Journal

3 Owl Hosts Marketing Panel at OPEN Atlanta Conference

OPEN Atlanta’s Annual Event was held on December 8th at the Atlanta Tech Village. Speakers include some of the most influential entrepreneurs, business executives, and transformational leaders. Our founder, David Feldman, was invited to help put together a panel of marketing thought leaders and led a discussion on how digital marketing can enable brand storytelling. The panel included Umama Kibria (Founder and CEO of Sweatpack), Andrew Jones (Principal at Pompier + Partners), Melati Belot (Director of Client Engagement at Y Media Labs), and Jacquie Chew (SVP of Marketing at Avertium). Check out photos from the event below!

What is Strategy? (At 3 Owl)

With the growing prevalence of slapping “strategic” in front of positions and companies, it can be difficult to differentiate between those simply using the word for its buzzworthyness and actual implementation of deeper strategy into work. The concept of “brand strategy” can feel like an ambiguous idea. Really, the concept of being “strategic” can be confusing thanks to the over-saturation of the word. Strategic partnerships. Strategic solutions. Strategic platitudes abound.  Because of said ambiguity and overuse, we thought it would be valuable to define brand strategy at 3 Owl and how we consider the concept when working with brands to help them grow and evolve. Putting just a few words to it is a challenge, but our basic definition of strategic branding could be “Discovering the truths at the core of a brand, creating a narrative around those truths, and telling their story in the most interesting way possible using design, tech, and creativity to stand out from the competition while achieving success for the client.”  Most branding agencies will read that and say “Yeah. Us too.” Which is fine. All restaurants have the same goal of serving good food. To better define what strategic branding looks like for us,

Great American Cookies Direct to Consumer E-Commerce Launch

The Cookie Challenge Great American Cookies saw an emerging opportunity to deliver their decadent delights directly to consumers in search of sweet treats. Some smaller cookie companies had already entered this space, but industry analysts were predicting substantial growth in cookie delivery sales. And the nation’s largest retail cookie chain was well positioned to dominate the market. Headquartered in Atlanta, Great American Cookies had the brand recognition that came with its nearly 300 U.S. franchised stores. They had a wide variety of popular recipes for cookies and other sweet bakery items. They had the production facilities and were building out a section for on-premise baking. (The facility had previously produced only raw cookie dough, which was then shipped to retail stores for baking.) However, their existing sales, shipping, and inventory systems were all geared toward large-scale delivery of ingredients to franchise owners. They had no system in place to accept and fulfill direct consumer orders. And they didn’t have an inventory management system suited to the dynamic production of cookies ordered, baked, and shipped out on the same day. So they came to 3 Owl to develop an integrated e-commerce and inventory management platform, and to integrate it with their

Practical Advice for Naming Your Brand

There are few things more challenging throughout the branding process than naming a business or product. It takes condensing a ton of information into a few words that perfectly capture a brand to tell not just who you are, but acts as the first impression your brand will hold onto forever. It’s the thing that needs to stick right away and if it doesn’t, you’re already starting with a disadvantage. Daunting, right? Some brands name themselves. When appropriate, using a creator’s name, a city reference, or a piece of industry lingo can fall into your lap and perfectly fit the bill for naming purposes. That’s great. Congratulations, if that’s the case. But, a majority of the time, after a product or brand starts to take shape, finding the perfect name can pose a significant challenge. While honing in on your name, there are a few factors worth considering to help you find the one that suits you. Clever names lose novelty. A pun or gimmicky name may feel fun, but can easily grow tired for both you and potential customers. Choose a name you can grow with and represents you in a way you want to be seen. Your name

3 Owl Hosts Students for Week-long Marketing Workshop For Teens

JumpSpark is a Jewish community organization designed to connect Atlanta’s Jewish teens with professionals around the city and create opportunities for engagement and growth. 3 Owl had the pleasure of working with JumpSpark to name their brand, design their visual identity, and build their website and social media. After building the brand, we hosted a week-long immersive marketing workshop for JumpSpark students. We invited fourteen students to join us for a week of real life experience at our agency and asked a few talented friends to lend a hand. Our goal was to give the students both a baseline understanding of our industry as well as an honest look into the creative process. We were transparent and let them experience what being a professional creative means: doing what you love, but making it work with client needs and adapting to feedback to deliver a top-notch product. The week was a well-rounded, fun (we definitely had fun), and interactive look into the branding and design world that ended with feeling the pressure of an actual creative presentation. Here’s how it went down. Monday- 101 We started by introducing what 3Owl does and gave the students a baseline understanding of vocabulary and

Marketing

Improving Your Website Data: Best Practices for Restaurant Websites

A great website can help measurably increase a franchise restaurant’s bottom line. Most of us are used to looking at a standard set of statistics to evaluate websites: numbers of visitors, time spent on site, bounce rate, number of pages visited, etc. While these stats are certainly telling, they can often be misleading measures of success. Based on our experience designing and developing websites for a number of restaurant chains, we’ve compiled the top 5 key performance indicators we measure as we look at statistics for restaurant websites. Some of these, like total dollar amount per online order, require additional integrations through Google Tag Manager, which we’ve found is well worth the investment as it gives us a much deeper understanding of our audience and how our site is impacting the real bottom line. We have a deeper dive on best practices for each of our top KPIs, but here’s a good primer on how to look at these statistics and why they matter. Get Directions Clicks It’s important to tag any button on the website that allows users to get directions to your restaurant. Clicking a map to get directions is a clear indicator of visit intent. The majority