Imbue Creative

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there. 

I’m the CMO of Friends Life Care Partners. We’re a small nonprofit that focuses on care coordination, care management, and financial services. Our mission is to help older adults live in their own homes independently and age in place instead of having to move into a facility.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Imbue Creative?

We approached Imbue Creative to help us overhaul our advertising efforts, balancing our traditional methods (e.g., seminars, direct mailing) with new digital and social channels.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement? 

Over the course of the engagement, Imbue Creative has served as our digital marketing partner, working with us at a strategic level to explore different marketing channels. We usually start with a project brief and map out our tactics over ongoing calls. From there, they help us execute our efforts.

The team is particularly skilled at developing content for inbound marketing. In the beginning, they digitized all of our traditional collateral pieces before launching our first blog. We worked closely with them to create the content and position it. They’ve since helped us develop email campaigns, customer journey cadences, ads for publication and social, and a wildly popular video.

One of their larger projects involved redesigning our website. They outlined the overall design, looking at the navigation and flow before populating the site with content to support our messaging. After helping us conduct a UX study, they incorporated our feedback, made additional tweaks, and pushed the site live.

What is the team composition?

I work with their founder and a senior account manager.

How did you come to work with Imbue Creative? 

We initially found Imbue Creative while working with their sister company Digital Dog. What started as a couple of projects has grown over time to become a much deeper partnership.

How much have you invested with them? 

We’ve spent between $100,000–$250,000 thus far.

What is the status of this engagement? 

Their work started in 2016 and is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

Imbue Creative supports us across all of our business needs. Since we’re a small nonprofit with a finite geographical service area, even the smallest impact can be a lot for us. 

The video that they created has far outperformed all of our other content, boasting over 60,000 views to date. It’s so effective as a lead generator that other companies across the US have contacted us to license it. We’re actually planning to do an additional video with them in the near future.

In terms of the website, users have found the information easy to navigate, comprehensible, and motivating. As we inevitably age, it’s important to realize that we have to plan ahead before tackling how we want to spend the rest of our lives. Our site both enables users to identify their needs while also giving them the solution.

How did Imbue Creative perform from a project management standpoint?

We've never had any issues with their project management. If there’s a delay or if we encounter a hurdle, they let us know, and we work through them together. I know that I can trust them to do what they promise on time and within budget. We mostly communicate via email, but they also meet us in person about once a quarter.

What did you find most impressive about them? 

Because we have limited resources, they’ve really helped us to be competitive in our services. They’re an extension of our team and have empowered us to do things that we couldn’t have done otherwise.

Are there any areas they could improve? 

No, nothing comes to mind. Recently, we’ve started to have bimonthly strategy calls, which will hopefully allow us to develop more long-term approaches to problems. Our goal is to get ahead of some of our different audiences and messages so that we can really make a difference with our efforts.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?
 
For any agency relationship, start with a good brief and have a clear understanding of your expectations for the project. This can be as broad or as narrow as you need it to be, but it must be encompassing. Whether it’s your goals, budget, timing, or allocated resources, your brief is a guidepost for the agency as they begin their work. That’s not to say you should prohibit any creativity; rather, it’s a tool to keep the project on track.