Geared to the creative teen looking for a fun and rewarding activity, BeTeen offers professional graphic design courses crafted especially for them. It’s a great outlet for teens to learn useful design skills along with life skills such as accountability and creative problem-solving, in a fun and engaging environment.
The Challenge
Straddling the line between fun and professional, BeTeen’s website branding incorporates bright colors (the primary being purple for creativity) and hand-drawn doodles with a bold, sans serif font. However, their print ads were designed with a different style of doodles, duller colors, and a more playful font talking to an even younger crowd.
As they started up their social media and WhatsApp marketing, BeTeen needed to ensure that viewers would connect the dots between their different-looking print ads and website, with social media as the bridge, maintaining their brand experience and continuity.
They also needed direction on the type of content that would appeal to their target audience, ideas for templates to speed up content creation, and direction for optimizing their designs for the digital space.
The Solution
Step 1: Mini Brand Strategy
Brand Personality - Selling Points - Target Audience
Based on our initial discovery call I created a mini brand strategy outlining BeTeen’s brand attributes, visuals, Unique Selling Points, Emotional Selling Points, and Target Audience. This ensured that all ideas and suggestions would be strategic and effectively appeal to their specific audience and goals.
Step 2: Social Strategy
Goals -> Metrics -> Types of Content -> Content Pillars -> Content Templates
I then dived into their social media content strategy and plan.
We had discussed BeTeen’s specific goals for Instagram as being primarily to spread word of mouth with a secondary goal of building trust and authority, becoming a reliable name within the teen creative education world. I used those goals to determine which metrics are most important to them (views, saves, shares, and tags) and therefore which types of content they need to focus on - sliders and reels, to maximize their reach.
Based on knowledge of their ideal target audience, following a framework of building knowability, likability, and trust, I created their 5 content pillars for them to post about in order to resonate their target audience - About BeTeen, Creativity, Parenting, Design Expertise, and Social Proof. I came up with a series of 4-8 content templates for each pillar, so they could streamline their creation process.
Step 3: Design Direction
Design Direction + Best-Practices for Instagram and WhatsApp
Finding the perfect balance between the print and web designs required a different approach for each platform based on the purpose and messaging of the content:
For WhatsApp, which is going to be paid advertising directly based off the print ads, I directed their designer to use the fonts and doodles from the print ads to maintain the visual recognition. I paired those up with the more vibrant colors from the website, to add that energy and vibe back into the designs.
For Instagram, which is going to be organic content not specifically related to the print ad campaign, I directed their designer to use the design elements and fonts from the website. Instagram content will be leading people straight to the website, many of whom might not have even seen the print ads, so the continuity with the website is more important in this case than the continuity with the print ads.
For both types of assets, I expanded the brand color palette from the website to include some of the new colors that were introduced in the print ad series - namely a cyan blue.
I then created sample designs for each platform to ensure that the direction is clear, along with notes on design best-practices and processes for both, to ensure that their internal design team will seamlessly create content that is optimized for social media.
The Results
BeTeen now has a clear set of directions that will keep their internal team aligned and cohesive as well as streamline content creation to maximize their time and market effectively to achieve their goals.
