Rebrand Smarter, Not Louder

I heard a great rebrand question on Ask Drone U, and I wanted to add my two cents from a branding perspective. Here are the three fundamentals I’d focus on first: know exactly what your business is, know who you serve and the problem you solve, and leave room for growth so your name can scale with you.

Show Notes: 

00:00 Ask Drone U rebrand question
00:59 Branding vs SEO
02:19 The 3 branding fundamentals
03:01 Leave room for growth
04:35 Name generic, earn SEO with content
05:19 What’s next

Produced by:
124 Productions

Transcript

0:00

Welcome, everybody to the Dave Grenier Podcast, where we talk about photography and other creative things. Today is in response to a podcast I was listening to from “Ask Drone U”. if you're not familiar with “Ask Drone U” definitely give them a listen. I'm going to link them in the description because they're my favorite podcast. I listen to them and I watch them on YouTube. But they had somebody come in and ask a question on how to rebrand her business. So she has a drone business that is actually she does 3D aerial photography video and Matterport, I think we're all the things that she was listing. I mean, that's my wheelhouse. That's so my ears perked up and I was like, Oh, hey, you know what? Let's let's talk about this. I just want to add my voice to the conversation. And this is by no means to counteract or contradict anything that the guys over there were saying. Paul and Rob were had were very thoughtful in what they were talking about. And I, I absolutely agree with the things that they were saying. But from a branding perspective, that's my background. I wanted to just add my voice to the conversation here. So Paul had talked about changing kind of gearing her business towards SEO, which is search engine optimization. Now, I am not an authority on SEO. I know enough to be dangerous, but search engine optimization for those of you who don't know, is basically optimizing your content. Your blog, your website, whatever it is, the name of your company, so that when people do a search, like a Google search, you rank higher essentially is what would it comes down to. Paul was that's where his brain was. He was saying, “Hey, I think you should do it this way because...” it was mostly SEO related. And then Rob kind of kind of went more towards the the camp that I am more familiar with and more comfortable with, which is the branding side where he said it's it means more what you're what the folks think of your brand, think of you think of your company than it does for the SEO. And they again, they weren't like arguing or anything like that. So there's three things here that I would tell you to kind of focus on when you're trying to to brand your company. By no means is this a comprehensive list, but these are three things that I would focus on first. One, what is your business? Know your business. What is it that you're doing? And be able to talk about that 100% inside and out. Then know your clients and what problem you solving for them. So it's kind of a two parter. So you have who your clients are. You are you a concert photographer? Do you focus mostly on construction? Do you work at schools? Do you do special events? Are you a wedding photographer? You know, all these things are things that that you need to know, not just what, but those are going to determine who your clients are and then how to kind of advertise towards those and the third part that I would add to that is leave room for growth. If you are a photographer, a video company, and you have something like in my case, 124 Productions, you have room for growth, you have room to expand past photography. If I just called it 124 Photography, I'd be known for that and people could search it and say, “Oh, this guy's a photographer” without knowing anything else. They know that I do photography, but that doesn't accommodate that doesn't, that doesn't leave room for my growth in maybe two years. Maybe I want to do something completely different. Maybe I want to do visual effects or something, because that is something that I have an interest in. A lot of the big companies that you've heard of, Apple, Nike, Facebook, places like that, they don't have in their name what they're doing. Apple doesn't say Apple Computers, and that's given them the ability to grow very like kind of within the computer realm, but it lets them grow outside that realm comfortably and easily because they're just known as Apple. We all know what Apple does. The apple has nothing to do with computers, but we have now, through time and their reputation is known that they're synonymous with electronics, computers and and they've expanded to like headphones and iPads. And iPad is technically just a flat computer, but, you know, headphones and these other accessories that you wouldn't have thought about before if it was just Apple Computers. Looking at your business and knowing what you do, knowing who your client is, the problem that you're solving for them, and then leaving yourself some room for growth. I think that's all really important. I don't want to discount SEO. My approach personally is to name my business something a little more generic, like 124 productions and then through blog articles. That's how I get the SEO. But that's that's my approach. That doesn't mean I mean, I'm, I'm not a business guru by any means. So what I would say is definitely go over to “Ask Drone U” and like I said, I'm going to link them in the description because they're an excellent podcast. They get a ton of good information. If you like drones, listen to them. If you just like podcasts those guys are really consistent and enjoyable to watch and listen to. So I'm going to leave you with that right now. My next podcast is going to be practical advice for beginner photographers, because on the first episode, which was a few days ago, we talked about chasing your dreams as a photographer. So that's going to be the next step in that. So make sure to listen and hope to see you there. Until next time, be good to each other.