If I could sum up my 5 years of experience with Ingenuity Orthodontic Marketing in a single word, it could only be trailblazing. I learned in that 5 years how to turn a constant supply of lemons into lemonade I’m incredibly grateful for that experience.
By the time I’d reached Ingenuity, I’d had almost 10 years of “informal” experience in leading design teams under my own name. I feel like that unclear and constant journey forward solidified my experiences in not only creating consistency with a different team, but also focused experience in leading a design effort without the added weight of sales. Within Ingenuity, I could flex muscles I knew I had, but had never been able to fully exercise.
Ingenuity Orthodontic Marketing was a boutique style marketing company focused singularly in the orthodontic space. As a startup company, my job there was never fully defined, which is something I struggled with later on in my career, but the fact remained that I was the singular lead and senior designer and the responsibility of any new creation, templating, branding, brainstorming and team-building came from me and the project manager. My value to the company and the task of my position was part graphic/print designer, part web designer, and part code guru, all versatilist. Versatilism was a term I learned later in my career but my time at Ingenuity forced me to flex a few familiar muscles as anything designed, must also be supported. No one else was qualified to admin a WordPress/Apache web server backend, so I was the guy. As support tickets piled up amongst the 50-something client web properties, I built ticket management processes and software automations to handle that load.
The Process
My process for creating new process for new design at Ingenuity was actually quite simple. The first step was to write it down. Much of my process actually comes from pulling on a thread of ideas and committing it to paper (or Google Doc).
The three docs I drafted to cover the “Ingenuity Web” process were the Web Sales Close (the funnel), the Vision and the Platform.
Style Tiles
I borrowed a very lean moodboarding style popular at the time called “Style Tiles.” You can read about it here. It kept brands and designs consistent throughout the life of the client interaction, no matter who worked on the project.
Branding
Since we only dealt with a single industry and every client per market had the same content and worked with the same products (Damon, Invisalign, Acceledent), every website basically carried the same tested wireframe and sitemap. My job was revamping their old brand, (which inevitably involved moving them from a “bracey-smile image” to something more modern or personal), expanding that brand to a new style tile, expanding the style tile to a web format, numerous print templates (including the new patient packet)
The combination of the style tile with the wireframe/sitemap resulted in a very fast turnaround for our initial clickable prototypes. That allowed our process as a whole to concentrate the majority of our interactions on getting the brand right. It’s key to fight the right battles. The average shelf life of a website design is about 5 years for a site of this size. The most important and timeless parts of this interaction that remain are the brand and the relationship. My primary role was to ensure that the client was intimately satisfied from concept to completion…in other words, my job was to deliver delight.
Delivering Delight
It was important in our process not only to deliver an incredibly beautiful and immersive branding experience, but also to train our clients on how to understand and treat their new brand. It goes back to the parable of old wine in new wineskins. Our new brand language called for beautiful pictures of client outcomes, hiring wedding photographers to take client after shots in the style of graduation pictures, not simply relying on clinical quality before/after shots taken in the chair, showing happy smiling in office photos, and a big move AWAY from stock photography. Given the fact that all of our clients used the same products, they also used the same product photography. A great client outcome photoshoot taken in a familiar location did a whole lot to communicate to the mothers making the purchase decisions and drive conversions.
This meant we not only drove great and timeless brands, but we also sold our clients on our process, our designs, and drove trust with the client’s entire team into every step of the interaction. Client trust is born of communication, process, and ultimately results. We delivered on that with every new design.
My value to the company and the task of my position was part graphic/print designer, part web designer, and part code guru, all versatilist.
Much of my process actually comes from pulling on a thread of ideas and committing it to paper (or Google Doc).
The most important and timeless parts of this interaction that remain are the brand and the relationship.
Client trust is born of communication, process, and ultimately results.
