Like with any of us, as your organization grows and changes, your image needs to transform with it. Refreshing and re-fueling your brand prevents rote sales messages from overshadowing the core values your customers truly connect with.

Looking to recapture that “magic” that made your company so special in the beginning? See how these five rebrand strategies can rocket your business to success.

Why Rebrand?

If you think branding is simply a matter of redoing your logo, you’re missing the point of a rebrand (and maybe the point of your brand entirely). It’s not just about how your company is perceived externally, although that is part of it.

Rebrands are for companies in or approaching a transition. The transit can be brought on by a variety of factors including:

• mergers or acquisition
• introduction of a new product
• entry into a new channel
• employee turnover
• change in ownership
• breakdown in the company’s culture
• realization that the brand has lost its original focus

More than anything, your brand is your identity. It encompasses your company core, hinges largely on values and goes far beyond what it looks and sounds like. This one move can help you move away from doctoring sales and towards creating true customer loyalty.

1. Start by Asking Questions

Have a loose brainstorming session with both seasoned and green members of your team. Those who have been around a while can give insight to the company’s roots. Newer employees may be able to offer a fresh perspective. You can also do a customer poll to get an idea of how folks are (or aren’t) relating to your brand. Listen closely to glean valuable information about their true feelings about your company and see if they can rightfully detect your core values. If not, start there.

2. Understand Where You Began

Your brand is unique, so is its backstory. Take some time to highlight the values that formed the foundation of your company. Then, make sure those are front and center in both your internal and customer-facing communications.

3. Know Where You’re Headed

You likely have a lot of smart people under your employ. Gather insights from all departments to help piece together the current state of your brand verses where you’d like to go. Map out where you are and where you want to be before you start your rebrand.

4. Approach from an Emotive Place

Differentiate your brand by connecting with customers on an emotional level.  When a company and customer share the same values and beliefs, the brand is permanently elevated and differentiated from its competitors.

5. Create a Little Intrigue

Leaving a bit to the imagination has always been an alluring way to capture one’s attention. Give customers just enough to wet their palate, encouraging them to dig a little deeper and unlock the full mystery of your brand. You could start by reeling them in with a catchy tagline or simple, yet tantalizing design. Just make sure you have an equally compelling brand story and dynamic team or product to back it up.

In the end, a rebrand has several moving pieces and parts. These five steps are only the beginning. One thing we always convey to our clients is that it’s very rare for a brand to be completely “broken.” Instead, we operate under the mindset that you can accomplish a lot with a little rediscovery and recognition of how powerful it really is. From there, it’s simply a matter of packaging it accordingly.

If you’d like some help executing an out-of-this-world rebrand, we’d love to partner up and re-fuel that engine.

Call Globe Runner and talk to a member of our creative team at 877.646.6118 or simply enter your information in our contact form and we will help you get launched.

So this one blew me away. Amazon just bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. There may have been hints that we could have seen something like this happening. In a previous blog, I talked about the Amazon Go Store in Seattle where you can go grab your food item, like a sandwich or an apple, and walk right out of the store and they will charge your Amazon Prime account.

So my real shock might have just been in the speed in which they pulled the trigger on a deal the size of this one. This acquisition says a lot of things about Amazon’s ambitious plans to me. First off, I see a much deeper connection between e-commerce retail and in-person retail being formed. Also, they will obviously have more physical locations than just the Seattle stores.

But I think the biggest takeaway from this will be the convenience factor. I’ve spoken previously about Amazon being the kings and queens of removing friction from the e-commerce experience. They were the first big platform to introduce the one button check out. They are now primed to introduce the ease of convenience that they brought to e-commerce to the food, and, more specifically, the health food industry.

What has previously been a chore for many, going to the grocery store when you are tired, is now potentially removed. Specifically on the non-perishable item side of things, Amazon and Whole Foods together can absolutely be a force to be reckoned with here. They will have the systems and the infrastructure in place to make one of the very few things Amazon did not have before, fresh groceries, wildly available and can be delivered in a way to preserve freshness and flavor.

