North Coast Media, LLC

8 Steps to a successful rebranding project

By Bill Roddy | Publisher, Landscape Management

Timeline — When tackling a rebranding, it’s important to maintain a timeline to reach your goals.

On Oct. 21, 2015, we celebrated one year since completing the rebrand and redesign of the Landscape Management brand. The year has passed in the blink of an eye. In looking back, it’s astonishing to see what we accomplished in the months leading up to the launch. However, in reviewing the notes and details, I quickly realize, the process made the project. I’m not saying there weren’t some long hours, stressful situations and times when we weren’t sure we’d complete the project on time, but overall, it was “relatively” smooth.

Taking on a rebranding project can be overwhelming. Because our process worked so well and has produced outstanding results, I’d like share our 8 Steps to a Successful Rebranding Project.

1. SET A BUDGET

A tremendous amount of expenses are associated with a relaunch. Before you start, be sure to establish a budget. Make sure your team understands the budget parameters and is committed to managing the funds accordingly.

2. SCHEDULE PLENTY OF TIME

You’ll need a minimum of nine months. Depending on the size of your company, the number of people included in the process, the layers of approvals, etc., a lot more time may be needed. Be sure to think about your team’s other workload and any business or vacation travel. We didn’t use a project tracking software, but having one would have definitely helped for tracking progress and keeping the team on schedule.

3. ALL IN

The words ALL IN have special meaning to those of us in Cleveland. Last year while the Cleveland Cavaliers were making their run through the NBA Playoffs and into the Finals, their team slogan was “ALL IN.” As the Landscape Management team was making its run towards the brand relaunch, we adopted the same slogan. Just as in team sports, like basketball, your entire team must be ALL IN to significantly increase the odds of success.

4. DO YOUR HOMEWORK TO REVEAL YOUR BRAND ESSENCE

You don’t get to decide what your brand means in the eyes of your audience. Only through conducting research — qualitative and quantitative — and synthesizing/distilling the research to understand the audience’s key need(s) will the brand essence be revealed. Landscape Management worked with an outside research firm, Strategic Partners, to conduct the research and facilitate a brand workshop helping us establish our unique brand essence.

5. JUST DO IT

After establishing your brand essence, stop analyzing and “just do it!” Using the outcome of your branding workshop, creative briefs and communications plans should be developed. Art directors and designers get involved to develop logo concepts. Copywriters work on taglines. Lots and lots of logos and taglines are developed, presented, reworked, re-presented and on and on until the final logo and tagline — supported by research and reinforcing your brand essence — are selected. Because our product includes a print publication, we make certain that all content written, and each page designed, are based on the key learnings from the research and uphold our brand essence.

Left: Previous LM logo; Right: Current LM logo

6. REBRAND EVERYTHING

Now continue to “just do it” for everything your audience associates with your brand. Signage, business cards, websites, collateral materials, trade show and event materials, wearables, product packaging, etc.

Anything with your logo or branding must be rebranded. And be sure to schedule enough time to get everything complete prior to your relaunch (see No. 2 above).

7. RELAUNCH

Plan to make a big splash. In order to create some anticipation, consider a teaser campaign beginning a couple months in advance of the relaunch. Maybe you can include a countdown clock on your website. Hold a press event. Launch an advertising campaign. Throw a party! Everyone enjoys a good party; it’s a great opportunity to engage your audience and reward your team. Be sure to stay within your set budget parameters (see No. 1 above) as it’s easy to let these costs get out of control.

8. REVIEW AND REFINE

After you’ve relaunched, your work is far from complete. Create checkpoints to make sure you’re on track. Review progress of the measurements (KPIs, Sales Revenue, Profit, New Customers, etc.) you’ve established as targets for success. Refine as necessary to make certain you meet or exceed your success metrics.

Deciding to rebrand can be a daunting undertaking. Following the steps above can help ease the apprehension and ensure a successful outcome.

