Strategica Partners

Building brand stories, targeting the right audience with the right message, and expanding a business’s reach takes a lot of research and marketing know-how. Strategica Partners, a go-to-market consulting firm for software and education companies, provides these services to its clients in spades.

But providing all this expertise takes a lot of time and coordination, not to mention the many different types of visuals that Strategica’s teams produce to make sure clients understand what to do and where to go next. 

With Lucidchart, Strategica has been able to save an average of 14 hours per project, but that’s not all. Lucidchart has helped Strategica streamline their processes, produce cohesive deliverables, and collaborate more effectively, all of which empowers their clients to execute on their ambitious visions.

Streamline processes and focus on deliverables

Strategica’s line of work is often visual––their marketing collateral involves website mockups, brand designs, and reports with graphics. These visuals need to accurately reflect Strategica’s recommendations while still being simple enough so that they can get input as soon as possible. 

With Lucidchart, Strategica’s teams focus on the essentials of the deliverable. In other more complex or extensive design platforms like Photoshop, “it's not always obvious what is actually driving the output the client cares to see, so more time is invested in color gradients and creative shapes that don't generally drive value to the client,” CEO and founder Rebecca Shaddix points out.

Instead, they can get that mockup done quickly and have it look clean and professional without investing so much time in the design before they even get feedback from the client. 

Rebecca underscores this functionality: “That's something that we like about the iterative process of being able to work within Lucidchart. We don't necessarily have to hand over deliverables for feedback all at once that could have been optimized in any number of ways. Being able to have multiple stakeholders eye it and give input along the process really improves the quality of the output and client satisfaction with it.”

Create cohesive, exciting visuals

To really get clients on board and catch the vision for their new marketing strategy, Strategica goes for a “less is more” approach, opting for visually engaging presentations as opposed to lengthy, text-heavy, and ultimately unactionable reports. 

They’ve tapped into Lucidchart’s design range to put together mockups, designs, and other graphics that draw clients in without overwhelming them. “It's finding that perfect hybrid of ‘it's exciting and inspiring to look at but obviously not a suggestion for all of your marketing collateral’ and to be able to iterate and share and handoff really fluidly,” Rebecca underlines. “That's been a great huge case for us.” The power of Lucidchart is the power of one diagram that lays everything out––rather than having five and forcing your audience to make the connection between them all.

Operating on one platform from start to finish creates a better end product and a better experience for the client. “[I]t makes our assets more cohesive when we're all kind of speaking the same language and using the same tool between internal presentations to external conversations,” says Rebecca. Teams create templates that standardize designs or simply borrow from previous designs using Lucidchart’s simple sharing features.

Save time

Before capitalizing on Lucidchart’s sharing and collaborative editing features, “we were kind of all over the place,” Rebecca explains. The team was using many different tools and bouncing back and forth between those tools during each project. 

For example, a website mock-up might be created in Photoshop or Sketch and shared via Frame.io, Invision, or Google Draw, but collaboration and feedback internally and from clients was still time-consuming. In addition, having to work across different platforms with limited sharing capabilities only made the handoffs internally and with clients more complicated, resulting in costly slowdowns and headaches besides.

“Realizing that we could just share directly in [Lucidchart] and edit from there was much more seamless, and it was faster,” says Rebecca. 

In fact, Strategica did the math. As previously mentioned, they save an average of 14 hours per project with Lucidchart––all from cutting out unnecessary steps in the process and working together in a central place.

Collaborate more effectively

Collaboration is at the heart of Strategica’s mission statement. It’s what differentiates them from other marketing consultants. So it’s no small matter for the CEO to say that Lucidchart has helped them collaborate even better. As she puts it, “[Lucidchart]'s great for us to communicate ideas and creative new approaches internally, so we love that.” 

And it’s not just about having multiple people work on the same project at the same time. Rebecca explains that as teams collaborate in Lucidchart, “we'll unify and align the focuses that we have to make sure that things have lined up, and then we can collaborate from there.” When each step of the project can be done in a single, streamlined workspace, the result is more effective teamwork while keeping all the tactile and creative dimensions that marketing strategy requires. 

When speaking of the benefits her company has gained from rolling out Lucidchart across all teams, Rebecca reiterates this point: “It lets us focus on the aspects that are actually important, almost as if we are sketching processes by hand but collaborating together.”

That unity and focus also translates to interactions with clients. Strategica relies on Lucidchart to share their ideas at each step of the process. At the start of a project, they work together in the platform with the client during onsite meetings. This way, they can quickly begin to build out what the client already has, which makes it easier to see what they need. Throughout the project, they share document links to get incremental feedback from the client on the different pieces of the project. When presenting to the client, they use Lucidchart’s Google Suite integration to embed diagrams into Slides.

Lucidchart also allows for detailed commenting on shapes and text in documents, so Strategica can incorporate feedback at every step. Along with Lucidchart’s sharing and collaboration features, this helps them be more responsive and makes their goal of being true collaborative partners with their clients a reality.

From creating effective, engaging visuals and designs to reducing operational noise, Lucidchart is the Swiss army knife to Strategica’s business goals––an intuitive workspace that designers and non-designers alike can easily use to drive value for clients.