions (1109% increase), 2700 post engagements (254% increase), increased club applications by 27% despite the virtual setting.
Collateral
To clearly differentiate from other clubs, I made sure to make consistent all brand collateral across all channels. This included slides, photos, brochures, letterheads, and even internal documents.
Through Figma, anyone could access any of the brand assets to create their own collateral as necessary.
Reflection & Takeaways
Copywriting is an art form
A majority of my time rebranding imagiCal was spent on editing brand copy. Creating succinct and memorable content that aligned with the brand tone was challenging, as the team went through five revisions of the copy just to end up to what we have. This project allowed me to focus on something new!
Branding is what elevates a org. from good to great
While college club culture is often seen as casual, the work we do is professional, mirroring the real world. Thus, by giving a brand for our club, it elevated its perception, as heard from the newer members, and reflects what we aim to pursue.
Frequency and consistency goes hand in hand.
It is not enough to launch one campaign - you post often to have effective reach. However, if they lack a refined style, audiences may not be able to identify the brand. For imagiCal, having established a brand style guide and Figma workspace made it easy to quickly collaborate, create and post brand assets.
Looking back, I did not anticipate the reach of our website and marketing campaigns, considering we’re just a student organization. It made me excited to see the actual impact I could have as a designer, and I throughly enjoyed being able to apply skills to a club I love dearly. I can’t wait to see how the club grows!
The imagiCal Executive Team ;-) after a 6 hour meeting