THE OPEN ROAD TO MARKET DATA
MAYSTREET
THE CHALLENGE
After eight years in business, MayStreet, a financial technology company specializing in delivering high-quality market data to investors, was no longer a startup. On the cusp of greatness, it had outgrown its initial brand, requiring a refresh that would signify that this was a firm at the level of industry giants like Bloomberg and Refinitiv. In addition, the company needed a robust marketing plan that would help it continue to raise awareness for the brand while also feeding leads to the growing sales organization.
THE STRATEGY
MayStreet solves the problems of legacy technology for its clients, leveraging the cloud and other modern tools to do so. Although the firm’s approach to technology is one of the most sophisticated on Wall Street, we encouraged MayStreet to streamline the marketed product portfolio to include just three basic components. This enabled us to communicate a simpler, unified story that can be readily understood by time-poor senior executives and non-specialist media rather than overwhelming them with technological complexity.
All of this led to a readily understandable analogy: MayStreet was like the Google Maps of market data. A way to navigate huge amounts of information and lead you to the right data-driven decisions, all in a user-friendly way. In other words, MayStreet showed the way forward. And of course, MayStreet’s name (which was selected because the firm initially had an office on May Street in London) fitted this allegory perfectly.
EXECUTION
Conceiving MayStreet’s platform as a form of GPS navigation opened up an array of creative possibilities. We developed a full branding scheme — from logo, fonts and color palette to graphic style and animation — that tied to this concept, serving as the foundation for assets such as MayStreet’s website, collateral, pitch materials and social media. The unique visual brand of MayStreet was matched with a clear voice that avoided technological jargon and zeroed in on the benefits of MayStreet’s platform from the users’ point of view. Overlaid on this was a marketing strategy focused on being user-centric at all times, with media relations (providing easily understood market data to media), thought-leadership (laying out a clear strategy for SIP reform) and digital (publishing resources for the C++ development community) efforts all supporting the approach.
RESULTS
“Forefront has been transformative for our business,” says co-founder and CEO Patrick Flannery. “Our brand is now a major point of strength, and the PR, digital marketing and content program that supports it has had a direct and meaningful impact on our sales efforts and revenue growth.”
