Our clients expect a return on their investment.
This is how we achieve it:

Brand Strategy

The sole purpose of all the marketing for iManage is to create maximum revenue streams from a massively scaleable business model.

From the start of our relationship with iManage we’ve always known that their core values and business acumen would reap them big commercial rewards. So our job from the beginning was to create a brand that had personality and edge, that was simultaneously both corporate and cool and could support them as they expanded the business into new, and very big, revenue opportunities.

The anthropomorphic ‘i’ very much suited their sector, in which they excel in providing dynamic training services, so we complimented that necessarily quite conventional brand with a funky context, designing strongly contrasting stripes and modernist inspired slabs of colour and imagery.

The brand strategy for the design work has been equalled with an innovative approach to both product and business development. We’ve encouraged the owners to stratify their offering into three tiers: thought leadership for industry positioning; core products for continuing revenue; and commoditised information for perceived value.

This strategy has succeeded extremely well, with the company continually expanding into exactly the right clients, and the development of new, extremely high yield, commercial opportunities.

Website Design and Development - www.imanage.org.uk

When what you sell is a service, your revenues are only limited to where and how you sell those services. Our marketing skills have directly contributed to iManage expanding their revenue opportunities with clever use of their web site to simultaneously gain market credibility and market share. We developed the current site with its three-tier offering, and at the time of writing are working on a new brand for the business that will be integrated into the site in April ’08 and take their services to a global market.

Double Sided Direct Mail Leaflet (and a consequent change of direction)

The business wanted to expand by steeply increasing both the number of clients and the number of courses. So they asked us to produce a series of direct mail pieces aimed at unlocking more work from HR departments in London and the South East. A number of direct mail campaigns ensued using trade press insertions, but despite our agreeing that the leaflets were definitely fit for purpose, the amount of business from them was actually disappointing.

So we further analysed the sector and the iManage offering. We discussed with the business owners exactly where their most profitable business was. And where it wasn’t. And came to a potentially uncomfortable conclusion: iManage is very successful with a certain type of client - intelligent, dynamic, and corporate, and the high volume direct mail approach was unlikely to reach the right decision makers or sufficiently engage their interest.

Now we had a dilemma: if the business couldn’t generate strong growth through selling courses in volumes using a direct mail channel – what was the right channel?

We listened further, and then concluded: the company’s most profitable clients were those who not only bought the company’s skills, they also bought the personality. These clients wanted the experience, the engagement and the character of the business. They wanted a two-way relationship with a partner supplier. One with whom they could engage in informed conversation.

So we conceived a drastic change in direction.

The Super-size Conference Hand-out

If you’re going to substantially expand your business by engaging the interest of a small number of highly intelligent procurers, you need to create a confident and compelling opening proposition.
We produced an introduction piece for iManage to use as a hand-out from their stand at the annual HRD Conference 2006. It was oversized (a huge A3 folded along the long edge), it used metallic inks (which we’d already integrated into the branding in the previous year) and opened with a bold “Hello there…”  (yes – in 2006 – before “hello there” became the norm of the casually confident).

And it worked. Sensationally. iManage got a number of strong leads precisely in the target market, the best of which they converted. The business grew substantially.

So we repeated the approach the following year, with another Super-size hand-out, this time directly addressing the needs of HR procurers with the title “A resource for humans”, and it worked again.

Full Stationery Suite

Brand Extention

As a consequence of the success of the new marketing strategy, iManage is now in a position to further expand its business. We’re now working with the business owners to grow the company internationally, with the launch of a new global product that has the potential to make huge revenue contributions to the business from both high net worth sales and high volume sales.

Here’s the new brand, we’ll bring you updates on this marketing as they happen.