Our work
Kin
- Product design & build
- Content marketing
- Strategic consulting
The Challenge
Create a private social media space for families centred around the members, not advertisers
To create a digital home for families sitting at the intersection of technology and tradition where they can connect, chat and share memories and stories. All free from the data exploitation and intrusion found on the established social media and messaging platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Not only did we create the app design and build, but we also created the name, branding, marketing strategy and the paid media plan.
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The Approach
How we built a new brand and social network from the founders' vision
Our client approached us with a clear vision and view of the functionality for their app – a private social network for families with the ability to send future messages. They had a non-technical background and had never launched an app before so leaned on us to guide them through all stages of development, from inception, UX and UI to build, test and launch. Here’s the process we followed to bring Kin to life and launch it out into the world.
Brand Strategy.
Implementing our brand builder process
We used our Mediablaze Brand Builder process which started with a one-day immersion workshop to really understand the founders’ motivation, their passions and their vision. Really talking to and understanding the stakeholders is key to getting to a brand purpose, and from there things such as what the brand would look and sound like follow quite naturally. It’s a process we’ve designed to identify what would be wrong for a brand as much as it is to uncover what is right.
During this workshop, we chose Kin as the brand name. Why Kin? With such a clear vision for the brand, there were a few names that felt close to the mark in terms of warmth, treasure and security. Names like Locket and Trove were in the early mix with Storus (Story + Us), a portmanteau wildcard. Kin won out because it evokes not just family, but close family. The kind of family we envisioned filling the app with photos, stories, chats and future messages. It’s also nice and short, which any designer will tell you makes creating a logo that little bit easier!
Having trademarked the name through our legal advisors, we went on to create brand guidelines to define and capture the brand’s mission, tone of voice and visual look and feel. This included the brand’s purpose, promise, principles and values as well as logo, typography, colour palette, imagery and iconography. These Brand Guidelines serve as the brand’s ‘North Star’ guiding how the brand looks, acts and sounds across all touch-points from comms to the actual product.
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Product Strategy & App Build.
Bringing the app to life
Before building anything, we made a clickable prototype enabling our clients to see the app coming to life without us having to write a line of code. Working closely with the founders, this approach allowed us to refine customer journeys efficiently and get to prototype approval faster.
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Making it scalable
With approval in place we shifted focus to the technical requirements of the app, with major consideration given to the architecture needed to enable the app to scale. Our team of iOS and Android developers then started the build.
A key aspect of the project was being able to get real feedback at all stages of development. To this end we released a beta version to a closed audience of investors, family and friends to gather feedback on functionality and features, and to highlight any bugs.
Once final development was complete, the Kin app was launched - with keyword optimisation in place - in the App Store and Google Play. The app is now live and we release updates with added features and improvements every two weeks.
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Marketing & Paid Media Strategy.
Attracting the right audience
The client brought specific acquisition goals to us that they wanted the app to achieve, based on investor lead growth expectations. The Mediablaze strategy and paid media team began by evaluating the brand’s unique selling points (USPs) to understand Kin’s natural niche in the social media and mobile app landscape. This gave us hypotheses about where we should focus our efforts, whom we wanted to attract and the data we would need to collect.
This discovery phase was followed by a roadmap of test and learn experiments to understand the media channels we should be leveraging and audience demographics, behaviours, needs and interests we should be targeting. The output was a smart acquisition model for Kin, that also identified growth opportunities for the product too.
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Amplifying Kin's reach
Kin's app marketing strategy was formulated in a sprint-based approach that looks to understand placements, channels, audience behaviours at each stage of the acquisition funnel, from awareness, to retention across a variety of channels, including:
Facebook (Paid & Organic)
Instagram (Paid & Organic)
LinkedIn
WhatsApp placement
YouTube pre roll
Search (paid and organic)
Mobile Programmatic Advertising
App store optimisation
App store paid search
Brochure website
Community Management
Email Marketing (tips, tricks, nudging)
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Implementing a test-and-learn strategy
Every month, there is a 4-week sprint period in which we make a calendar of all the paid and organic social content we’re going to create with specific posts going through an A/B testing process to see which posts drive more engagement, sign-ups and registrations. We analyse the results from those tests half-way through the four-week sprint and make any necessary adjustments, then incorporate those learnings into the next month’s content calendar.
“Mediablaze’s collaborative and consultative approach, along with their extensive knowledge base across digital product, content marketing and strategic consulting means we had a partner who truly understood our idea and how to successfully launch it into the world, all while addressing the ambitious targets required by our investors.”
Michael Collett
FCCA, Co-Founder and CEO
Kin