Make the most of your interview notes

By Kevin Yanik | Managing Editor, LP Gas, Pit & Quarry

As a business media writer, I often find myself poring over pages of transcripts from interviews I’ve done for upcoming stories. The transcripts sometimes stretch 20 pages long, because I make a habit to type every pertinent detail from conversations into my MacBook.

Unfortunately, a 20-page transcript doesn’t easily translate into the 1,500-word feature story you were assigned to prepare for your print magazine. Twenty pages of notes could be molded into a 15,000-word feature, I suppose, but magazines have limited space. And a print magazine’s limitation is where editing comes in.

After completing a story that’s destined for the magazine, I’m inevitably left with morsels of interesting information or memorable quotes – I call them “scraps” – that simply don’t fit into the print version. Having completed an assignment, a number of writers simply toss away their scraps and move on to the next task. But these writers are discarding information they could sprinkle into other content arenas.

Take coverage I recently completed for the October issue of LP Gas, a North Coast Media publication that covers the retail propane industry. A cover story I prepared spans more than 1,600 words. A sidebar that accompanied the cover story is about 400 words, and a related Q&A that published in the magazine is about 1,200 words.

The coverage combined exceeds 3,000 words. That’s beyond the typical word count we’d dedicate to a single subject within the magazine.

Yet, despite the additional coverage, I was left with interview scraps that couldn’t fit into the print magazine. I connected with 11 people for our October coverage – that’s more people than I’d normally source – and several sources weren’t included in print.

The obvious home for content that doesn’t make it into print is the web. In my particular case, I took one of my best phone interviews and molded it into a Q&A with an expert that was promoted within the brand’s e-newsletter. Also, I captured two of my story interviews on camera, so our digital media content editor produced a pair of YouTube videos from those.

I’m still sifting through leftover notes from the assignment, and my plan is to prepare an entry or two for our brand’s blog. Social media is another obvious outlet for leftovers, and I plan to find opportunities to populate those pages as well.

LP Gas also has a monthly section in the magazine dedicated to the topic we covered in the October issue, so there may even be opportunities to position some of my notes there.

The takeaway here is to consider content opportunities beyond your initial assignment. Interview scraps can serve as informative nuggets for readers. Those nuggets will also help to minimize the number of editorial ideas you and your team must develop from scratch.

Staff App Review: ABM Parking Services

By: Darren Constantino | Pit & Quarry, Editor-in-Chief

The ABM Parking Services app includes comprehensive parking information including hours of operation, rates, entrance points and payment types. It helps you to find parking in Cleveland and many other cities.

Why not a webinar?

By Diane Sofranec | Managing Editor, Pest Management Professional

Looking for a cost effective and relatively easy way to reach customers and potential customers? Consider hosting a webinar.

A webinar is an online presentation viewers can watch at their convenience. In return, you receive the contact information of those in attendance.

Webinars are a great way to share your targeted message with customers and potential customers. As an added bonus, including polls and a question-and-answer session allows you to quickly learn what they think of your brand, product, or service.

A successful webinar will provide information and insight, or offer a solution to a problem. Choose your subject matter wisely. The goal of your webinar should be to help those who attend, not sell them a product.

Of course, you may deliver a product-centric webinar, but keep the focus on the problem the product solves, not the product. Keep in mind that readers want to know how to think, not what to buy. Rethink your presentation if it’s too sales oriented.

Consider focusing on a topic your customers and potential customers want to learn more about. Your attendance figures will reflect their interest in your subject.

Check Twitter, Facebook and other social media sources for ideas on a topic your customers and potential customers are talking about.

Consider using Interactive tools during your webinar because they help increase viewing time and improve retention of your content.

Polls, surveys and a live question-and-answer session will provide a personal connection to your brand, product, or service.

Polls will give you a feel for what attendees/readers are thinking about a product or issue.

Surveys will provide information you can use to make changes for your next webinar.

A question and answer session will address attendees’ concerns immediately. It’s will allow you to dispel misconceptions about an issue, or product or service.

Webinars are a great way to control the message for your brand, product, or service while helping or educating customers and potential customers. Your customers and potential customers will consider you a trusted resource if you offer a well-presented webinar on a subject that provides a solution to their problem.

