Getting Personal for Keisha Mabry’s New Website
Keisha Mabry has a lot of friends.
Maybe more friends than anyone we’ve ever met. (Don’t believe us? Check out her TEDx Talk, “What I Learned from Meeting 100 People in 100 Days.”)
Making friends is a big part of Keisha’s personal and professional brand. She’s all about helping people make connections to become stronger entrepreneurs and, well, better human beings.
From the moment we met the author, motivational speaker and self-described connector, we knew this would be a very different project.
True to heyFriend, her self-made brand, she instantly felt like a friend. And while it made for lively conversation, it also led to some interesting challenges in the messaging and design departments.
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Like most of our clients, Keisha came to us looking for help fine-tuning her message. She wanted a new brand and lead-generating website to help her get in the door with more big-name companies (although, to be honest, she had already been pretty successful at this on her own).
But unlike most of our clients, she wasn’t selling high-tech software or big-ticket industrial machines. She wasn’t even selling financial services or architecture expertise.
Instead, her personal story needed to be front and center.
Keisha’s goal with her new site was to catch the eye of large, even Fortune 500 companies, for her motivational speaking and coaching business.
She also wanted to promote her other, more personal efforts, including mastHERclass, a yearly conference for entrepreneurs and an online course for women who want to build their own speaking businesses.
Balancing act.
But we asked ourselves: How do you make a credible, professional brand and website for someone who feels like a friend? How do you lean into the specifics of a B2B sales pitch – things like benefits and calls to action – without losing things like personality and friendliness?
We found the answer, not in downplaying Keisha’s bright personality, but in letting it shine.
Keisha’s authenticity is what makes her great. We used some strategic copy and design to balance it all out.
Brightening things up a bit.
Even on the B2B speaking circuit, you’ll find a lot of sites tend toward reserved, conservative colors. We knew that would never work for Keisha.
We updated her existing brand, adding a fresh color palette and typefaces that are professional and fun. From business cards to social media to the web, the design brings a new level of consistency to her brand.
Everything about this site puts Keisha’s openness and friendliness front and center.
It’s grounded by a benefit-driven headline – but the supporting copy and calls to action throughout echo her tone and personality.
Simple, clear brand messaging draws people to her three core programs directly from the homepage. Her followers will immediately recognize heyFRIEND, mastHERclass and diySPEAKER, and new friends learn about how her presentations and programs can help grow their businesses.
But Keisha’s site needed to also appeal to B2B audiences, so we took a much more conventional approach across the top, showing Keisha’s buttoned-up side. The site is divided into key sections – programs, bio, blog, events, shop and contact – following tradition for B2B sites.
Throughout the pages, company logos and testimonials drive home Keisha’s prowess as a motivational speaker in-demand from top companies and organizations across the country.
Again, it’s all about striking a balance – clear, concise navigation guiding people through stories and promises that are far more personal.
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We crafted the messaging to be reflective of Keisha’s ownable, energetic tone that you heard in her TEDx talk – while making sure we kept the focus on how she can help companies and the professionals in her audience realize their potential.
Here’s to new friends.
Of course, as is our custom around here, we wanted to make it easy for Keisha to keep the site up to date. It’s built on the latest version of WordPress, so she can easily add her own images, blog posts and events without having to write a single line of code.
Even in the midst of COVID-19, when conferences look much different than they used to, Keisha has been pushing forward to build her business. She’s spoken at several virtual events, and is continuing to publish helpful content like blog posts.
We’re thrilled to have created such a usable, flexible website for our new friend, Keisha, and we can’t wait to see what she does next.
