It’s Friday, and you’ve got a Monday deadline.
A huge story is about to drop, and your exclusive with TechCrunch is definitely not ready. You need a compelling image or graphic to share with TC and it has to meet their strict demands of quality and design.
To make matters even more chaotic, you need it to describe your novel artificial intelligence and deep-learning program for speech recognition in audio and video files. Yes, in a single graphic. And yes, in one business day.
So what do you do?
You start freaking out! A few minutes ago you were thrilled to announce your latest funding round, and that TechCrunch was going to run the story. But now you’ve got a new set of obstacles on your hands: a one day deadline, and a seemingly impossible communication/design challenge.
This isn’t a hypothetical story, however, this is exactly what happened to Deepgram. “There’s no way we can get high quality design this quickly” they thought at first. “Maybe next time.”
Smarter, not harder
Not ones to back down from a challenge – a characteristic of any good startup – instead they got to work.
The team surveyed their options. In need a of a good designer, and fast, they reached out to a marketing design company they heard about while at a previous startup.
Before they knew it, Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson and his team was whiteboarding and uploading pics to a shared doc. Their new Account Executive was providing feedback on the fly.
“Talking on the phone with someone was a huge relief,” they admit. “Everything happened within minutes. The feedback was so quick.” Less than an hour later, Deepgram had something they were happy with submitting.
Over the weekend they received a few iterations from their design director, and by Monday the project was completed and submitted to TechCrunch. Tuesday morning, the story was live and the news started bringing traffic to Deepgram’s homepage.
So how’d it go?
We caught up with the Deepgram team to hear how everything was going.
“We’ve had the most signups ever in the previous two days, and a 400% spike in web traffic.” An image or graphic alongside an article usually helps visually, but doesn’t often tell it’s OWN story. TechCrunch readers were intrigued by Deepgram’s story and were able to understand their unique business through words and design.
“And we’ve heard great feedback about the infographic,” saying that basic words might not be the best way to explain deep learning to someone reading a news article. This also made it easier for the TC reporter to focus on the story (new round of funding) and not overload the 320 word article with the nuances of Deepgram’s technology.
And then…
Because of this initial success Deepgram believes the infographic is more than just a one-time asset. “We’ll get a lot of mileage out of it”, Scott says, already planning to use it as marketing material on their website and to share with potential clients. [In fact, while writing this article, the infographic was used in a second article about Deepgram’s brilliant promotion for free use by journalists until Election Day.
In the future, Deepgram plans to use an on-demand Marketing service for more of their marketing and design needs. “It’ll be great to have someone with the dedicated bandwidth, that knows our brand style.”
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