It’s hard to not fall foul of calendar-based rituals. Especially in marketing. In fact, January in marketing world is a real time of cringe. “New year, new you.” “Ten things you were doing wrong in 2019.” “How to peel a watermelon in 2020.” Add this to the fact that 2020 is a conveniently round number (not only in a Gregorian way, but in a strange asymmetrical kind of way), you’ll no doubt have noticed the thousands and thousands of brands doing some kind of retrospective 'looking back to look ahead' thing, with many ambiguous ‘stay tuned...!” status updates.
We’re not down for any of that. At all.
Towards the end of last year, we (me, Olly, our Head of Partnerships and Amy, our Events Producer) locked ourselves in a room for two weeks and plotted a plan for this year – a plan that effectively put a neat and tidy marketing and content strategy underneath Kyan’s three pillars (our products, our events and our people). And what we came up with were our three core foundations, which are:
- Working with the right people
- Including users in design
- From design to reality
These titles are neither catchy nor groundbreaking, but they are a key part of our process when bringing digital products to life for our clients. They’re also elements that when overlooked or left out, can really affect the outcome of a project, build or campaign. Because these foundations are so important to everything we do, they will form our entire content and marketing strategy for 2020.
Over the next 3 or 4 months, we will be focusing on Foundation 1, ‘Working with the right people’. This means that the majority of our outbound marketing will be centred around just that subject until about March/April. We’ve got a lot cued up, and that includes workshops, events, a brand-new conference, a YouTube video series, interviews, guest blogs and more. Expect to learn a lot about:
- Finding the right partner to build your digital product
- How to include several peers in your design process
- How to define responsibility and roles within your teams
- How to cut down mega-teams and think more like a startup
- How to get the right team into a design sprint
The design sprint is the key vehicle here. Our output over the foreseeable future will be based on our learnings from running a year of sprints and sprint workshops (almost 30 throughout 2019), because that’s been such an effective tool for us in bringing our clients' big, bold ideas to life. We’ll be producing guest blogs, interviews and hands-on events that let you really delve deep into how and why building products through design thinking and design sprints is the way to bring an idea to fruition and ultimately to market.
So watch this space follow our social, emails and news section closely for timely updates and great content that will help you understand the best way to build (and launch) a digital product in 2020.
