As part of a small marketing team championing NorthPoint Development's self storage business, Beyond Self Storage, my teammates were more web/SEO/Google focused, whereas I as given responsibility over social media and overall brand guidelines. Beyond Self Storage already had a slick set of guidelines in place thanks to NorthPoint's solid graphic design team, so I collaborated with them to give the brand a shot of personality in the arm. Let's face it, self storage isn't a very exciting subject, so I honed in on how our brand helped followers make life easier. I'm never a fan of brands that put the spotlight on themselves too much, and as a rule of thumb, when copywriting for social media, brands should focus on what they can do for YOU, not on how awesome their core values are or whatever. So that was my true north.
Besides the less than exhilarating subject matter, I was faced with another challenge: Bubble Ben. I found Bubble Ben, a sentient doll with lifeless googley eyes made out of bubble wrap, to be extremely off-putting. I thought there was no way people were going to see this thing on their social feeds or in ads and engage with our content. Then I realized that Ben was exactly the kind of scroll-stopping wierdness that a boring thing like a self storage brand needed in order to stand out. So, I embraced the weird. I defined our brand voice through this quirky bubble wrap doll. Ben, and thus, Beyond Self Storage, was helpful, smart, and a bit of a nerd. I think a lot of copywriters and social media managers immediately go to a snarky, witty place when trying to give voice to a brand, and I'm certainly guilty of that. It was refreshing to write from the perspective of a dorky, optimistic, "bubbly" person. A person made of bubble wrap.
Near the end of my time with the company, I was being pulled into assisting other businesses under NorthPoint Development's portfolio, including WarehouseQuote.com and Beyond Brokerage. In the gallery above I've included a video banner for Beyond Brokerage comprised of my own existing drone footage of Kansas City landmarks, as their specialty was commercial real estate brokerage in the KC metro.
I wasn't given as much creative freedom as I've enjoyed in other companies while managing brand and social for Beyond Self Storage, so NorthPoint was a valuable lesson in collaboration, working closely with executive leadership, and easing risk-averse management into daring to be different enough to be memorable.
