Zedem is a creative studio, specialising in animation and film production. Founded in 2008, the company provides script to screen solutions to a diverse portfolio of international clients.  In 2015, its clientele included renowned international non-profit and for-profit organisations such as TED, the School of Life, the European Commission in Cyprus, PwC and Deloitte, while it also produced work for major corporate organisations such as TESCO, Pearson Education, Dell, IBM, Deutsche Bank, Coca Cola, and the World Bank through subcontracting work. Overall, this has provided Zedem with valuable experience on working with brand guidelines specific to each of these major organisations.

From 2010 to 2015, Zedem experienced substantial growth through the high quality of their work, their unprecedented creativity, their competitive fees, and the referrals of many satisfied clients. The company had been investing significant time and effort in building and developing a strong team of animators and illustrators. In addition, the team had gained a lot of experience from working on challenging projects.

However, Zedem was facing a variety of challenges as most of their work, up to that point, had been in the area of education and corporate training with limited budgets in comparison to marketing and sales work. Additionally, while their subcontracting business was significant in volume and revenues, it was less lucrative than the direct business. Finally, an extra challenge arose due to a number of low-cost video/animation solutions that had entered the market, such as the DIY tools, which service a market looking for cheap alternatives as well as other companies that offer low-cost commoditised template style products.

While Zedem aimed to retain their relationships with existing clients, they realised that they needed to generate direct business from international markets. This would lead to further growth and increase profit margin while, at the same time, would establish the company in the international market.

The challenge was clear: to create and implement a digital strategy in order to generate quality leads from international markets such as the UK that are more mature in relation to the services offered, and thus allow Zedem to compete for projects with bigger profit margins.

Working closely with the company, we immersed ourselves into the industry to better articulate and help them understand how their potential clients think and act within a digital context.  We conducted a number of meetings and interviews with key stakeholders in order to align with their strategic objectives and re-define the brand’s mission and vision. Together, we defined the business objectives, identified strengths and weaknesses and helped the company position their brand. Brand positioning was crucial to the success of the project, as it became the point of reference in forming a digital marketing strategy and executing digital marketing campaigns. A very important part of the beginning of the project was to identify and agree upon the KPIs that we would achieve at the completion of the project.

Furthermore, we performed a detailed analysis of the market and competition to identify threats and opportunities; we analyzed their current website, user behaviour, purchase cycle and data analytics, and we developed a Digital Marketing Strategy and a Keyword strategy. In this phase, new opportunities were identified and addressed through new UI/UX designs. Furthermore, we provided copywriting guidelines so that the company could use them when rewriting the content for the new landing pages and website.

The implementation of the strategy had to include activities such as the redesign and development of a new website optimized across all devices, to ensure optimal interaction between users and their particular device that exceeds user expectations. We designed and subsequently developed a new information architecture and wireframes based on the latest UX and UI trends and our research so that we can achieve the company’s business objectives. Our work led to a fully mobile optimized design that would ensure the best possible user experience.

We developed a new website, based on UI/UX best practices and provided Zedem with easy-to-use functionalities so that they can add, edit and manage the website content through a simple user interface. We also implemented web analytics tools (Google Analytics) so that they can analyse the website traffic and make informed business decisions.

After all the groundwork had been laid, it was time for us to execute our carefully designed digital strategy. We created Search, Display, Video and Remarketing Campaigns on Google and Facebook Networks, targeting exclusively international audiences. For the implementation of the campaigns, we created advertising assets (text ads, animated banners and Facebook posts) so that they can be also used for future digital marketing and communication campaigns.