SOP: How To Rebrand In Less Than A Week (For Fun & Profit)

Warning: Do not rebrand, unless you read this step-by-step guide.

Let’s set the stage first, and why you may need a rebrand.

Story:

Back in 2017, I decided to stop consulting for small local businesses in London and figured that the next step would be to go after larger businesses.

So I launched a website called Centis Digital, and started offering the same marketing as everyone else thinking that somehow, someone will see the value and buy.

Every day I was prospecting sending emails, trying to cold call – nothing.

Until one day, I had the chance to read a book called Blue Ocean Strategy. In this book, I realised what I should be doing all along – differentiate.

So, because of that book, and the realisation that marketing is all about finding your ideal client (Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, and many other marketers told us about that decades ago), I decided to shift from being a generalist to being a specifist.

I decided to target nutraceutical manufacturers.

It worked.

Six months after focusing on that market I got my first client.

In 2021, I had 30 clients worldwide.

Then the world came crashing in.

Lost all clients to COVID, and by 2022, I nearly shut down.

Then at the end of 2022, I found out that the only thing that our customers did not stop (apart of their websites, which we created for them of course), was their quiz funnels.

So, I quickly pivoted Centis to offer quiz funnels. I productized the service, and anyone and everyone could simply go to the website, purchase a specific service and we would deliver it.

We started growing again, but I noticed that the name just didn’t cut it anymore. Also, we had many requests to change/edit/maintain, and manage the funnels, which we did not offer.

So at the end of September 2023, I took the decision to rebrand. We invested two whole days brainstorming names, and finally, we decided to go with an A.I. generated one: “Interactive Audiences”.

I also understood at that moment that we were a startup again. So we needed a good offer, a great USP and a startup mentality.

I went back to the drawing board and checked what major brands from the productized space did.

I eventually drew inspiration (and copied) from DesignJoy, ManyPixels and Kimp.io, but instead of offering design, we decided to be the Netflix of Lead Generation:

Unlimited Quiz Funnels for A Fixed Monthly Fee, Each Delivered in 72 hours. Unlimited Revisions. No contracts.

I also decided to build in public following the examples of Alex from Groove, Buffer and many others.

What follows is the stem of the fruit of that labour and many more to come.

Standard Operation Procedure: Step By Step Rebranding In Under A Week

This SOP will guide you through the steps of branding a new website, and if you are migrating from another one, how to maintain links.

DAY 1:

Step 1: Find Your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

This is the hardest part and the most boring one. Finding out who is going to buy from you, is the part that almost everyone goes wrong.

This SOP goes beyond the scope of finding your ICP which will be discussed in a later post.

For now, all you have to know about your ICP is:

• The name
• The age
• The gender
• Interests (i.e. reads the Times, loves golfing, paints)
• Daily activities (i.e. working out, cooking, jogging) – do not confuse this with interests
• Work title
• Economic status
• Needs (what do they need to accomplish)
• Pain points (what problems do they have and needs solved, as soon as possible)
• Work-related problems
• Where do they get their information from?
• Which social media do they use?
• Which influencers do they follow?
• How often are they online?

Once you have this information you can proceed to the next step.

For interactive Audiences (formerly Centis.net) our ICPs are:

Target Persona 1: Business Owners

• People who own a business selling services or products with a focus on coaching, consulting, health, and consumer products.
• Are between 40-63 years
• Their businesses generate an annual revenue of $400,000 and have stalled
• Their main problem is that they can’t find and properly qualify more clients
• Their profits are decreasing
• They need fresh new leads every day
• They have a sales team of between 2-10 people
• They advertise on Facebook with minimal results
• They do not have an engaged email marketing list or email marketing is neglected
• They are making the decisions on who to hire

Target Persona 2: Marketing Managers

• People who work as marketing managers in the service sector or sell products directly or indirectly
• Are between 35-50 years old
• Have no clue how to generate leads
• Are afraid that they will be replaced soon
• Are stuck in the old ways of marketing
• Want to impress their boss with a new idea
• Want to bring in a fresh done-for-you agency to quickly generate leads

Target Persona 3: Agencies

• Any agency that sells SEO, Content, Ads, IT, Webdesign and similar digital activities.

Step 2: Define Your USP, Mission & Values

Once you know who you are targeting, you weave your USP, your mission and your values around them.

The objective is to be able to attract the people you want to work with and leave the rest to work with someone else.

To define our USP, we needed to understand what our ICP wanted.

Most of our ICPs want leads, fast. They do not want to deal with creating ads, building quizzes, funnels and most importantly, building upsell pages, landing pages and offers.

So we solve this problem by making the offer very compelling:

Unlimited quiz funnels – solve the problem of many customers who do not know exactly who to target, and sometimes their targeting is wrong. So we give them the option to create as many quiz funnels as they want in 30 days

Flat monthly fee – we have long gone from the model of charging per hour. It is unnerving to our clients and us. It causes lots of disputes, heated discussions and many more problems. So we charge a flat monthly fee that we believe it is fair, logical and low cost – for unlimited quiz funnels.

