With offices in both London and Barcelona, MA wanted to reassess their brand values across their various locations in preparation for future growth. The task was to realign the internal culture with the external brand image and improve user experience.
MA are a diverse brand with a vibrant culture across Europe, and yet the old website reflected none of their unique values. Over the past five years, they have implemented innovative processes, such as shared parental leave and mental wellbeing sessions. MA are far from your average recruitment company.
With plans to expand, MA needed a memorable, modern brand & website to reflect their personality. With the goals being to improve user experience and lead generation, design and creativity were vital. The Result: A beautiful new brand, and a flexible website that MA can continue to grow.
Post go-live, we interviewed Kate to get her feedback and opinion on the brand and site launch.
What did you want to achieve from your strategy?
My first aim as Marketing Manager was to find a digital partner that could help us achieve our goals. Being new to the business, I was in a position where I was about to start a project for a brand I didn't really know myself. The brand discovery was essential for me, and I made sure to take it on myself.
The main goals for the project were; to improve user experience, lead generation and technical SEO. The past website was old, and the user experience was terrible. From an admin perspective, we had no flexibility for customisation. The site was nearly ten years old, and the business had grown massively in that time. Not only had MA expanded into new markets, but also the tech ecosystem was rapidly changing.
Lead generation was an important objective, and a focus on the website design would help us achieve this. The old website was very complicated. It wasn't getting us the right traffic and was not SEO optimised, even simple keywords were not ranking.
From a commercial perspective, we needed to show that we are active across Europe. The new location market pages were an important addition, and making sure they were SEO optimised was essential for our reputation. Now we can show where we are active and rank for location-specific searches in the tech recruitment sector. And it doesn't stop there, the new site also leaves room for us to grow into new markets, continue to showcase results and expand as we become more commercial with our services.
Employer brand was ultimately the reason we rebranded. We wanted to be attractive to a different era of likeminded people. The career site is a current work in progress and due to be launched early this year, but for now, we can clearly share our brand values and attract new talent.
Going into this project, we didn't want our mission to be 'the best one in Europe'. Instead, we wanted to partner with people and brands that share our view and values. We want to help businesses achieve success and give the best service. Venn got this straight away.
In our industry, it's easy to shout about us and our success. Instead, now we have the new site, we want to showcase our candidates and clients and what we can achieve together. Beyond this, we want to set the standard for the type of people we want to work with. We didn't want to come across as typical recruitment and instead took a fresh approach and tried to fit in with 'our people' – the tech sector.
What was your favourite moment during this project?
The discovery of the brand.
We involved everyone in the discovery project. This created a unified vision of what the brand and website could be. The outcomes from the focus groups and the company-wide feedback we received were the same. Without the discovery, I wouldn't know the business as I do now, so I am very grateful. Our achievements would not be the same without this consultation phase.
How did you view your brand before the project began?
Corporate, typical recruitment.
There was a vast disconnect between the values of the brand and how we were displaying it online. We perceive MA as vibrant, diverse and different; this was far from the brand image that we were sharing externally.
The colours were predictable, dull, and they didn't reflect the drive of the people that work here. From an employer brand perspective, that was a huge issue. We weren't showing off that actually, we are very different from other recruiters. This needed to change if we were to attract the right people.