Hannibal Guest Blog

So, what is IG?

We’re a graphic design and document production agency with super-fast turnaround. We provide a flexible, scalable alternative to having an in-house design team. We’re particularly focused on supporting consultancies, so we do a lot of slide design, data visualisation, and B2B marketing materials.

How have you managed the client side of the business as well as delivering for the creative side? Were there any challenges to overcome?

It’s a great question and one that’s a particular challenge for us; often our clients want work back ‘yesterday’, which sometimes doesn’t leave a lot of time for creative thinking! Our approach has been to try and build a real partnership with our clients, to understand what they want and where they’re coming from as much as possible – whether that’s in terms of their brand and style preferences, or even the broader context for their work and industry – so that when it comes to crunch-time we have a really good idea of what’s needed and we’ve helped them with the creative side already.

With your business very much focused in a specific expertise, how did you identify this niche / opportunity?

It started from feeling the need ourselves. One of our co-founders was working late on a slide deck for a consulting project and wanted to get some support with the slides. As he found, there weren’t a lot of good options at the time: either expensive, slow freelancers or offshore companies with poor communication and consistency. So we built our own! It’s been clear from the beginning that we’re filling a real need – we hear the same things time and again from our clients about their struggles with other providers that don’t “get” their ways of working.

Having been following you on LinkedIn, it’s great that things are going from strength to strength. What does the next 12 months look like for you?

Thanks! It’s clear that our process is really working, which gives us the confidence to try and take this to the next level – in the medium-term that means going after bigger clients (in terms of headcount). Working with bigger organisations comes with its own challenges, particularly for a service like ours that is built around the relationships with our clients. It’s harder to maintain that personal touch if we’re dealing with a dozen different points of contact within an organisation!

The key to that that will be growing our team to meet the requirements of those larger clients.

You went through a brand process with us recently, which was great fun! What was it about our Brand Dials approach that you enjoyed the most?

It was fun! What really struck me about the Brand Dials was that it was a great way of articulating some of the things we had discussed and talked about already, but never quite managed to put into writing.

It was really nice to see that our team were basically in agreement about where we sat on each of the axes presented to us, even when we hadn’t been so confident about what we wanted when discussing it in the abstract.

It also provide a great framework for us to think about the different branding routes you presented to us, and which felt like they represented us the best. We’re all really happy with where we landed!

How do you feel having the right brand and message will impact your business and potential for new clients?

I’m pleased to say we’ve felt the impact of this already in introductions with new clients – it’s noticeable how much clearer an idea they have of what we can do for them going into those initial discussions.

Ultimately our proposition is quite simple, and if its relevant to a client it’s often a pretty easy sell, so making sure we’re conveying it really clearly is essential.

We see you putting lots of video content out, do you find this medium the best to
really get across what you do?

More than getting across what we do, we’ve found videos to be an easy, engaging way to share our expertise and show that we really understand our clients and the types of work they produce. Hopefully we’re providing value and useful insights, while also highlighting the places where we can help that work stand out.

And finally, how do you keep things fresh in the studio? Is it a diverse client base or new ways / explorations in brand executions?

We’re always working with new clients, who all have a unique approach and starting point – it’s never a cookie-cutter job.

More than that, we always try to push ourselves to develop new skills and capabilities, or just to find new ways of making quite traditional outputs seem fresh.

Find out more about our branding process

If you would like to know more about our process, please email lawrence@bunkercreative.co.uk