Delivered in 72 hours – we want to give clients the option to order as many quiz funnels as they want as fast as possible. So we produced the entire service to run smoothly – and once someone orders everyone gets to work:

• The ad specialist
• The copywriter
• The designer

Unlimited revisions – we do not provide refunds, as we deliver a service that can be easily copied once done. So clients pay upfront, and we deliver in 72 hours. If they need revisions – because we missed the mark somehow – we do them, no questions asked.

What is our mission?

Our mission is to become the Netflix of Lead Generation. You pay Netflix a monthly fee to watch movies – as many movies as you need per day – the same way you pay us to create systems that generate leads for you.

What are our values?

This is also a very grey area where you can get easily lost in the details.

The example that first comes to my mind every time I think about brand values is Patagonia, which started as a clothing company with the mission of protecting the environment.

So at Interactive Audiences, where we can protect the environment by donating profits (when we get them), our values are aligned with the values of our ICPs:

• To be ethical
• To create and build relationships
• To be human
• To care – we are not just for the money, but to help businesses grow.

DAY 2:

Step 3: How to find a name for your new business

I am not a big fan of complex processes. For me, everything starts and ends with our client. This is the person who pays the bills, hires our staff and has the power to shut down our company if she or he wishes (which happened with Centis, in 2022).

So the name must:

• As much as possible, clearly communicate what we do for the client
• Is optimised for the search engines
• Has a clear, easy-to-read design.

1: Brainstorm

With the ICP in mind try to find out what possible name could hit the nail on its head.

Drop every name on a list, and try to see if it resonates.

2: Ask The People

The next step is more obvious from a marketing perspective, as most people forget to ask what other people think. So, your next step would be to:

a) Find 20 people who know you

b) Ask them their opinion via a personal meeting, a call, email, DM or SMS

We asked our immediate family, because of two reasons:

• They have nothing to do with marketing and our business
• They have no problem telling us if they do not like something (and we love them for it)

When we were faced with the phrase “I hate every name you presented me”, we decided to take things up a notch:

Enter Namelix.com

Each time our limited minds are stuck on how to generate a name we have a secret weapon (ok, not so secret anymore) – Namelix.

This tool can generate names like there is no tomorrow.

All you have to do is write a keyword about what you do, who you serve and how you do it, and it spits out hundreds of brand names, along with possible logos and domain checks.

Simply select which type of output you need:

And it’s free!

So after a good day browsing through names and checking available domains, we got ours:

I also quickly registered the domain and then started to modify the logo. Piece of cake.

When you do that, Namelix transfers you to Brandmark, where you can modify the logo, text, colours, background etc in a very easy editor:

When you are happy with the changes, simply buy the name, and you are done.

Next, note down the new brand colours – we remained with the orange one as we need to differentiate in a busy online world – plus other brands selling marketing services like Neil Patel use orange (so he must know something more than we do).

Step 4: Create The Website (or migrate the existing one)

Creating a website that serves your business goals is a miserable topic that brings a lot of heated discussions, wasted time amongst your group and a burned budget, most of the time.

Why? Because everyone and their mother has an opinion.

Here is a list you need to follow to avoid most of the above:

1. The website needs to focus on conversions. It may be ugly at first, but the objective is to make it easy for someone to sign up or buy something. EASY. Create it and change it later.
2. A website is not a static thing. It needs fixing, all the time. Broken links, broken assets, broken pages. Make sure that your contract includes monthly maintenance for a set of requests
3. Your website will need adjustments as you go along. What YOU think will work, may never work in the eyes of the visitor. So start with the basic conversion principles, add your heatmaps and adjust as you go along. Make sure your contract is covered by one-year redesign fixes that cover CRO.
4. Call-to-action buttons and forms must be clearly visible and sprinkled throughout the website. People need to be able to see the button FIRST and then read the copy to decide if they want to click it or not. To “wannabe CRO experts” who will say that I do not know what I am talking about, have you ever landed on a website that had a yellow, red, or any bright coloured button and clicked it mindlessly without reading the copy, idiot? No, your mind was attracted first to the button and then you read the copy so do not bother sending me a message with your BS.
5. Optimise for mobile. After finishing the desktop version (or, whatever suits you) view it from a mobile or an application that supports mobile viewing.

When we decided to change the name and the domain, we decided that we didn’t want to waste any time with a proven website so all we did was to clone the existing website on the new domain account, and simply change the logo.

When you do that, here are things you need to pay attention to:

1. Make sure all links stay the same, i.e if before we had centis.net/plans, now it has to be interactiveaudiences.com/plans
2. Go through all your blog posts and change the name of the old brand to the new brand. Make sure any interlinking with the previous pages still works
3. Needless to say, delete and replace all cover photos on the blog that have a watermark or mention the logo of the old brand.
4. If you have banners, inline calls to action, delete and replace.

DAY 4:

Step 5: Re-install (some) of the plugins if you run WordPress

We run WordPress, so this step is crucial for the site won’t work.

