Lead by Ross Green and James Welch, Embryo is a full-service digital marketing agency based in Manchester. They specialise in developing innovative Digital PR, SEO and Paid Media strategies to stimulate rapid online growth for their clients.
The impeccable standard of work and results they deliver for their nationwide client base has lead to them winning multiple awards and a reputation as a highly respected industry specialist.
Embryo found themselves facing a common issue that nearly all digital marketing agencies experience as they begin to scale. Having grown by over 400% in the last 3 years, they developed a bottleneck in their design process. They had an internal team of designers focusing on websites and high-value projects, but they couldn’t keep up with the demand from their social media, client services and SEO team who were receiving daily client requests for simple day-to-day graphic design work.
In January 2020, Embryo were looking to add a junior graphic designer to support their in-house team. Whilst this seemed like the only option at the time, hiring an inexperienced member of staff at a crucial time in their growth phase was going to create additional problems for Embryo. They needed a better solution that didn’t involve high recruitment costs, time spent interviewing candidates and a drop in the quality of work their clients expect of them…
As with a lot of our customers before they start working with us, Embryo was sceptical about our service. Design quality and maintaining prompt turnaround times was paramount.
Embryo chose to sign up to our pro plan so that they were not restricted on the type of work they could request and could communicate with their designer in real-time via Slack. Within a business day, they were set up with an experienced graphic designer from our team, ready to jump in and support the entire business.
Initially working with their social media team and on their own internal marketing material, it was just a matter of weeks before every part of the business started to benefit from their new design resource.
Here are just a few examples of how we’ve supported every part of the business over the last 12 months:
In autumn 2020, Embryo partnered with Manchester-based branding specialists BGN to overhaul their visual identity. As part of the project, BGN created a bold new look for Embryo including a new logo, colour pallet, typography and website. Embryo now had the complete branding refresh that they had wanted, but they faced a problem…
How could they keep their new brand identity consistent without using up all of their internal design team’s time?
They needed to ensure that their new visual brand was maintained across all platforms. It wouldn’t make sense to have an incredible new brand concept designed and then not carry out the same quality throughout every piece of communication from that point onwards. After all, all it takes is one rushed and unprofessional piece of design work to chip away at that reputation they had put so much into building.
Enter the Design Cloud team (again.)
What did Embryo do? They saw the potential for a damaging design bottleneck and completely avoided it with one simple message – “Can we add another designer to our account?” By upgrading their existing plan with another professional Design Cloud designer, they had all the resource they needed to start using their platforms to show off their beautiful new branding with no worries that quality would ever be less than perfect. Their internal design team could focus on client work or other internal projects that would require more time, and there would never be any issues with getting client tasks over the line when they were needed.
Here’s some of the work we did to build up their new branding identity even more…
Working with Design Cloud has been really beneficial for Embryo. The communication we have is great, we work with our designers through a slack channel and it does really feel like they are a part of our own internal team. This graphic design subscription plan allows us to improve the capacity we have to work on design tasks internally and for clients, and it’s become an important part of the structure of our workflow here at Embryo. The team is friendly and always ready to help, and I can’t fault the quality of the design work we receive. I do trust the Design Cloud designers to create graphics that will represent us as a brand in the best way possible. I would 100% recommend this service to any other agency or business who need additional excellent quality graphic design at a more economical cost.”
“We’ve been using Design Cloud for quite a while now and as someone who works in Social Media it is extremely useful. When running social media channels there is a constant need for fresh, eye catching and engaging design and without Design Cloud we wouldn’t be able to achieve that as our in-house designer just doesn’t have the time. Quick turnarounds, great communication and even better end results. Would highly recommend to anyone looking for design.”
“Design Cloud allows us to think and act outside of the box when it comes to scheduling time with our internal design teams. Through using the Design Cloud platform, we don’t have to worry if our internal teams are busy on projects any more. This frees us up to spend more time in other aspects of our own internal marketing and helps us to move projects faster for clients.Throughout the business, each department is aware of Design Cloud and the benefits/use it provides. We utilise it through our digital project managers, if we have a design that needs doing, but our designers are too busy, it gets sent to Design Cloud.”
If you are starting to struggle to keep up with graphic design tasks internally, we are here to help. We also work with a number of marketing agencies who used to leave their graphic design to non-designers, but have seen that implementing skilfully executed graphic design is just what they need to give their overall efforts the boost they needed to see real results. Want to have a chat about how we can help you? Book a demo today and one of our service experts will discuss which plan will work best for your agencies’ bottleneck.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
