Introduction to rebranding
Probably you, like us, have come across such a modern and up-to-date word “rebranding”. Or you will soon go deeper into the depths of this concept. Why? Well, because the development of each business requires the company at some point to decide on rebranding in order to have a vision adequate to the market. And the market is something that is changing and evolving rapidly.
According to experts, once every 7 years (and in some cases more often) a business has to rebrand. The reasons for this can be quite varied. Including, for example, repositioning the company and its vision so that it reflects a change in its focus, differentiating the company from the competition, updating and updating the corporate image in order to reach a specific target audience, expand business goals or rebrand due to acquisition or merger.
Sometimes companies want to present a new image in order to manage their reputation, to distance themselves from problems of the past, or the goal is to rebrand to take advantage of current and popular trends, such as new technologies and more.
What does “rebranding” mean?
In short, rebranding means creating a new look and a new feel for an already created product, service or company. Usually, the purpose of rebranding is to influence the consumer feeling by breathing new life into the brand and changing it so that it looks more modern and relevant to customer needs.
So, it’s time to move from theory to practice. Understand why rebranding is a word that makes designers, project managers and copywriters – and your entire team – shudder, even before you can finish the last few letters of it, tell you our story and share our story with you. experience in the “magic” process of rebranding.
Why the word rebranding is shocking
Because it’s hard. Because it requires a lot of effort, resources and time. Because in the digital world, things get old in minutes, and if you’re not ready to work at the same pace, you’ll fall behind quickly.
And here is the place to tell you the story of the rebranding of our site. Why our story? Well, because it is personal, experienced, suffered and we dare say – successful. We have come a long and emotional way in acknowledging the need for new “clothes”, new interiors and new experiences to offer guests on our website. In addition, we have learned a lot and we want to share the conclusions and lessons. Because, although it was not easy, we are proud of what we have achieved.
Rebranding – the beginning
The first thing you actually encounter when rebranding a site is all the shocking, huge amount of textual and visual content that needs to be updated and sorted. Keep your composure, put the contents aside for a moment if you don’t want to feel like you’re in a messy closet, and think about the structure.
Harness common sense, building the foundations of a successful site
We did so. We laid the foundations of the site, focusing on the structure, distribution and logic of the user experience. We asked ourselves a series of questions, the answers to which gradually began to outline the map of our website. We asked ourselves:
- What is the story and the message we want to convey?
- How to arrange the plot so that it is fascinating and interesting to watch?
- What is the design line that will suit this plot?
- How to guide a person through history in the most intuitive way and provide him with what he is looking for, as quickly and easily as possible?
- What are the good practices we observe and want to implement?
- How to make the story attractive enough for both search engines and the searcher?
So we were able to sift through the most important things we want to say about Smarkethink, and reduce them to a few basic services that set us apart and that we want to show visitors to the site. We clarified the concept of the slider or as we like to call it – the first impression. We decided to use easy-to-understand short messages. They were accompanied by a beautiful vision that both says what we offer and betrays our style and taste.
Then came the main “dishes” in the menu, or the navigation bar with all the pages that we had to put “in order”. We graded them according to the method of empathy. We put ourselves in the user’s shoes and played out different storylines. And so on until we get to the one that each of us pointed out as the most intuitive.
Here is the final arrangement:
1. About us
The feeling of human presence is very important in the strategy for building a brand and the visitor of the site should remain unobtrusive with this feeling. Whether it is a product or, as in our case, an agency that offers a comprehensive marketing service. That was the reason we put the About Us page first. We are convinced that human presence and intervention will be increasingly valued, especially due to the fact that the future goes in the direction of robotizing communications and automating processes.
2. Services
Of course, the Smarkethink site is a business site, so it was logical to put our skills second. It describes the things we are good at and what we offer our customers. The services are our unique handwriting, our specific routine and professionalism and that is why we gave them the second place in our unique “ranking”.
What followed was the task of what to bring to third place. But don’t think that we haven’t gone without controversy in the meantime. We discussed passionately and with arguments whether we should give the second place to the projects, but in the end the logic prevailed. And the logic was this: we thought about how we would present ourselves if we signed up, for example, to participate in the Olympic Games. We will say: “My name is Smarkethink, I am a competitor in the discipline” Comprehensive Marketing Services “, two-time champion and winner of gold medals in the last competitions in which I participated.” In other words, first you introduce yourself by name, then you say what you can, and finally the proof. Thus, by logic, the third place was given to our implemented projects. They are the result of the trust that has been cast in us, but also of the order placed in us, which is in fact proof of the correctness of previous claims about our skills and expert team.
