How To Market Your New Brand Identity

How Do I Market My New Brand?

So now that you’ve completed your rebrand, how will you let everyone know about it? If you’ve done this right you will go into your rebrand was a full content calendar and marketing plan ready to launch the same day your new website launches.

Look at the Whole Picture

We mapped out a very strategic rebrand calendar for all the tasks leading up to launch, and as a part of that, we also completed a strategic marketing campaign and content calendar for the year following our rebrand. This can be quite a bit of work. You have to look into your business strategy as well as your brand identity. For example, if you reevaluated your core values, your service offerings, or your product offerings as a part of your rebrand, then you have a lot of new information to tell your clients – much more than just showing them a new logo.

The Guts of your Rebrand

So let’s dig into your rebrand. As we looked at our company as a whole, we decided to evaluate our core values, our service offerings, as well as our verticals, or personas. Each of these ended up leading to at least one new campaign over the next year. This gives us time for a specific strategy to tell our customers all about us and helped us to prioritize our messaging.

Some of the questions we asked ourselves, which might help you in this regard are as follows:

• Are we happy with our current clients?
• What types of clients do we not have that we wish we did?
• What clients do we have currently that won’t fit our culture after our rebrand?
• What are some clients or industry’s we’ve never gone after before but want to go after?
• What are we committed to? What are our values, individually? (as this then builds a brand)
• What is our favorite part of our workday?
• What is our leave favorite part of our workday?
• In which areas do we consider ourselves to be experts?
• In which areas do we need significant growth?
• What new skills would we like to learn this year?
• What skills are most valuable to us right now?
• Is our industry growing and changing, or stagnant?
• What is the long-term economic disposition of our industry? Of our clients?

This list is merely a sun in a galaxy of stars, and therefore limitless. Some of these questions we got off web searches (as you may have found this article), some came up through business strategy sessions utilizing Scaling Up, and others came up in random conversations.

Either way, we took a good hard look at our business from the inside out. Then we began to map out what we wanted to talk to our prospects about over the next year.

Campaign Strategy

Up until now, we have not spent any money on marketing. We didn’t want to waste any money on a non-strategic campaign that was merely temporary and not built to gain the business long-term growth. Throughout the last year of our rebrand process, we have a really good idea of where our business is headed and now feel that we can strategically market ourselves.

What we have found is that this merely looks like sharing our experience with potentially interested parties! We’ve found that the most successful brands at marketing online are really just giving away information. This increases credibility as well expertise in the industry. We have mapped out our campaigns over the next year to mimic this flow by documenting everything we’ve learned over the past year, and spreading the wealth to the masses!

I won’t tell you what every campaign is, I don’t want to give away the farm, plus they are always subject to change as we learn more, but I will explain what we are marketing and why we made those decisions.

We first decided to share our experience with – completing a rebrand! This article is a piece of that campaign! We thought, what better way to dive in and digest everything we just learned and experienced than to write about it. This campaign was launched right around the time of the announcement email about our new name – Bolt Goodly. This campaign consists of two announcement emails (one for current clients, one for everyone else), various articles, and new landing pages.

In order for all of these items to launch on time, we were working on them for weeks in advance. And to be perfectly honest…I wrote most of them in the final week before launch! This is not ideal, I will tell you now. But realize that you will run into all sorts of problems, blockages, etc. that may delay your calendar. I knew this, had a plan and got behind anyways! So sometimes you just have to roll with the punches =)

That being said, every other campaign for the rest of the year is mapped out so that we are launching a campaign every month, while simultaneously working on another one and adjusting the one we launched in the previous week.

Now you may be asking, what do I launch and when? Well, that’s where the real strategy comes in! Through our series of questions, we asked ourselves, we now know the two most important things to know before you can market anything:

✓ What do I want to say?

✓ Who do I want to say it to?

Depending on your industry, some campaigns, along with the answers to the questions above should be apparent as to what they are and when they launch. For example, anyone in the retail industry should consider their Q4/holiday campaign. This entire quarter can make or break a retail entity. There are many opportunities through Black Friday and other holiday sales to launch sales campaigns, new products, or another special.

We’ve also considered other holidays throughout the year where we might have an offer or a service that applies. Beyond the actual Gregorian calendar, we also look at times of year that are relevant to our vertical markets.

For example, we work with a lot of nonprofits and they tend to have extra money to unload at the end of the fiscal year or a new budget and money to spend at the beginning on the fiscal year. So we will market ourselves and our new brand specifically to nonprofits around the turn of the year.

Campaign Calendar

Once we’ve figured out all of the above sections, we mapped out our campaign calendar for the year, which also included a content audit of our inventory.

We have a campaign launching every month and for the 2 months leading up to it, I’m writing content, mapping it out then launching. I’m writing for one of mapping the other 1 out and launching another campaign.

This rebranding campaign is basically offering people like you a little insight into what this might look like for someone else. Hopefully, I’ve shared some nuggets of wisdom that may help you with your process or while you’re doing research.

If you want some more information on our campaign strategy, we’d love to brainstorm with you! Drop us a line.