Our Brand Refresh Journey: Getting Ready for You

Welcome to the final blog of our refresh series before we reveal all.

Up until this stage of the journey, all of the work we had done was conceptual. But now that we knew who we were and how we wanted to present ourselves to you, it was finally time to put our refreshed identity, look, and feel into practice.

Maia, our Marketing and Communications Coordinator, tells the story of how we packaged all of these good things together, for you.

Maia Reid, Marketing & Communications Coordinator for Thankyou Payroll

Planning, planning, & more planning

 
Receiving our finalised brand guidelines for the first time felt like being given a shiny new toy to play with. Essentially, we’d been handed everything we had worked on up until that point in one compact 30-page document. It was exciting to say the least.

But although we were eager to reveal our refreshed look and feel to you right away, there was still a lot of mahi to be done.

This much was clear after we put our brains together and laid out every single task required of us in the lead up to our launch. It’s fair to say that there wasn’t much space left on the whiteboard once we were finished. But that didn’t take away from the excitement – we just got stuck in.

Two key pieces of work stemmed out from this planning session:

• preparing our team for launch and,
• preparing our digital touch points (e.g. website, social media, etc.) for launch.

Preparing our team – for you

 
Although I wear the ‘marketing hat’ for Thankyou Payroll, our look and feel touches a lot more than just our website, our newsletter, or our social media. It’s every interaction you have with us, from phone calls, to conferences, to the code in our product!

This means, every member of the Thankyou Payroll team has a part to play. We want to make you feel that good things are happening every time you interact with us – regardless of where, when, how, or why. To ensure this consistency, we ran a series of collaborative workshops, helping our team to get into the ‘mind of Thankyou Payroll’ and understand the role they had to play in this project.

We wish to assure you that this internal work was never about homogenising the personalities of our staff. Thankyou Payroll’s personality is unique in that it relies on the personality of our staff too – and it has always been incredibly important to us that we don’t lose sight of this.

Putting our ‘look and feel’ into practice

 
There are so many ways that our customers come into contact with Thankyou Payroll digitally – from our payroll software, to our social media, to the websites of companies who endorse us. Each one of these touchpoints needed to be refreshed to reflect our new look and feel.

The biggest change of them all has been creating an entirely new website – from scratch.

There were three important things our old website lacked: simplicity, easy navigation, and storytelling. Naturally, these informed the direction of our new website. With these directives in mind, we started this project on a clean slate by drawing out a new skeleton – our site map.

To bring this to life, we worked with the wonderful Maribel from CREATIVA – a women-led web-design agency, working with purpose-driven businesses. While she built the site, we wrote the content, and eventually, we reached a point where we were able to put the pieces together.

After hours and hours of hard work, we are truly proud of the website we have put together as a team – it’s simple, it’s polished, it’s colourful, it’s us, and it’s you. We can’t wait for you to see it.

Keeping it real

 
Throughout this entire project, one thing has always been clear to us – we want to be as transparent as possible about the changes going on and the path we’ve taken to get to this point.

This has meant telling you things before they happen and as they happen, and pulling back the curtains of Thankyou Payroll so that you’re just as much a part of this refresh as we are. That’s what this blog series has been all about and we hope you’ve found this journey both insightful and exciting.

In the coming days, weeks and months, you will notice some changes in the way we present ourselves to you – on our website, in our product, in your inbox, and on your social media.

However, we also want to let you know that not everything will click over just like that. Some changes will be more gradual and will evolve over time as we enter our next chapter: product modernisation.

One thing’s for sure, Thankyou Payroll isn’t going anywhere – only forward.