When going through a re-branding, many companies describe the process as aligning their brand with their target market and reflecting a new focus in the company. In our case, the re-branding process is an outgrowth of a desire to fix some mistakes we made when we launched the company. That initiative led us to focus on some important branding issues that will help us achieve our growth objectives in the future.
What's in a name?
In our case, not very much. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare said, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." The biggest problem with our old name (Rapidan Strategies) was that it didn't give a clue as to what we did as a business. The Rapidan part of the name refers to a famous trout stream in the mountains of Virginia outside our headquarters in metropolitan Washington, DC. As one client aptly pointed out to me: "that means something to you, it doesn't mean anything to your potential customers."
We had developed some brand traction in our target market as Rapidan Strategies. Not wanting to throw the baby out with the bath water, we decided on our new name of Rapidan Inbound. In our re-branding process, that gave us the best of both worlds. We kept Rapidan in our name, which is familiar to many in our target market.
The reference to Inbound truly reflects not just what we do as a business, but what we believe in as a philosophy. We don't think outbound sales tactics aren't important. Far from it - they are an essential part of an integrated marketing stratey. But we do believe that growing a company is difficult, if not impossible, without a strong inbound marketing channel that integrates with and supports your other marketing channels.
Design to support our branding
We thought it was very important to have the design elements of our site and marketing support our branding. We engaged an excellent branding company, Brandca, out of Bogotá, Colombia to help us with our design. The first manifestation of their help is the logo shown above. It was the option that I thought best represented what our company does for clients.
The next step in our design re-branding is a new website. Brandca is working on it now and I'm blown away by what I've seen. It is a quantum leap forward in how our design will support our business objectives. We will be rolling it out shortly.
Our search for design help led us to find a new branding partner who will be working with us to provide these services to our customers. We liked Brandca so much we decided to partner with them. More to come, but Brandca's CEO, Laura Amézquita will serve on our advisory board and serve as our Chief Branding and Design Officer. I'm really excited to work more closely with Laura, she's already doing great work for our clients.
More leads. Better relationships. Results.
As part of our branding, we wanted to come up with a tagline that quickly communicated our value proposition. The new tagline is More leads. Better relationships. Results. This what we do for our customers.
The first reason most companies cite as their reason to do inbound marketing is to generate more sales leads. Generating leads is our raison d'etre. We want to make sure potential customers know that is what we do.
Another important part our mission is to help our customers use social media and content marketing to establish better relationships. We help our customers be helpful with prospects, customers and people that they don't even know yet. In a world where the average buyer completes 57% of her sales process before ever contacting a salesperson, you need to start building better relationships by creating content that helps people when they're doing pre-purchase research.
Inbound marketing analytics measure the effectiveness of everything you do. We're in the business of producing results, whether we like it or not. We know that and devote 100% of our efforts into producing results.
So there you have it: More leads. Better relationships. Results.
We look forward to rolling out the rest of our re-branding project shortly. In the meantime, we wanted to share with you the process we were going through so that you will have a better idea of what we do and what our value proposition is.