I’m super excited by the ramifications of this deal. This could be a major game changer in the e-commerce and grocery delivery spaces.

Can a small business compete with a large conglomerate? I was at a conference recently and I heard an answer from a speaker that I absolutely hated. The answer was “Stay hyper local and try to win your battles accordingly.”

I just don’t accept that. What if you want business from a slightly larger audience? Here’s the trick. Go deeper than any of your larger competitors would ever dare to do. Let’s look at the travel industry, for example. Big brands, like Expedia, are wide. Look at where your margins are the highest and start creating content that is so compelling Expedia and others will never compete with you.

Another thing to remember is that you’re a CEO. You can pick up your phone at any time and reach out to other CEO’s and C-level executives and work on content and SEO deals that can truly benefit both companies.

Don’t ever forget, even if you are a small giant, you are still a giant. There are many things you can do from an SEO strategy standpoint that will get your content out there.

So this is a follow up from a previous blog. In it, I talked about how Snapchat was primed to IPO, and with it, open up the advertising floodgates. If you recall, Facebook and Twitter very much followed the same path. In the early days of Snapchat advertising, you had to create a campaign with a very prolific agency and it could cost you a lot of money.

Now, you have the creative freedom to use the self-serve tools they have rolled out. The standard Snapchat ad will be a vertical video that will run after a user watches a snap (or a few snaps) of the people they are following. After your video ad runs, which can have a maximum duration of 10 seconds, the user will have four potential calls to action.

The first one is to download a native app from the App Store or Google Play. The second one is to read an article that is relevant to the video they just watched. The next option would be a link to your website. And lastly, the fourth option would be for the user to watch a longer form video and have your video ad act as a teaser to the services your company can provide.

Now with the ease of use of the platform there comes some drawbacks from an advertisers point of view. Unlike YouTube, which offers both the ads that do not allow for the first 5 seconds to be skipped and full length ads that can not be skipped, Snapchat offers nothing of the sort. If they are not compelled after the first second or two, they can tap your ad and will skip right past it.

This is all very interesting and we at Globe Runner can’t wait to see how it develops. We are currently not running promoted Snapchat ad campaigns, but we are actively developing one for one of our clients and will keep you posted with results and good data.

Snapchat. It’s the platform that started out misused but now has become arguably one of the most important social media platforms, especially if you want to reach Millennials aged 18 to 35.

They’re there. They’re using it. And they’re loving it. It went so well that it went public this year.

Why do we care? Because it’s time to get serious about a Snapchat strategy that works for your business. If you’re trying to reach that consumer base, Snapchat is the platform to be on.

Why are they there? Think about it for a second. It’s because of the ephemeral nature of the photo and video sharing that Snapchat allows users to do. It’s temporary, in the moment, and exciting.

It’s going to go away. There’s some limit to this photo experience and you need to be there to be involved with it. That’s what Snapchat’s all about.

When we’re thinking about developing a video strategy to go along with Snapchat, think about its use and how people are using it, and why they are there.

I think successful brands will be brands that embrace that concept, that live with it, and that grow with Snapchat.

With its recent IPO, there is a big opportunity for us to advertise. They have opened up the floodgates, allowing everybody to advertise on it just like Facebook did.

We’d love to help you start thinking about what your Snapchat strategy is going to be and how you’re going to capture your brand. We would love to help you share it with a user base who’s truly engaged and excited about being in the moment with you and your brand.

If you’d like help with that, please give us a call. Reach out to us. I look forward to chatting with you about it.

If you have any other questions that you’d like addressed in a future video, please leave them in the comments. I look forward to hearing from you.

What if you could take the functionality of an app and put it into a website? That’s what we call progressive web apps.

It’s a new technology, a new way of writing code, that allows you to install information on somebody’s phone through your website and give you a lot of the functionality that an app has.

Some of the pieces of functionality include my personal favorite, push notifications. Another one would be offline functionality.

You’re literally installing an app on their phone (with their permission, of course) without them downloading and installing an app.

