“Each gig should be unique. You’re always treading that line between keeping yourself fresh and giving people something they want to hear.”
– Brian May
If you’ve been to our new website homepage, you might have noticed our new look – a completely revamped digital home for Intuitive Websites!
The team at Intuitive Websites spends their days designing new websites and working on digital marketing campaigns for our clients and we recently made time to refresh our own website.
We were overdue for a new website and updated tone for our brand.
Why Intuitive Websites Needed a Fresh Sound
You might be familiar with our old tagline—“Rise Above the Digital Noise.” Our old logo was a rocket zooming through space, demonstrating the story we told current and potential clients about what our services would do for their brand: they’d blast off to new heights and fly high above the competition with websites that “popped” and marketing strategies to reach their customers.
But the thing is, Intuitive Websites isn’t SpaceX and we here at the company aren’t astronauts. Also, many competitors are using these rocket themes.
It was time for a change to our company branding.
Discovering Our New Sound
By 2023, it was becoming clear our branding wasn’t entirely aligned with how our services and our team had expanded and changed over the years. The story we told through our space exploration and rocket theme didn’t reflect the methodologies we employed as part of our Four-Step Process or our use of Growth-Driven Design (GDD) principles. GDD is a process for website redesigns bringing new life to our clients’ brands.
In our original branding, the mission was simple. We were Intuitive Websites; we design (go figure) intuitive websites. Today we are not only in the business of designing intuitive websites — we are a full-service digital marketing agency that builds a digital sales funnel using, among other tactics, SEO, paid advertising, Google Ads, story-driven content marketing, Social Media, HubSpot, and website design and development.
Not all of our clients come to us needing a full website redesign. Some clients need an SEO-focused approach; some get results from paid ads; others desire digital content, and more. We are a fully custom agency setting priorities for what drives results as defined by our client’s goals.
Thinking about the variety in the people we work with and work for, we needed a brand that communicated the flexibility of our approach and differentiated us from the rest of the world of digital marketing.
We desired a brand identity that conveyed what we do, how we do it, and what makes us the ideal choice for clients of all shapes and sizes. We needed a brand identity that demonstrated we are a friendly team of professionals—we speak with authority and demonstrate our expertise.
At heart, Intuitive Websites is a band of passionate creators who work hard to emotionally engage with our client’s audiences and lead them to become customers.
The more we looked at our work, at our clients, and at ourselves, the clearer the picture of our new branding became. As we grew our company and evolved as a culture, the aspirational rocket-ship branding fit us less.
As it turns out we are like musicians here to help our clients find their groove, take to the stage, and make themselves heard.
Meet the Music-Minded Marketing Masters of Intuitive Websites
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that when you get a bunch of marketers together, you end up with a lot of creative people all creating things together. Here at IW, our staff includes people who spend long days writing for our clients and then go home in the evening to write some more, just for fun; we have people who spend their free time exercising their imaginations through crafts and artwork; and, as it turns out, we have a lot of people who are really into music. In fact, whenever we have an on-site meeting, I usually end up hosting a jam session with all our musicians.
I’ve been a guitarist since the 80s and have released Pop-Folk and R&B albums under my brand, Thomas Young Music—and then there’s Adrian Collins, our Creative Director, who joins me on the drums and guitar.
Adrian is actually one of several avid drummers on our team—including our Senior Front End Developer Joy Blanchard and Timothy Lutes, our SEO Specialist, who got into web development way back in the mid-90s when he channeled his passion for new tech into his Beatles fandom to build one of the Internet’s earliest interactive multimedia Beatles fansites. When Tim isn’t turning SEO insights into music to our clients’ ears, he’s banging the skins as the drummer for a local punk rock band.
Our COO Kerianne Leffew got her roots in the music scene, as a festival operations manager for events like The Forecastle Music and Activism Festival in Louisville, KY—featuring 150 bands across five stages—and the weeklong Roots 40 Music Festival in Denver spanning 30 different venues.
Our Inbound Manager Aubree Deimler and SEO Specialist Jenn Boedeker both sing karaoke. Rita Fitzgerald, our Senior Account Manager, has a passion for Broadway. Our Admin Manager Pati Barczynska and our Funnel Manager Liz Acosta, among many other music lovers on our team, love attending live concerts of their favorite bands.
And we have our content specialist and copywriter Willow Ascenzo, who spent her childhood watching—and hearing—her older sister pursue a degree in classical singing. You could say she knows her ABCs—by which she means Aida, La Bohème, and Carmen.
Why Great Marketing Is Music To Our Ears
The spotlight shines upon the stage, the conductor steps up to the podium and raises his baton, and the players begin to tune their instruments to concert pitch—first, the oboe playing a long ‘A’, then, one by one, the rest of the woodwinds, the strings, the brass, until discord turns into sweet harmony.
On the stage in front of a packed stadium of cheering fans, the drummer counts the beat and the band begins to play their greatest hits.
What do these two things have in common, and what do they have in common with digital marketing?
