Case study—Growth Marketing for Daily
Crafting brand identity and growth marketing for Daily, a young startup
Daily makes it easy for developers to add video and audio to any website or app and competes with other developer platforms like Twilio and Vonage in an ever competitive market. Founded in 2016, I helped to position the brand as a flexible, developer (and human) focused solution for those building with live video and audio.
As the third employee I worked directly with the founding team and marketing executives to evolve Daily’s identity through multiple rounds of funding, ultimately culminating in a $40M Series B.
Responsiblities
- Oversaw all marketing design at Daily, from November 2016–October 2022.
- Worked directly with founders to develop brand identity.
- Managed freelance designers and editors.
- Developed brand style guide, templates, and other resources to help colleagues generate marketing assets.
Developing the brand identity
Daily evolved its business model and identity a few times before becoming a platform for developers. During these evolutions I was responsible for designing and presenting brand identity direction to the founders.
The company had deep customer support roots, and wanted to position itself as an approachable, developer-focused solution. The mood boards below highlight brand direction work I spearheaded and presented to the founding team.
Launch illustrations and graphics
The marketing team at Daily worked on promoting new features and product releases via social and on our website. As a designer, I would work with my marketing colleagues to help create collateral to illustrate concepts to our audience.
Templates were created to help my colleagues generate assets on the fly, however quite often a bespoke illustration was required for complex concepts. Daily needed to visually communicate to a wide range of personas, including: front or back-end engineers, founders, designers, product people and so on.
"Working with Steve as a product marketer, I particularly appreciated his sensibility for branding, user experience, and visual storytelling."
Francine Boulanger, Marketing Lead, Daily
Iconography and illustrations
Under my design leadership I collaborated with other visual designers on our team to continue evolving Daily’s brand identity. This included building out a set of icons specific for use on the marketing website, and across various other materials like sales materials, one-pagers, and on social media.
Similar to our iconography, I also collaborated with my colleagues to continue to develop Daily’s illustration style. Below is a sampling of illustrations created over the past year. These illustrations were also used for product launch material and throughout the company website.
Marketing website pages
Over my time at Daily I was the point person for designing, building and maintaining the company’s marketing website, daily.co. The site was built in Webflow which allowed me, as a designer, to easily implement any design work without the help of an engineer.
Many landing pages were created as templates, which could then easily be built using Webflow’s CMS. Other pages were custom or would use a sampling of prebuilt sections/components from other pages. Towards the end of my time at Daily we were steadily rolling out new landing pages for different product launches.
Closing thoughts
On designing a brand
Looking back, I believe that Daily’s brand identity was headed in the right direction by the time I left. Yet, I do believe that I could have done a better job of incorporating motion and video into marketing materials to communicate that Daily is a live video/audio platform.
Brand design is tireless and busy work. So to is visual and communication design. To maintain a consistent brand you must keep your eye on everything that is published. I believe I did okay at this, however there is certainly room for improvement.
On marketing vs product design
Over my time at Daily I worked on product and marketing in tandem—the first time in my career thus far. The value of growth should not be understated and I believe that design is paramount to both building a brand and telling stories.
The design direction I led with was to keep product design more rigid in its execution. As a guideline, our products were designed to be unapologetically consistent. Marketing material, and visual language, however had much more leeway. While a design system was utilized, color and imagery was used more freely so that designers had flexibility when it came to illustrating concepts.
Thank you
Thanks for viewing my work! Everything presented here was created for Daily.
Contact me directly at [email protected], I’d love to chat!