As a digital marketing agency, we are often tasked with recreating the brand for an existing or new client. When we are creating a brand for a customer, we go through a series of designs, explore messaging, and capture new photography; all of which will be the catalyst of your new look and brand.
Where Do You Start When Creating a Brand?
The struggle is real and can be frustrating and time consuming, especially if you are doing it for your small business. When creating a new brand, it is important to research your target audience as well as your competition. Knowing your target audience and creating persona’s will help you establish your brand and brand messaging. Conveying the right message to the right audience should be the ultimate outcome. This will also help you narrow your audience when creating your digital marketing and advertising campaigns.
The Importance of a Complete Brand
It is best if you review the “personality” and focus of the brand identity. Having the right business name and tag line (slogan) is as important as the look (colors and fonts). Choosing the right colors and fonts should be tested for readability and “pop”.
Creating and recreating brands has been one of our core services. As a full-service agency, our clients require us to push traffic to their websites. Once prospects arrive, are we properly conveying the brand and message of the company in a new fresh way? Keeping an audience engaged is more important now than it has been in the past because you only have a few seconds to either capture their attention or risk being passed over.
Once the brand is complete, it is time to apply the new brand across your business.
ICG next is an innovative industry leading financial advisory firm. When designing the companies new name and logo brand, the priority was to take the existing name (Intellectual Capital Group) and replace it with a simpler name that meant something to the clients, as well as the owners of the company. The award-winning logo design showcases the individual letters in the graphic portion. Colors were chosen as classic white, charcoal, and black, with a touch of red.
The C&L Services’ brand has changed many times over the years. As the company expanded services beyond just street sweeping, the name changed from C&L Sweeper to C&L Services. The tag line has also evolved to be specifically focused on Total Pavement Maintenance. The colors were adjusted to be more vibrant, and the 50 Years (with the stars) was added which establishes the brand as experienced.
Creating Our Own Brand
In setting out to create the new John Rod and Co. website, we knew we wanted something great as a lead-in so visitors knew exactly what we could do as a digital marketing agency. We wanted our new website to have some of the latest bells and whistles to keep visitors engaged. We also wanted the website to act like a portfolio so customers could see some of our work.
A Short List of Must Haves:
Dynamic Video Intro – People need to know right away what a company is selling. For many of our clients, we have created dynamic video introductions to better engage the audience.
Gathering Assets – Content, messaging, copywriting, photography, video and branding should be well thought out and organized before the website development is started. For the Tileworks by Rich & Sons and the ICG next websites, all content, copy, messaging, logos, branding, video and photography were created by the John Rod & Co. team.
Social Media – When tracking our clients analytics, we see a direct correlation between when we post on social media and how it impacts website traffic. Once you know what platforms your audience is engaged with, create those social pages and post on them weekly to maximize your brand exposure. Do not saturate your audience and bombard them with non-original content on social media.
Blogging – Google loves new content. Creating blog stories about your company, your services and your products is a great way to climb to the top of the search engines organically. Creating original content and optimizing your posts will generate more traffic that is sure to generate more prospects and ultimately more sales.
If you are a small to midsize business struggling with you rebrand, we feel your pain. For more information about John Rod and Co. and how we can help you with branding and messaging, click here.
