So you want to lead a rebrand...
The project is hefty. The internal team is quaking in their marketing boots. And leadership is getting a little Veruca Salt about the timeline (Daddy, I want it now!).
You know the scope (large) and speed (fast) of your project, and now you need to answer: Do you bring in an agency, hire some freelance support, or do it all in-house?
Hope Weatherford faced a similar challenge as the new Head of Marketing at HR platform Fountain. The company had a suite of new products and positioning it was ready to share, and the challenge wasn't what to build—it was how to tell the world about it.
Like, yesterday.
With a tiny team and a massive repositioning ahead, she had to make a critical choice: How were they going to get it all done?
Luckily, as former Head of People, she had two secret weapons. (1) She had deep empathy for the audience of employers and job-seekers that Fountain was speaking to, and (2) she knew a thing or two about staffing.
Her approach to assembling her rebrand team delivered remarkable results:
- 4x increase in form fills to leads
- New mentions in publications like Forbes and Gartner
- Competitors echoing Fountain's messaging back to them
The 4 questions to ask yourself (and 4 resources to help along the way)
Before Hope made any moves, she mapped out what her rebrand really required in terms of capacity, scope, speed, and complexity.
Below, we share how Hope answered these questions for herself—plus four tools you can use to evaluate each area for your own team.
Capacity: What bandwidth does your team actually have?
This is a place where a lot of marketing leaders get tripped up. Even if your team has the skills, do they have the time?
Hope was realistic about her team's bandwidth for such a massive undertaking. She needed to find partners who could work like extensions of the team, not traditional vendors.
“To move with the agility and speed we needed to not only launch these products, but also drive impact with the content that we were creating for these launches, I needed more capacity than what I had on the team,” she explains.
If you have carte blanche to clear off the current project management board, you can refocus time and resources on the rebrand. The other projects can wait.
But if that board is giving you stress dreams…it may be time to bring in some outside support.
Here’s a tool for deciding which is best for you:
Rebrand toolkit: Staffing diagnostic
Should you keep your rebrand in-house, hire a freelancer or two, or bring in a full agency? Our diagnostic quiz can help.
Scope: What’s the actual magnitude of the rebrand?
Hope knew Fountain’s rebrand would be no small task. “We had this mountain coming at us, and we were like a little anthill,” she says.
A major rebrand isn’t a one-time announcement. To be successful, it requires multiple marketing channels that work together in concert. Think symphony, not soloist.
Better yet, think flywheel.
Fountain created a content ecosystem across web, email, and social that fed into itself. Web content became social posts; newsletters directed readers to social pages and the website; and social posts drove newsletter signups and web traffic.
"It all ties back to a multi-touch approach," says Hope. Content connected with events, PR, and earned media to amplify Fountain's story at scale.
The result was a content system whose whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Full stop.
What channels should you prioritize as you carry out your rebrand? Here’s our 3-step framework to help you decide:
Speed: How fast do you need to move?
Fountain wanted to announce their new offerings ASAP. But in HR tech, where compliance is crucial, “move fast and break things” is a quick route to becoming a cautionary tale.
Hope needed startup speed without startup levels of risk.
So storyarb filled the gap, with nimble yet centralized project management. The teams communicated constantly through voice notes and quick calls, and storyarb’s structured content workflow helped keep strategy on track and deliverables hyper-organized.
“Because everything was in one place, we could see where someone else left off and another person picked back up,” says Hope. “We felt like one team.”
In other words: “I don’t even consider storyarb an agency; I consider storyarb an extension of who we are.”
Within three weeks, Hope’s team relaunched the website with Fountain’s new products, messaging, and creative.
It was a massive transformation, especially for someone without a marketing background—really amazing.
(We agree. Go Hope!)
Are you speed-running a rebrand? Here’s our 8-week timeline for eating that elephant one bite at a time:
Complexity: Do you have the expertise you need to pull this off?
For such a major overhaul, Hope wanted more than content for Fountain. She wanted a team with a bird's-eye view of the larger content marketing landscape.
“What’s cool about storyarb is that it’s way more than just the partnership, building content, or getting to hear a different point of view,” she says. "They really help you see what's happening across industries, so you can share in the latest best practices."
(Yes, we’re blushing. ❤️)
But to identify where you might benefit from external support, start with a skills audit. Map what skills you need to your current available staff, then bring in specialists who can fill in any gaps.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Content marketing that works: ‘I’ve heard about you.’
Hope ultimately decided that she needed external support to provide three things:
- Strategic storytelling to define and share Fountain’s new identity
- Ability to create ICP-focused content that helped the lean team extend their reach
- Simple project management systems to help Fountain’s team move quickly and cohesively
Enter her new content partner… (Ok, ok, it’s us. Hi, Hope. 👋)
The strategic content partnership allowed Hope to focus on what she knows best—people—and leverage her HR expertise to make the rebrand resonate.
"Especially in HR tech, you don't get a second chance," Hope explains. "Your tool has the potential to make or break people's careers. You have to build trust with the stories you tell."
And she orchestrated a rebrand that launched Fountain into a whole new league.
The scoreboard doesn’t lie:
- Within a hundred days, they had a 4X increase in form fills to lead.
- Fountain earned coverage by Forbes and a mention on Gartner’s ATS Magic Quadrant
- At every large HR tech event Hope attended, people were telling her, “I’ve heard about you.”
- Brand awareness felt like it had quadrupled
In the end, these wins directly translated to Fountain landing larger enterprise customers and serving a wider swath of frontline workers.
I knew we did it right when we saw people in our industry repeating our website messaging. Now they’re using our words as part of their talk track.
Imitation: The sincerest form of marketing success.
