I was a bit nervous when creating Dave. Was I wasting my time? Was everyone going to think it was stupid? Definitely, probably, maybe.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the past couple of months looking into how brands (most a similar genre to ours, some not) present themselves to the world on the various social and mainstream platforms. The goal of this was to fine tune our own marketing strategy and come up with a unique strategy of our own.
The most surprising thing about my research was how cold I felt a lot of the marketing was. It felt far too corporate, boring and unimaginative. We were already guilty of doing this, and it sparked an immediate reaction from me that we needed to up our game. I changed most of the images on our home page, rewrote a lot of the copy, and started a complete rethink of our social strategy.
To ensure we are focusing on quality rather than quantity we decided (for the time being) to only start two social accounts, Instagram and LinkedIn.
We chose Instagram mainly for the fact that it’s everyone in our office favorite platform, and I had some good ideas to build an account with some serious personality. We started posting a few stock images relevant to our business just for the purpose of gathering an initial following (you have to start somewhere), and then got to work developing Dave.
The reaction I got from our office when I finished the first Gridpay video starring Dave was a lot more positive than I ever expected. We can be far too honest with each other at times, and I thought my idea was going to be shot down in seconds. I wanted him to be a bit silly, but still get our message across without being childish. Dave got the thumbs up from everyone and was now our latest recruit.
We only plan on using Dave on Instagram for the time being. He’s currently doing the rounds introducing himself, and if you see him make sure you say hi.
As I mentioned, the other platform we decided to focus on is LinkedIn. We understand it’s a more corporate/serious platform (not always), but we still plan on rocking the boat a little. Our initial strategy for LinkedIn is to just be ourselves and build a solid network with lots of relevant connections. We’ll be posting weekly updates of all our successes and failures, as we attempt to grow Gridpay into what we’re dreaming it will one day be.
If you’re in a similar position to us or want to let us know what you think about Dave, we’d love to hear from you.
