How IRISS Used Visme to Cut an Expensive Carbon Footprint with Immersive Digital Content
GaggleAMP is an employee advocacy software solution designed to empower companies in encouraging and supporting their more active employees on social media, allowing them to authentically share the company’s message. These messages can be disseminated across platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Ivan has witnessed the product's entire evolution, while Michelle, initially a client, introduced her previous company to GaggleAMP before joining the company herself. This unique perspective places her both in front of and behind the product.
Being a company dedicated to providing brand advocacy solutions, their primary audience comprises marketers who oversee the employee advocacy programs alongside sales leaders or human resources professionals within the communication department, utilizing brand advocacy for recruitment and attracting potential hires.
Their focus largely lies on the daily user—those managing the program, curating content, integrating it into GaggleAMP and ensuring its distribution to employees. Additionally, the budget holder is crucial in guaranteeing GaggleAMP's return on investment for the company.
Their team consists of 30 employees spread across marketing, sales, customer service, product development and revenue teams.
When Michelle initially joined GaggleAMP as Director of Marketing, she immediately collaborated closely with the sales team.
She quickly observed that the client-facing documents produced by the sales team lacked a sophisticated incorporation of the company's brand elements in their design.
This prompted Michelle and her team to develop a comprehensive branding strategy, not only for marketing but for implementation across the entire organization. The aim was to ensure a consistent brand experience at every touchpoint of the customer journey, including UX/UI for product users, interactions on the website for potential clients and engagement with marketing or sales materials.
“I wanted to get everybody on a clear and consistent template that was brand and marketing-approved so we could stop sharing sub-par items. My goal at the end of the day was that everyone had an elevated experience when they encountered the brand,” Michelle remarks.
As they began implementing their branding strategy, they needed a tool that would not only help accommodate its execution but also maintain and support their overall design process.
“We started to think: Okay, how can we make all the departments adopt this process and learn how to create their own presentations without having our design team put their hand on every presentation?” Michelle asks.
During their research, Ivan discovered limitations in automating the company's style guide within their current software and encountered challenges in easily replicating or customizing templates for the team to use with ease. This required the design team to create entirely new templates for different projects, roles or clients.
Michelle faced multiple considerations when choosing a tool. She needed a product for the sales team that would ensure they stayed within brand design guidelines while maintaining brand consistency.
They found their solution in the discovery of Visme. Michelle introduced it to Ivan, and both instantly embraced the tool. Visme features a built-in brand guide area that could be applied to any project within their shared workspace. Within minutes, Ivan effortlessly uploaded the company’s font, colors, and branding elements—far more easily than with previously attempted software.
“It has a simple setup for the branding, but everything that’s necessary to create is in place. Then we found out that we can save our assets inside Visme, which included images, video–every kind of resource we had, which was a big win for us,” Ivan states.
Moreover, Visme's user-friendly onboarding process enabled him to quickly grasp essential tools and elements, which reduced any steep learning curve that can be anticipated when starting with a new platform.
Once the branding setup was complete, Ivan went straight to creating branded templates for the team's use. Given the design team's tight schedule, allowing minimal room for extensive presentation edits or creation, streamlining this template process became crucial.
The team’s main objective was addressing the bigger issue at hand: the sales team's presentation creation. Designing these presentations alone would take Ivan hours, even days, of considering the demands and feedback, leading to bottlenecks in the workflow. Creating standardized presentation templates became essential for efficiency in both the design and sales departments.
Once the templates were standardized, Ivan noticed a significant decrease in requests for new templates. Templates were easily adapted and used by the sales team, so while Ivan occasionally gets requests for one or two slides, the frequency has mostly stayed the same. This highlights how Visme's user-friendly interface supports seamless adaptation by non-designers.
The design team has already created 20 templates, which have been used more than 500 times. Each replicated template empowers creators to take charge of the design process without starting from scratch, straying from the brand or heavily relying on the design team for extensive modifications.
Made with Visme Presentation Maker
“We just released the templates, and the team was replicating it and using it without either taking away time from design with request or edits, which is another big win we found when using Visme,” Ivan states.
Before Visme, Ivan was tasked with creating 6-8 presentations daily, but now that’s dropped to zero. This change represents one of the most significant returns on investment for Ivan and his design team—they've reclaimed valuable time. With this newfound time, he can dedicate efforts to marketing assets, product development requests and more.
However, the impact of increased efficiency wasn’t limited to the design team. For the customer success and sales teams, time is a crucial asset, especially when managing clients, having intermittent meetings and completing other tasks.
Previously, creating a 10-15 slide presentation would take up to 3-4 hours, possibly even longer. Now, they can swiftly locate a template, personalize it, and have it ready to share with a client within 10-15 minutes.
