When asked to write a piece on why we have rebranded from Inside Online to Salience after nine years of trading, I have to say I was a little stumped.
Ridiculous when you consider that I am one of the founders who leads the sales and marketing team.
The simple answer – it feels right. The new brand reflects who we are now, the people we work with and, more importantly, their output.
The majority of the reactions from colleagues, friends and family were negative, and this was before they even saw the new brand and website. The reactions were driven by fear – are you not afraid of losing the reputation you have built up? What if people don’t recognise you? How do you know the brand will work?
While the shiny new site and brand did lessen the concern, the questions still stood and frankly were valid.
So why then are we choosing to rebrand and risk the baby that we have built up lovingly for the last nine years?
How has digital marketing evolved?
Back in 2009 things were a lot different. Google was in its infancy, Facebook was only just taking hold of people’s lives, and online marketing was a Wild West. To call ourselves marketers was a stretch. We were data heads who lived to break the Google algorithm and saw customers only as metrics in analytics. We didn’t need to understand our clients, customers or marketing campaigns to get them to rank in position one in organic search or to create effective paid media campaigns.
But the days of 10 blue links on a desktop are gone. We now live in a multi-device, multi-screen world where customers are just as likely to ask their phone a question than use a keyboard. We have gone from search engines that update every 18 months to real-time algorithms that use machine learning to deliver the right result, to the right person at the right time. People’s expectations are higher than ever; we have less time to capture attention and far more channels and communities to leverage.
Rather than a catalyst for change, the rebrand to Salience reflects years of change within the agency culture, staff and services.
How have we changed?
For the best part of a decade, we have grown up. Our first office was the back bedroom of the MD Andy; it was the only space that we had free to meet, plan and grow a business. We now have our headquarters in the heart of Chester that we are incredibly proud of. It acts as a second home to the team of 20+ multi-skilled marketeers we work with and reflects who we are.
There is still a strong focus on data, but we now use this to drive creativity and fuel audience growth.
The team mirrors this evolution. There is still a strong focus on data, but we now use this to drive creativity and fuel audience growth. Nine years ago, we would run campaigns with two or three different roles. We now use more than ten different skill sets and achieve so much more. Our focus on great content inspires customers and means we leave client websites better than we found them.
As a brand, Inside Online reflected our immaturity as a business. It left us open to explore all online marketing services, left us room to grow and define who we are. Over the years, the brand, the website and our marketing has evolved, and we are not a generalist online marketing company any more. This new brand reflects who we have grown to be. A specialist; Salience – Search Marketing.
Where are we going?
Salience sums up what we do as an agency perfectly. The formal definition you will find in a dictionary is:
“The quality of being particularly noticeable, prominent or important.
“The degree to which your brand is thought about or noticed when a customer is in a buying situation.”
This encapsulates the aim of every campaign we run and the medium in which we excel – Search.
Over the years, our tactics have evolved alongside the expectations of the customers we target. We’ve brought in design, development, conversion rate optimisation, content marketing and digital PR to sit alongside the traditional services of SEO and paid media. The way in which we deliver campaigns has taken a seismic shift at the same time, bringing on board agile working practices and moving away from planning campaigns in rigid blocks that limit problem solving and inspiration.
However, our objective has always remained consistent – increase brand salience, so our clients make more money.
Can I see our tactics and services evolving over the next nine years? Absolutely. However, I can’t see our objective being any different.
This is why this rebrand feels right and, in turn, should resonate with the clients we work with now and in the future.
We are always up for a challenge, the question is how can we help solve yours?