From an eighty-person symphony orchestra to a four-man band, great music comes from talented individuals joining forces in a collective effort, and that’s exactly how we look at our digital marketing efforts at Intuitive Websites.
How a Digital Marketing Campaign Is Like an Orchestra
“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.”
– Halford Luccock
At Intuitive Websites, we follow a Four-Step Process to get marketing results that help our clients find their audience and grow their business. Our process takes clients who’ve struggled with marketing in the past or don’t see its value to their business and delivers them campaigns that are as rich and powerful as a four-movement symphony.
Step One: Digital Strategy – The Translation of Value
A successful digital marketing strategy starts, as every orchestra and band does, by getting everybody on the same sheet of music. When our marketing team establishes the goals, target audiences, and overall campaign strategy for one of our clients, you can practically hear us tuning our proverbial instruments.
In Step One, we help our clients see their businesses from the outside looking in—from the eyes of their current and prospective customers. Our clients get an understanding of how they can translate value so it is sweet music to the ears of their prospective and current customers.
We build strong and successful marketing strategies with our clients based on data-driven insights and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely) goals to lay a solid foundation for selling their value proposition.
Step Two: Strategic Communications – Get your message out to the world!
Just like an orchestra is made of several sections, all with their own unique talents and skills playing in sync, digital marketing combines the talent of experts in several unique disciplines, such as technical SEO, content creation, and website design, all kept on track by the conductor’s baton. We work together, coordinating across various channels to deliver a cohesive message to our client’s audience, the same way strings, brass, woodwinds, and percussion coordinate to deliver complex harmonies.
In Step Two, we optimize our client’s messaging across all their digital marketing channels to take their customers on brand adventures through story-driven content, intuitive and accessible website design, and effective graphic design that establishes trust. We are WordPress experts and HubSpot specialists who take a proactive approach to maximize our client’s website performance, provide optimized user-friendly experiences and to lay the groundwork for effective inbound marketing.
Step Three: Inbound Marketing – Attract qualified customers to your company.
Just as a symphony orchestra uses a wide range of instruments to create rich, full sounds layered in melody and harmony, digital marketing campaigns leverage multiple channels and tools, including inbound marketing techniques, to attract emotionally engaged audiences.
In Step Three, we focus on attracting, engaging, and delighting our client’s audience by using effective inbound marketing platforms to get their message to the ears of the people who need it most. Our inbound marketing efforts draw on our expertise in SEO, email marketing, social media, pay-per-click advertising, and influencer marketing to create the right blend of inbound marketing campaigns for success.
Step Four: ROI and Digital Conversions – Monitor results and get a return on your dollars.
Finally, musicians are constantly honing and practicing to enhance their skills, push themselves further as artists, and deliver better performances to their fans, just like digital marketers—and the same way a digital marketing campaign requires constant optimization and fine-tuning to continue delivering results.
From rehearsal to performance to rehearsal to performance, musicians in the orchestra pit and on the band stage never stop working to make their performances as good as they can be—tweaks here, adjustments there, all to make sure they can deliver as much of an emotional experience as possible. No two performances are ever alike—because the performers are always learning and growing from experience.
In Step Four of our four-step process, we use leading analytic platforms to track conversion and measure the Return on Investment (ROI) from our digital marketing efforts, determine what’s working well and what could be working better, see where new opportunities lie, and make adjustments to your digital marketing strategy. With an adjusted strategy, we fine-tune our strategic communications, launch new inbound marketing campaigns, measure our results, and the process begins again.
“A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.”
– Dmitri Shostakovich
When you think about it like that, it’s not surprising that musicians and marketing professionals fit together with all the harmony of a beautiful C-major chord!
Intuitive Websites: Putting Your Unique Sound First
Musicians are versatile folk. The best are flexible, adaptable, and constantly coming up with new ways to reach into themselves and pull out the music within for all to hear. There are no one-size-fits-all approaches to composing a gripping symphony or pulling off an electrifying guitar solo. The most incredible songs don’t follow strict rubrics. There are important rules to music theory, creating harmony, and writing notation on sheet music, but there’s no rule that can’t be bent as long as you know just how and (most importantly) when and where to bend it.
In other words, it’s not exactly rocket science, where bending the rules generally leaves you with a smoldering wreck sizzling on your launch pad.
At Intuitive Websites, we deal with clients of all shapes and sizes. Over the course of a single day, we find ourselves working with regional janitorial firms and HVAC service companies, probate law and tax attorneys, high-tech software consulting firms, multi-million-dollar chocolate companies, and real estate companies and hardcore engineers in niche technological fields building things that make our heads spin.
There’s no one magic bullet to provide the perfect marketing campaign to all these clients, no secret formula, no one-size-fits-all strategy for marketing results. We know our music theory inside and out, we stay in tune and on beat, but we also know how to improvise and harmonize to deliver the best marketing results possible.
“In jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammar and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.”
– Wynton Marsalis
We’re dedicated to helping our clients find their groove and raise their voices above the digital noise of the Internet with marketing campaigns that sing.
Are you ready to rock?
Line up a jam session with me to get started on your new and improved digital marketing journey.
