My assignment from Sassy-pants Knox is to write a wrap-it-all-up blog to end a 7-part series about our rebranding. Here’s a last thought or two for you and then we’ll just move on about the business of being the new us.
We struggled with our process. Everybody always says that rebranding is the hardest thing to do for a creative company, and, they’re right. But for us there was one thing that was fundamentally wrong as we moved into the content organization phase of the work. We had misalignment on a number of fronts about how to handle client work on our site. Here were the positions:
Creative Director: I want only the best work on the site, and only for major brands.
Media Director: I want the best performing work on the site no matter what it looks like and how old it is.
New Business: I want everything on the site; every site we’ve ever launched, every industry we’ve ever worked in and every piece of creative we’ve ever done.
Me: I want it to be easy to get new client work on the site so we can promote our expertise and company.
For a company whose tagline is “simple. clear. focused on results.” aligning all of this was impossible…until we had an a-ha moment in the conference room.
One of our goals is to be thought leaders in our industry and our blog is the main tool we use toward that strategy. So the a-ha moment came when we said…
What if we thought of our site in two major sections; the portfolio side and the publishing side. The portfolio side would stay focused innovative work, for clients where we have done a variety of projects that showcases our media capabilities, as well as our web design and development work. For those clients we would design compelling experiences using an editorial style that was engaging. So far we have done 3 feature stories for Tennessee Tourism, Vanderbilt University Medical Center and CMT.
The publishing side would be based on a blog that was flexible in the kind of content it could handle. We would blog about every client and include how-we-did-it style posts, along with images that represent the process and the end result. Blogs are easier to get out the door and it would allow us to post our work quicker. You can see an example of this on the post about The Frist Center’s new website.
This publishing side also has the ability to promote our guides, of which there will be more! And to promote upcoming speaking engagements and pimp ourselves out a bit.
This one decision clarified the strategy and enabled us to move on, while being true to our company tagline and our core values. It recommitted us to branding and publishing and our pageviews have doubled since the launch. Our social followers had an immediate increase and those audiences are continuing to grow. That’s a good sign that the strategy is working.
Tell us what you think. I’d like to hear similar stories of how a single decision was able to help you move on with a project that could have taken you down.
And thanks for listening as we rattled on about us. We know it’s not all about us, although it is a little about us since it’s our website and all.
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