Connected Creativity
Our strategic thinkers and creative designers
challenge convention and explore stand-out ideas
that will enhance your brand performance.
Inventive Thinking
Insight and consultation, campaign strategy and planning, lead generation, brand strategy, product launches, behaviour/culture change.
The journey to building a successful brand starts with an effective brand strategy. Which is where our Connected Creativity approach comes into its own.
We apply strategic thinking before we start on creative design. Our strategic team will review your competitive landscape, explore your brand values, profile your core audiences and find creative expression for your points of difference.
Armed with this insight we will craft a compelling brand proposition, ensuring the tone of voice and visual identity are matched to the key decision makers in your target audience groups. And we will devise an effective communications campaign that will ensure that those audiences know who you are, what you do and why they should engage with your brand.
Our team has created successful brand strategies for companies large and small. We are always happy to have some exploratory conversations to demonstrate the difference we might make to you.
For many of our long-term clients, we work collaboratively with the client marketing team to help create and shape their marketing plans. Often we will draw up structured annual activity plans to optimise the use of available budgets to achieve the business objectives and subsequently monitor spend and results in an open book manner.
Ultimately, we recognise that you invest in marketing to achieve results and it is our job to deliver them. Creating a strategically sound marketing strategy underpins this objective and drives each individual activity within the plan.
Are you launching a new product or brand? Or looking to breathe new life into your existing offering? Then you need a standout marketing campaign – one of our areas of specialist expertise.
Following an in-depth discussion of your objectives and current market position, our planning teams will get to work on devising a campaign that will reach and inspire your target audience. Chances are that the campaign will be both multi-channel and multi-media. We always adopt a neutral stance and tailor each campaign to its own specific circumstances. We will combine online and offline campaign elements and ensure that goal tracking and success metrics are agreed and in place.
At the heart of the campaign will be the big idea that captures the essence of your brand proposition. Our creative, web development and digital teams will bring the ideas to life and we will continue to work with you throughout and beyond the campaign to monitor, review and refine the outputs for enhanced results.
Whatever your launch budget (well within reason!), we can develop a launch plan to give your new products the best possible start in life.
After an initial consultation, and fact-finding research, the Rare team will carefully consider the tactical campaign for your product launch. Each campaign is different, and we will propose tactics to support your particular route to market. Next we will create the launch proposition – writing the positioning and messaging and creating visual concepts.
Once agreed we will work on the diverse elements that will form the launch campaign. This might include digital marketing campaigns, direct mail, web landing pages, email follow-ups and more. We will always build in tracking metrics wherever possible and actively measure results to ensure we stay on track.
Creative Expression
Brand Identity and roll out, design for print, direct mail, advertising, point of sale, exhibitions.
Printed literature still has a part to play in our digital world, whether it be a glossy, consumer product brochure or a range of trade catalogues and leaflets for B2B customers.
Our creative team has plenty of experience in literature design. We can work within your existing brand guidelines or revamp these as part of the project. Either way, we will take time out to understand your business, your products and your customers before developing initial creative concepts for you to review. Once the creative direction is agreed, we will complete the detailed designs, organising photography and providing copywriting services where required. When everything is approved we can provide print-ready artwork or manage the entire print and production process on your behalf.
Many of our clients are building products and home improvement manufacturers, often reaching the end consumer via merchant networks and installers. Product displays in these outlets are notoriously crowded and often poorly maintained. Creating brand stand out can be challenging.
Effective and impactful point of sale can help meet this challenge. At Rare, we will always consider point of sale opportunities when crafting your brand strategy and promotional campaigns, if relevant. Our designers are experienced in creating novel solutions that work.
In one example, for Polypipe Plumbing, we researched and considered the entire customer journey from driving to the merchant site, walking through the external and internal store environments and, of course, the product displays. By rethinking packaging and shelf labelling we created a complete pick and mix solution that could be tailored to each individual store. This Effective Merchandising proposition was installed by a dedicated client team, and average sales uplift for re-merchandised branches was a spectacular 45%
In our increasingly digital world, direct mail is far from extinct. In fact, it’s a great way to reach a defined audience with an impactful, bespoke message.
We use DM frequently in B2B scenarios such as dealer recruitment or new product launch campaigns. Often this is the only effective way to make first contact, when email data is not available across enough of the target audience and telephone cold-calling is too hit and miss. A well-crafted direct mail piece will create impact and engagement. If the reader visits your website or, even better, gets in touch, your campaign journey has begun.