And if we go back to the slider for a moment – it serves the purpose of presenting ourselves through the skills we have.
3. Projects
So, here we come to the part where we talk about the middle ground. As we said above – our projects are our pride, but above all they are the mirror of the services we offer. The reflection of our creativity, of the passion we work with, of our professionalism. And here the next question arose – how to present these projects without bothering with too many details, but still highlight the skills we have woven into their implementation. The solution came naturally – we arranged the projects so that each of the services we offer can be viewed in an already implemented project with the necessary details, photos, a short case story about the task and the results.
Of course, not everything is presented in the “Projects” section yet and we have a lot of work to do. The page should be supplemented with a huge list of completed projects that we have behind us, but this will happen after each of them goes through the appropriate cosmetic procedures, put on their new clothes and present themselves in the same context as everyone else. What is behind all this? Processing the texts, selecting photos, placing these components in the unified line of design that we follow, and of course – all prepared with great attention to detail and love for our work.
4. Blog
For obvious reasons, the blog is the heart of every web organism, so we logically decided to put it right after the projects. Work is our passion, so we like to share our thoughts on marketing and advertising, we like to tell interesting stories that we experience around the implementation of projects, we like to “create” stories. And at the same time we believe that we can be useful to you – our customers and visitors to our site, with our shared experience and conclusions. To see for yourself, see a list of important things to do if you are going to rebrand your site (at the end of the article).
And last but not least, through the materials we write, we achieve several important goals for us. On the one hand, while creating blog materials, we explore various marketing issues, new trends and good practices in depth and train ourselves. On the other hand, we help customers understand and realize the essence of some of the services and tools we offer and use.
The blog must have added value, and if we can achieve that – Google will reward you with traffic and conversions. However, let’s not forget that this is an algorithm, and it is more mathematics than subjective beliefs.
5. Contacts
Here that we somehow imperceptibly reached the contacts. Of course, a corporate website must have a “Contacts” page. However, what its logic will be depends entirely on you. Depending on the content you put on this page, you can serve different purposes. What does this mean? For example, if you work only for foreign markets, but you are based in Sofia, do not put a map with the location of your business – it would only waste someone’s time trying to find out exactly where you are positioned. If you do not like to talk on the phone – do not write a contact phone number. Do you have a common email that many colleagues follow at the same time? Then create a contact form, the information from which to receive this email and to be constantly monitored.
At Smarkethink, for example, we love office guests, so we focused on the address and the map. Of course, we did not deprive ourselves of any way to contact us, because we know that different people have different preferences. You may be surprised, but we even wrote down our invoice details. While this may seem like a practice from the past, it does a great job. Instead of providing this data every time we communicate, we simply provide a link to our site, which in addition brings us new visits, and why not a potential opportunity for a new customer. Needless to say, one click is enough to get the user within our retargeting.
The content
So we laid the foundations and built the structure of the site and it’s time to return to the content. It was much easier to stand in front of the cluttered wardrobe, because we saw the place of each “garment” and we had prepared the hangers. We divided the tasks, took out all the content, made an inventory so we wouldn’t miss anything, and started archiving. We shortened the texts and corrected the statement so that it was in tune with our rejuvenated site. We dusted the photos and synchronized them with the design line. And … we started pouring.
We parted with texts that were no longer relevant or seemed too long. Do it out of respect for the time of the person who will read them. One of the most common difficulties in the process of creating texts is to adhere to the rule of length and content. Excessively descriptive texts, long complex sentences and intricate introductions to very simple facts are guaranteed to turn off the reader.
Here is the place to say that at this stage our site was still on a test server, so we could work in peace. When we cleared the final details, the breakages and everything we didn’t like, we were ready to transfer it to the old domain. In general, this procedure takes some time, so we advise everyone – do not forget to put “coming soon” on the domain address until the new site is transferred.
And finally – as promised, we show a useful list of things that you should not forget if the decision to rebrand a site has already been made.
- Make a copy of your old site (Back Up). And back it up so you can access it at any time.
- Make a list of all the pages, ie. url address. This will help you after you transfer your new site to the old domain address.
- Make a list of backlinks or at least the most popular ones.
- Write page titles & meta descriptions for all your pages.
- Create two types of sitemaps – for users and for search engines.
- Make page 404 again – for both users and search engines.
- Review and compile a robots.txt file.
- Take care of broken links.
And if you can not do any of the above – you can contact us for advice and help.
Don’t be afraid of rebranding. Embark boldly on this task, but with thought and strategy. And we wish you success and offer help!
