How Strong Collaboration Delivers Awards – and Results
We Didn’t Set Out to Win an Award
When our client approached us to completely redesign their website, our first question was, “What Are Your Primary Objectives?” On the surface, the design was clearly dated; it had some questionable navigation and not a lot of educational content. The blog page hadn’t been updated in a while. Visitors just weren’t hanging around.
We could get those issues all up to speed – no problem, but then their site would pretty much just be on par with their competitors. There needed to be a deeper conversation to give the website an edge that would stand out in a ridiculously crowded field.
Peeling Back the Onion
Our philosophy is to build a web “presence” as opposed to a web “site”. It needs to be a vital, functional portal that just happens to live on the internet.
In the case of Conrey Insurance Brokers, we took the exact approach that they take with their clients: ask the right questions – a LOT of them. Really understand the clients and business. That may sound a little simplistic, but we found that after doing the extra detective work, the primary objectives became clear: create an emotional connection that starts a dialog with the viewer – while standing out from every other insurance website out there.
During our discussions, we honed in on the fact the insurance clients want to protect everything they had worked their entire lives to achieve. Whether that was a material goal (like nice cars in the garage or fine art) or a lifestyle goal (a dream to travel the world), each insurance client had their own personal journey.
And when do these big goals and dreams begin? Usually in childhood.
The Big Idea
For us, the big idea was to use children to portray the ideals of Conrey Insurance Brokers’ clients – and also to convey information to help them become better-informed consumers. From the very beginning, our client loved this idea. And, despite some resistance internally, he decided to take the creative risk. He felt that this approach was the perfect emotional representation of the Conrey Insurance Brokers brand.
The Major Award
Yes, the website and the accompanying tour video, each won a Communicator Award. And, yes, we really must give credit to the client who took the risk on the out-of-the-box idea that resulted in this award. But it wouldn’t have happened without that initial discussion and subsequent collaboration for those of us committed to a vision of developing something truly different and unique.
Does It Work?
Well, if winning an award was not enough (actually, it isn’t enough for us), the website has been a resounding success. It certainly is different from any other insurance website out there. And it has started many, many conversations for Conrey Insurance Brokers and their prospective clients.
Win-Win
Here at Total Spectrum, we want to collaborate with our clients to produce work that works. Do you have a dream – a goal – a business challenge? Share it with us and we’ll help solve it together. Even if the goal is to win an award we’ve got that covered.