From top to bottom:

1. Google Analytics: Nothing starts without first creating a new Analytics property and then installing Site Kit as a plugin
2. Then you have two options. One is to add the pixels below via a plugin or a via Google Tag Manager. I personally find a small lagging in Google Tag Manager so I prefer adding this directly via a plugin, called “Head, Footer and Post Injections”
3. After installing the plugin, take the code from Google Tag or the one below and add it to the “Head” section

1. Facebook Pixel: The next thing to do is to create a Business Page and a Business Manager, add an Ad Account, and take the pixel and install it – either via Google Tag Manager or the plugin above.
2. Twitter: if you publish content on Twitter, go ahead and create or rename a property, then re-add the pixel
3. Adroll: If you are doing remarketing, add the new pixel, such as Adroll here in the same plugin or via Google tag
4. Heatmaps: It is important to know what the users are doing on your site. If you haven’t already, simply install Hotjar which has a forever free version and you are covered.
5. Email marketing plugins. This is a biggie. How will people be able to sign up to your offers? Mailchimp, Klaviyo and others need a plugin to connect with their service. Make sure you install it too.

DAY 5:

Step 6: Change All Socials

Let’s do this:

Linkedin:

Profile: I guess your first point of contact is your Profile so the very first thing you need to do is change it to reflect the name of the company, what you do and how you help.

Here is my profile before:

And here is after:

Make sure that the profile shows exactly what your audience wants you to know. In this case, I want them to know that I am a CMO of a new brand (formerly Centis) and I am building in public. I am also an author.

Why I do not want to sell my book above? Because the link I have below is for them to sign to my newsletter, and generate a list of people who are interested to know about growth.

Some of them will turn into clients later on. Selling directly, even a small ticket item proved to be unsustainable.

Featured Section:

Make sure all links stay relevant. Remove everything you had before and replace with the new links:

After:

Next step, if you have a company page go and and change that.

• Change the domain
• Change what you offer
• Change the logo
• Change the banner

Go first to Settings as an admin and add your new domain. Then delete the previous one.

Then go to “Edit Page” and change all fields that you need:

Step 7: Email Settings

Once you change domains, none of your previous emails will work. I would prefer if you first change the emails and then everything else, so as to keep getting messages.

However, the issue is that no one will know your new email so it’s best if you:

1. Before you change the domain send an email to every contact, lead, and customer that you are changing domains and rebranding
2. Send another email the day that the rebranding and migration will happen – just a few hours before.
3. Then send them an email and CALL them if possible, to confirm they have your new email, didn’t go to spam and everything works fine.

DAY 6:

Step 8: Update your entire tech stack

We run on multiple apps:

Missinglettr: An online app that grabs our blog posts and distributes them across different dates automatically. A huge time saver. Needs to be disconnected and connected again to the new property.

Socialbee, Metricool and Ocoya: Our social media management tools. All of them need to be reconfigured and change the links they have.

We have 120 posts scheduled, so this will not only give us a good excuse to rewrite and edit the posts but also of course to change the links.

Good times.

HappierLeads: A very nice system that anyone who lands on our site gets tagged, analysed and their company email extracted. This then immediately sends out an email to their email with some relevant data.

For reference, this is the list of leads we get when someone touches our website:

And finally, our project management system, SuiteDash. An absolute beast at grabbing leads, moving them to stages, sending them automated emails, and assigning work to our staff.

This I think concludes the entire thing – you now have a complete list of activities and a Standard Operating Procedure on what to do next, if you decide to rebrand, change domain and start all over again.

Which reminds me.

With Interactive Audiences, we start from scratch. We are now back to square one, without anyone knowing who we are, what we do and how we help people.

We are essentially a startup.

This experience (which happened twice in 2017, 2022 and now 2023) taught me an important lesson:

To have an engaged audience.

So this time, I am building my company in public. As this SOP proves, I am sharing everything I know – funnels, metrics,how to generate leads and how to write copy, email marketing, CRO.

I will be writing about it not only for Interactive Audiences but also for my two other businesses that were not in the spotlight :

LoyaltyNation.io, an online loyalty app for brick-and-mortar businesses that levels the field between them and the big retail brands – by offering incentives and loyalty schemes to customers

And my personal, side hustle, FractionalCMO (which will soon have its own website in English – now it is in Greek).

If you found this guide useful and would like to learn more about lead generation and sales using quiz funnels, there are four ways you can do it:

1. Totally Free: Join the Exclusive Network Community (the name is under discussion) where each week, I send out very useful insights, strategies and tactics on how I build not one, but three startups in public, and discuss with you funnels, metrics, revenues, client acquisition, inbound and outbound marketing and coffee :-). Join here.
2. Very Low Cost: If you want to have an insider look at how we have generated, and still generate, thousands of qualified leads for our customers using quiz funnels and paid acquisition, buy the Quizzes To Millions book. Only $9.99, with a 30-day, money-back guarantee. Get it here.
3. Low Cost: Request a paid, 1-hour workshop ($150) to see if quiz funnel marketing is for you and how it can help your business. The workshop analyses your business and you walk away with a foundation of what to do. You can book a session here.
4. High Cost: If you feel ready, you can buy our productized, unlimited quiz funnel service, delivered in just 72 hours.