Marketing and Design Blog

Atomicdust Crafts Branding, Website and Collateral for CPA Firm

You might think that accounting and creativity don’t – or maybe shouldn’t – add up. But when a large St. Louis CPA firm came to us looking for a new identity, Atomicdust was up for the challenge. See the branding, website, and collateral we created for local CPA firm, Anders. 

Atomicdust looks beyond the expected to create brand for consulting firm.

Daugherty Business Solutions has been quietly improving the way Fortune 500 companies use technology for more than 25 years. And while their client list includes many household names, they’ve found the competition for business to be quite intense beyond their St. Louis home.

That’s why they came to Atomicdust.

As a company, they had never done much marketing. Almost all growth had been from word-of-mouth, referrals and organic growth within existing clients. So they never really needed to. But with aggressive goals in place, that needed to change.

Growth in this sector is about more than attracting customers, too: it’s about recruiting and retaining top talent.

Read more and check out our naming, branding and web design work for Daugherty Business Solutions.

Battle of the Beans. Goshen Coffee Company’s Bean vs Bean Challenge.

When longtime friend and client Jay Beard bought Edwardsville’s Goshen Coffee Company last spring, we were excited to start working on developing a brand for a product we love - coffee.

Our first goal was to use social media to build hype for Goshen Coffee and the new bags and website that were coming this fall. We know that on Facebook, people typically respond to two things - things that are useful, and things that are funny. We wanted to create a promotion that people could laugh at and want to share with their friends. 

And with that, the Bean vs Bean Challenge was born.

Read more about Goshen Coffee Company's Bean vs Bean Challenge. 

Photographing (and drinking) great coffee at Goshen Coffee Co.

I am sort of a coffee connoisseur.

I used to live in Park City, Utah, and was the head barista at Bad Ass Coffee Company, which roasted and served 100% pure Kona Coffee. I calibrated the espresso machine and grinders twice a week and meticulously prepared every drink for awaiting skiers. After moving back to Saint Louis, I got a job at a boutique coffee shop where we roasted everything in a beautiful chrome and brass machine in house.

Admittedly, I drink quite a bit of terrible coffee, but I still get excited when I find really good beans or a great coffee shop.   

So, naturally, working with Goshen Coffee Company has been awesome. We kicked things off with social media with Bean vs. Bean Challenge, and are currently in the midst of defining the brand and designing new bags and a website.

Last week, Taylor and I had the opportunity to visit the roasting facility in Edwardsville with owner Jay Beard and photograph Goshen’s unique process. Read more about James and Taylor's trip to Goshen Coffee Company in Edwardsville.

The Brand Spiral of Death (and other thoughts on branding)

The importance of branding from the inside out.

There are two things you need to understand about your brand:

1. You care about it more than your customers do
2. You can change that

In order to begin the shift to a brand that customers genuinely care about, it’s critical to understand that branding is the starting point. Not marketing. Not sales. Branding. Yes, that 8-letter word that agencies and clients have been carelessly throwing around for years in an attempt to sound smarter than one another.

Read 'The Brand Spiral of Death (and other thoughts on branding)'

Rethinking The Professional Services Website

Professional services firms often struggle with their own branding, social media and marketing. Typically, it's because the services they offer are so similar to their competition, there's no real platform or defined difference to create anything concrete. It's sometimes difficult to tell them apart.

We're fortunate to work with many professional services organizations (architects, financial services, healthcare, technology, etc.) to help develop memorable messaging and marketing strategies. And typically the first place this new thinking will appear is on the company website.

Here's some helpful perspective on what you should consider as you build your professional service firm’s marketing materials and website.

Read 'Rethinking The Professional Service Website.'

Atomicdust Refreshes Website and Messaging for Resinate Materials Group

Resinate Materials Group came to us with a problem: their core promise – high quality, custom resins at stable prices – was lost in their website’s dated design and (by their own admission) inaccurate content.

Right away, we saw this wasn’t a design or writing challenge. This was a branding problem. So we started by interviewing key stakeholders from Resinate to gain a deep understanding of the company’s place in the resin market.

Read about the website and messaging Atomicdust created for Resinate Materials Group. 

Naming, Branding and Website Design for Daugherty Mobile Suite

One project leads to another.

We were in the midst of a full-scale branding program for our new client, Daugherty Business Solutions, when they came to us with a more urgent task: branding their new, mobile-oriented products.

This in and of itself represented a seismic change for the company. Daugherty had always focused on long-term consultative client relationships, rather than individual products or services. Daugherty asked us to name these new products in a way that positioned them as an extension of the company’s experience and expertise, not as a separate entity or independent division.

In the competitive marketplace, names for mobile-focused divisions run the gamut from straightforward to esoteric. We decided to leverage Daugherty’s brand equity – they have a long history in the IT consulting space – and name the set of products the Daugherty Mobile Suite. It’s simple, descriptive and accurate, while giving the company the flexibility to add new products or functionality without rebranding.

Read more and check out our naming, branding and web design work for Daugherty Mobile Suite.

Atomicdust lends a hand for U.S. Crisis Care’s branding and marketing

When we were first introduced to U.S. Crisis Care by a board member – and Atomicdust client – what we found was a small, passionate organization doing some very important work. Their mission was fairly well articulated:

“...a nonprofit organization that supports the development and operation of community crisis care programs...”

Their goals were pretty clear, they were organized and had had many accomplishments over the past 25 years. In this case, Atomicdust met U.S. Crisis Care at a time when they seemed to have their situation figured out. We weren’t sure where we were needed, but we wanted to help the organization... and we believed in our ability to help even the most successful groups get even better. They agreed to let us apply our Branding Program to see what Atomicdust could do to strengthen their efforts.

Learn more about our work for U.S. Crisis Care. 

Online Ad Spending Outpaces Print, But Does it Matter?

Online advertising spending will surpass print in the United States for the first time in 2012, according to a forecast by eMarketer. As stated in this report, spending is set to increase twenty-three percent to $39.5 billion.