Overview
Shifamed, a medical device innovator that specializes in creating products to make high-risk procedures less invasive, was having trouble articulating the tangible impact of their work.
While their products and companies are helping surgeons save lives, their brand voice was cold, clinical, and lacked an empathetic story: it solely focused on the technical elements of their work, which overshadowed the critical difference they are making in the lives of people everywhere.
Our challenge was to help Shifamed humanize their impact story, understand how it relates to their various audiences, and craft a new brand positioning to leverage across all brand communications.
We sought to position Shifamed as a pioneer in innovation, technology, human-centered design, and mission-driven human impact – all while maintaining their deeply-ingrained culture of diversity, collaboration, and humility.
To tell this story effectively, we launched a comprehensive research and discovery process. With the findings, we worked with the team to develop new brand positioning guidelines, and brought these elements into their new website.
Through our research and discovery, we also found that they could benefit from developing more thought leadership pieces. We created recommendations for updates to their social and marketing strategy.
Our first step in humanizing the Shifamed brand and positioning it as a pioneer in the industry was understanding the existing brand better. The research and discovery process included:
Through in-depth interviews, we better understood the landscape and were able to identify key whitespace opportunities for them to differentiate themselves from similar organizations. We also leveraged audience insights and to develop five key personas that would be later used to guide messaging and marketing strategies. All of our findings and insights were brought together in a 2-day, collaborative workshop, where we partnered with Shifamed leadership to hone and finalize all of the elements of their new brand positioning —including core beliefs, brand definition, purpose, and vision.
As Shifamed was undergoing a website redesign at the same time as our brand work, we brought many discoveries and updated brand elements into the new website.
We partnered with their web team to help restructure some of the pages based on our brand work—better presenting the story and making user experience recommendations to make the site feel less rigid and more human-centered.
We also wrote copy for many of the new pages, and provided image guidance to ensure the website reflected the updated tone, language, and vision.
Once the brand and website work was complete, we moved into the activation phase, and presented strategic recommendations for their marketing strategy.
The investor audience was a key target persona, as Shifamed needs to be on the radar of strategic decision-makers to take their brand to the next level. We developed updated content pillars and messaging with the new personas in mind, and worked on developing thought leadership centered content.
We developed a strategy for thought leadership and investor outreach via social media. They weren’t doing much for social media marketing, so we recommended they invest more time in the channels most influential for reaching an investor audience.
Lastly, we conducted a Hubspot Audit for their sales and marketing team. We had a goal-setting session, then gave them a recommendation on what Hubspot plan and features they should invest in. We put together an implementation plan to help them migrate to Hubspot, culminating with Hubspot training to help their teams use the platform.
All of this work helped bring the brand learnings and updated language into a new marketing plan to drive investor interest and position Shifamed as a thought leader in the industry.