“Visme allowed us to provide a design process for sales that helped their velocity moving forward, all while eliminating additional tasks being done or sent to design. It was fantastic,” Michelle remarks.
GaggleAMP conducted a Visme onboarding training primarily for their customer success and sales team, although it took a while, as old habits die hard. However, within six months, the entire team had successfully transitioned. Visme is now an integral part of their internal onboarding process, where new employees receive training on the company’s primary tools.
During onboarding sessions for new clients, employees or designers unfamiliar with Visme, they receive instructions on how to follow brand and company guidelines to accomplish their objectives.
“These instructions embody our principles—how we think, where we're headed and what we aim to achieve. They must be reflected on every slide that we create and we evaluate this constantly,” Ivan adds.
For new employees transitioning from an enterprise space where decks had strict modification restrictions, the introduction of Visme brought an appreciation for its flexibility. Now, they value the ability to make modifications that better suit the end customer's needs and preferences.
“For new employees, once they’re logged in to Visme, they get the gist of it pretty quickly. They can find folders set up on the side of their dashboard easily, and everyone has their main templates nicely organized for them. We usually provide a main template if you need it, clone it, and put it in your folder,” Michelle states.
Now GaggleAMP predominantly uses Visme for onboarding with their Ready, Start, Launch guide for new clients. Their Customer Implementation Manager, Dean Agen, utilizes Visme as part of his initial communications when clients transition from sales to customer success.
This ebook template serves as the ’source of truth’ for common strategy and implementation questions and is provided to every new customer. Many clients who go through our implementation process refer to this long-term, even once they are out of implementation.
The deck undergoes annual refreshes to support changes to the implementation talk track. This process and template has greatly helped their team by allowing their non-CS-supported clients to the more concise strategy side without having to rely solely on a customer success manager.
Made with Visme Presentation Maker
As a small, 100% bootstrapped company, GaggleAMP always has to approach problems strategically and with a focus on saving money. For them, branding isn't just a means to differentiate from competitors; it's integral to crafting a seamless customer journey.
They actively seize opportunities to preserve and uphold GaggleAMP’s brand, ensuring a unique and consistent customer experience from the initial discovery of the company to the moment customers are on board.
Their branding and mission are intricately woven into the core principles of the company, influencing the design process across all departments.
When working with Visme, the typical workflow starts with their base templates—branded templates regularly utilized by the sales, marketing, or customer success teams. Teams duplicate these templates, tailor them to their needs and easily hide slides they don't require.
Moreover, whenever the company introduces new features or widgets for inclusion in presentations, Michelle can swiftly update these elements within the base templates. This ensures instant updates across multiple presentations.
“The placeholders for the images are already present in the templates; it’s simply a matter of me uploading the new image and dropping it in. Not having to go to Ivan and say, “Hey, can you go change an image or text? Now I have the ability to say, ‘I know I can change these things by myself, and it’s pretty quick and simple,’” Michelle remarks.
While Michelle, like most Visme users on her team, has the option to make changes independently, she consistently aims to maintain template integrity when employees interact with standardized templates. Through Visme, she effortlessly locks elements, widgets, text and slides. Additionally, she can modify user permissions, ensuring that no unauthorized changes are made to these slides.
“These little nuanced things within Visme have made it really super simple for us to not go too far off the brand, but also allow sales to have the tools that they need to keep everything moving quickly,” Michelle adds.
Meanwhile, Michelle utilizes Visme for presentations and annual board reports, leveraging a variety of templates to create customized reports.
Occasionally, Michelle and Ivan will do an annual update on their standardized templates and content when a new member joins or leaves the team. They may need a custom slide or to update company/product information or assets.
Their next goal is to ensure that they’re able to accommodate the evolution of their design process with emerging trends while maintaining brand consistency across all projects and templates, especially during the launch of new products.
Ivan loves Visme’s animation features, especially transitions and time-saving functionalities like copying and pasting animations between slides while maintaining the exact settings across presentations. Additionally, the option to adjust illustration colors to match their brand has been instrumental until they could create and upload their own assets.
Michelle, as a non-designer, appreciates Visme's grouping function, enabling quick changes without designer intervention. She saves these modifications as blocks and replicates them across templates for efficiency.
Another favorite Visme feature for her is the ability to add interactivity, such as linking specific content to blocks, pages or items. This process ensures that if a potential client or customer needs additional information, like a website or to book a call with the right personnel, they can do so without leaving the presentation.
By leveraging Visme's dynamic content creation platform, you can find a seamless solution to your design and content creation problems.
Visme isn’t a content creation tool; it’s a workspace and workflow platform for designers and non-designers alike, allowing you and your team to create and maintain onboard client-facing content.
Interested to see what Visme can do for you? See for yourself. Request a demo or give Visme a free test run.
Design visual brand experiences for your business whether you are a seasoned designer or a total novice.
Connect with Sales