From a conversion point of view, it’s a much easier conversion to get somebody to give you permission to send them coupons later than it is to get them to install an app right then and there.

You’re going to get a higher percentage of people to convert and install your progressive web app and allow your brand to stay top of mind on their device.

Now there are some limitations to progressive web apps. The biggest one is it’s not supported by Safari. You have to keep in mind that you’re going to develop a fantastic website that delivers on every aspect of a web experience for your customer.

It’s not an either/or, and that’s why we use the word progressive. It progressively gets better depending on which browser they’re using. If they’re using Chrome or Firefox, it’s going to go well, but it’s not going to do well on Safari.

If you’re interested in developing a progressive web app, let me know. I’d love to talk with you about it.

A lot of potential clients walk in my door and they’re missing huge traffic opportunities and massive potential return on investment. The reason is because they’re missing a Bing Ads strategy.

I’m a big proponent of Bing Ads. The reason being that I have clients that make amazing returns through their Bing Ads.

Back in the day, Bing did not have as good of an ad platform. Today, however, their platform has caught up and they represent almost 30% of the search market. That’s a huge amount of traffic that you’re missing if you’re not advertising on Bing.

Here’s the last point that I really want you to take home. Bing has a significantly skewed older audience. The reason for this is that Bing is the default on PC’s. Every PC that you buy, Bing will be the default search engine through Internet Explorer. It’s a Microsoft product.

Now, your older users are not changing their defaults as often. They’re just not as tech savvy. For that reason, you’re going to get a slightly older audience, and you’ll get buyers in that demographic.

We’ve had a lot of success with Bing Ads. I encourage you to try a Bing Ads strategy. If you’d like to know more about it, feel free to reach out to us and we can help set one up for you.

How much is a lead worth? This is a question I get almost every day. The other question I get is, “How much is a lead going to cost me.” But I think that’s really irrelevant until you know what the lead is worth.

It’s actually very easy to figure out. I’ll just run through the math really quick. You take a business and you say, “What is your average customer value?”

Let’s give an example of business‑to‑business sale. Let’s say they a sell a $100,000 annual contract, or something like that. That’s the top‑line revenue. Then, you want to discount that and take out the cost of goods sold, and take the gross profit. That’s what’s left over.

Let’s just say its half, so $50,000 of gross profit is what a customer relationship is worth. There’s your number. That’s what we’re looking to get to. How do I make sure that I make that $50,000 back?

Then we look at what percentage of people do I close? What percentage of leads come in the door that actually signed a $100,000 contract and I make $50,000 on?

Just for easy numbers, let’s say it’s 10%. That leaves us with $5,000. A lead in that situation is worth $5,000. Now, that would mean that that lead would take 100% of your gross profit, so it’s not a good buy.

We usually discount that by half, and then you’d be doubling your money. If you want to be conservative, you discount it by half again because you’re thinking, “We want to make sure that we’re really getting 1 out of 10 quality leads.”

A lead in this scenario that I just gave would be worth $1,250 up to $2,500.

When you’re doing your numbers, they’re probably not as simple as the ones I just laid out. Look at what your customer value is. What’s your cost of goods sold? What percentage does your sales team actually close?

Then, discount it so you make a profit. Ultimately, you can come up with a fairly easy number that will inform you, “If I can get a lead for this amount of money, it’s a good deal.”

Then you can build all your marketing campaigns around that. You can look at your organic campaign. You can look at your paid campaign. You can look at your print ads. You can track leads from TV or radio. Examine all of your different funnels.

Make sure that you’re hitting or exceeding that target cost per lead that you’ve set for yourself in advance.

This is one of my favorite exercises to do with a customer. I love to help them develop that target cost per lead, and really start building strategies around that. Once you do that, you can harness the power of your business’ engine because you know what makes it tick.

If you’d like some help coming up with your target cost per lead or executing on the campaigns once you go through the exercise, I’d love to be a partner for you and a resource to help grow your business and develop that engine.