Want proof of the pudding? How about our multi-award-winning campaign for Saint-Gobain Glass that recruited nearly 2000 window companies to a newly formed installer network as part of the consumer launch of Planitherm energy efficient window glass? That was an impressive 15% sign-up rate that laid the foundations for significant sales growth.
For some companies, a presence at trade or consumer shows is an important way to talk directly to customers and influencers and to promote their brands.
If exhibitions form part of your marketing strategy, we will integrate the stand design and on-stand activities to create a cohesive campaign. Working alongside our trusted partners, we can provide a complete design, build and management service. Or we can simply provide the design and management, working with your preferred stand builder.
Our expertise in branding, digital marketing and creative design gives Rare a unique skill set to understand user behaviour and customer engagement. So we can plan the entire customer journey from pre-show campaigns, through to post-show follow-up. Typically we will use a mix of direct mail, email marketing, social media, advertising and PR to help deliver the target audience to your stand and drive engagement with your brand.
Digital Expertise
Website design and build, e-commerce, web and mobile apps, digital marketing campaigns.
Our award-winning website design and development team deliver highly effective and context relevant web solutions, whatever your requirements.
Using a strategic approach we won’t just consider what looks good, we will design you a website that will drive results. We will carefully consider your user journeys and ensure a positive user experience that aligns with the needs of your target audience and helps deliver your business objectives.
We listen to what you want to achieve with your website and help to deliver exactly what you need.
We will ensure that your website is easy and instinctive to navigate, gets users quickly to the information they are looking for, drives user engagement and captures interest. Your new website will be mobile responsive and standards compliant. Before deploying the live site the development version will have been thoroughly tested, including cross-browser testing.
In the early design stages we will use wireframes and site mapping tools to convey our ideas and get your buy-in, which we then develop into creative design visuals for approval, prior to eventual build.
Incredibly it’s over 10 years now since Apple coined the phrase “There’s an app for that?”. Now there are multiple apps for just about everything you can think of… but still we think of more.
Like most digital agencies, Rare has experience of building mobile and web apps for all kinds of situations. Our apps for the award-winning customer loyalty scheme, Installer Connect for Ideal Boilers, for example, allow boiler installers to scan a bar code and enter some data whilst still at the customer to register the boiler with Gas Safe, issue the warranty, sign up for service reminders, earn their reward points and much, much more. No wonder the scheme witnessed fourfold unit sale growth in just five years.
We also have extensive experience of building specialist web tools and interfacing with third party systems. We love a challenge, so if you have an app project in mind why not get in touch for a free consultation?
The experienced web development team at Rare can provide a wide range of websites, from simple information sites using open source CMS platforms to bespoke solutions, usually built using the Laravel PHP framework.
Our award-winning website solutions can meet the most demanding technical challenges, including scoping and developing third party integrations and secure data transmissions. We have also built many bespoke software tools and web apps into our sites, such as product configurators, web to print solutions and partner portals.
Every site we build is responsive across desktop, tablet and phones and our digital marketing team will ensure that each site is optimised for search results. They can also offer further services such as PPC advertising, keyword analysis and reporting, and social media campaign management.
Each website build is coordinated by an experienced project manager to make sure that we deliver exactly what you expect, and that we stay on track with agreed timelines and budget parameters.
We offer a free consultation service for website scoping and quotations. Feel free to get in touch for an initial chat.
Email communications are both highly targeted and extremely cost-effective. They are useful to create initial awareness and are especially effective in maintaining ongoing dialogue and helping to move potential customers along their sales journey from interest to action.
Successful email marketing takes a campaign approach and recognises what stage in the decision cycle each potential customer is at. Segmenting the audience and serving each group with a relevant, and often personalised, message at the right time helps drive higher open rates, increases engagement and ultimately leads to more sales conversions.
Email is also a great tool for ecommerce businesses. Automated messages can be tailored to customer status. You might target dormant customers with a special offer on a previously purchased product, for example. Or reward loyalty with a bonus promotion.
Our marketing experts can produce you an email marketing campaign that will include personalised content that can vary according to what type of response the reader makes. We can also provide a complete data management and email distribution service, or we can provide you with templated designs enabling in-house teams to manage content upload and email distribution.
Either way, engaging with Rare is the first step to revitalising your email marketing performance.
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