If you’re interested in creating a webinar for your brand, product or service, please contact us here.

Staff Movie Review: Crimson Peak

By Hillary Morgan | Digital Media Intern

I went into Crimson Peak expecting jump-scares and ghosts galore. However, what I got was a slow-burning, tension-filled, period thriller.

Set in the gothic period, Crimson Peak seemingly follows the formula of classic novels such as Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, but with much darker twists and turns. What begins as a gothic romance becomes a gothic horror as the film progresses.

Our heroine, Edith (Mia Wasikowska), is swept away by the dashing Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), who, along with his sister (Jessica Chastain), has sinister plans for the girl. The plot moves along nicely, making the film seem to go by much quicker than its 119-minute run-time. It grabs you from the beginning, not putting you back down until the very end.

Beyond the plot, the sets and costumes are intricate and gorgeous. These details, along with the main actors’ excellent portrayals, draw you in from the start and add to the haunting feeling throughout the movie. Especially important to notice is Allerdale Hall, the Sharpe’s home. What was once clearly a grand manor, now has a massive hole in the roof and is sinking into the ground, all of its former regalia still inside, now covered in the dust of the past.

So, what are the Sharpe’s sinister plans? Why is the film called “Crimson Peak?” You’ll have to check it out yourself to find out!

Meeting digital audiences where they are

‘If you build it, they will come’ can no longer be the standard for media companies

By Bethany Chambers | Digital Operations Manager

In the world of digital media, there is no single Field of Dreams. Shoeless Joe wouldn’t make his appearance in one cornfield now; he’d need one for each day of the week—at least.

Digital media has gone through an incredible evolution in the past decade (to put it mildly), but one thing has not changed: We’re still here to serve our audiences. And that means meeting them where they are. Right now, that’s on their smartphones.

At the Folio: Show in New York this past week, Atlantic Media vice president of digital Kim Lau put it best when she said it’s “back to the future” with our content delivery platforms. (It also happened to be Oct. 21 or “Back to the Future” Day, so Lau was helpfully delivering hashtag-friendly quotes to the crowd of journalists.)

Just more than five years ago, when mobile traffic was a small percentage of website visitors, media companies were setting up mobile websites. The trend was to develop mobile sites as a completely different environment than desktop sites, with separate content and separate domains. (Remember the time when you had to type in “m-dot” before websites on your not-quite-as-smart phone’s browser?) The divergence of platforms was on.

But that was then. Lau’s presentation, “Critical Trends in Mobile Content,” highlighted what a whirlwind we’ve gone through in mobile media in the past year, as the jump in smartphone traffic focused publishers on mobile consolidation before big tech came to throw us for a loop.

By late 2014, the demand of the mobile audience was to consume content on a single responsive website, no longer two separate environments. I’m proud to say North Coast Media’s brands were all responsive before many other publishers, with our last responsive site launching in mid-April, around the same time The Atlantic’s did.

Then came some major announcements – the launch of three new platforms in Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News (which rose from the ashes of the Newsstand and its publisher-developed apps) and Google AMP (short for “accelerated mobile page” project). This means three new distribution points for publishers to figure out in the coming months (none are mass-market yet) and “lots of ongoing maintenance with different templates and different experiences,” as Lau points out.

Also presenting on the mobile topic, Nicholas White, CEO of The Daily Dot, which gets a majority of its traffic from mobile, added that it is critical that competition continues to flourish in order to meet audiences and deliver quality content, calling “a winner take all environment” a “real problem for the industry.”

North Coast Media has 33 social media accounts across our six industries — on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest — where we are engaging with our audiences on some of their favorite platforms at the times it’s most convenient for them. Although our iPad apps went the way of Newsstand, our digital editions of the magazines are mobile responsive to whatever device you’re using. And, while we are continuing to tweak the design and functionality of our mobile responsive websites, we don’t plan to stop there. We’ll be on any platform we can be, delivering the news our audience needs when they need it.