Putting the audience first

In both B2B and martech, standing still means falling behind. In 2024, Siteimprove planned and executed a rebrand to signal that we are constantly advancing, whether that means evolving our products or adjusting our messaging to address what customers need.

The result was a new brand that could carry us — and our customers — into the future, not to mention deliver more conversions.

The problem

In late 2023, we faced a painful realization: While our brand was strong, our message wasn't getting through. Again and again, our sales and marketing team members had to explain what we do, which meant our brand lacked clarity on our value proposition and put us at risk of losing marketshare to competitors with stronger brands. Like many fast-growing tech companies, we'd fallen into the classic trap of talking about ourselves instead of addressing what keeps our customers up at night.

In today's hyper-competitive martech landscape, where tech stacks are increasingly complex and customer needs are constantly evolving, this inside-out approach simply wasn't going to cut it anymore.

"We’d already pivoted our products to move beyond individual point solutions to a comprehensive platform that addresses the full spectrum of modern marketing challenges, but our brand needed to catch up," says Izabela Misiorny, our Chief Marketing Officer. It was time to adjust our look and narrative to speak to what matters most: the success, challenges, and goals of our customers.

The solve

Creating a roadmap

Rebranding projects can drag on for a year or longer, but we challenged ourselves to get our rebrand done in six months. Because there was no time to waste, meticulous planning was essential.

We aimed to launch in August 2024, so in early 2024 — six months before we’d unleash our new image — we kicked off the process by getting buy-in and insights from cross-functional stakeholders, ranging from product developers to the sales team to leadership, working from one master plan to ensure alignment.

During that planning stage, we identified three strategic pillars of change that would support the rebrand:

• From product to platform: Our solution set goes far beyond our initial accessibility offering to include comprehensive offerings within marketing performance that are foundational to any modern marketing team’s tech stack. Our message needed to reflect that expansiveness.
• Enterprise-grade excellence: Our capacities serve complex, global organizations, like Akamai Technologies, Vodafone, and Merck. How we help enterprise companies streamline their digital governance and accessibility compliance, not to mention drive measurable impact, needed to be clearly broadcast.
• Category leadership: Our position in the industry has evolved from feature competition to shaping the entire martech industry’s direction; our thought leadership defines best practices in our space, so we needed to be crystal-clear in expressing that dominance.

Our new brand identity was built to position us for the next phase of growth, while honoring our core mission. As Izabela puts it, "We need to reflect who we are today and who our customers will need us to be tomorrow."

Like any other company, we embrace any opportunity to improve our SERPs. Spending lots of time under the hood in our own Siteimprove account and CMS meant we could devote even more time and resources to adjustments that would improve our rankings and traffic.

Refining messaging

Prior to our rebrand, our messaging had two primary weaknesses: It was either too focused on our product (to the point that we used internal product names that were meaningless to our audience), or it was too abstract for our audience to understand our value.

Our transformation required speaking more explicitly and specifically to the needs and aspirations of our audience. For example, our home page used to say, "Capture attention in an age of distraction" (vague and undifferentiated); now it says, "Built to help teams optimize reach, revenue, reputation, and returns." (We call those “the four Rs,” and refer to them routinely as we build out campaigns.)

Our content team rewrote more than 80 pages to not only capture our focus on our customers but also be a bit edgy and authentic in terms of tone, with gentle plays on words, e.g., "the best of all worlds" and "we love a good 'like.'"

"We’re marketers broadcasting to marketers, and because marketers tend to be skeptical, they tend to have an aversion to jargon and hyperbole," notes Iza.

"Plainspoken but playful" is a good way to describe what we aimed for.

Overhauling design

Our marketing assets, from the site to one-pages, long relied on the usual "corporate blue," just like so many other companies, including IBM, Intel, Ford, and Facebook. While there are good reasons for that (it signals calm and trustworthiness and works well with other neutral colors), on its own, corporate blue is tired. Moreover, if we were to adjust our language to be more distinctive, we needed to match the language with a more daring look.

After lots of back and forth, we landed on the flashes of lime green against a neutral palette, with bits of corporate blue here and there for visual interest and to retain some of our earlier palette. The electric lime green represents innovation and the digital-first mindset of our customers and us — it's energetic, memorable, and impossible to ignore, much like the results our platform delivers.

As Iza notes, "We retained elements of corporate blue deliberately to create a visual bridge between our heritage and our future." We conducted interviews with our customers to get their impressions of the visual impact of our new look and ran tests with our own accessibility experts to make sure the colors and contrasts we chose were suitable for the visually impaired. The result is a visual identity that's distinctly Siteimprove: confident, forward-thinking, and striking within the crowded martech landscape.

We also replaced our iconography, which was industry-standard but predictable, with shapes that can be found within our platform — shapes that suggest graphs, charts, and data visualization. We aimed for clean and crisp, rather than crowded and complex.

(While we’re on the subject of website imagery, let’s take a moment to explain why we haven't relied on stock photography in years. For a company as invested in digital accessibility and inclusivity as we are, photographs are too visually complex for screen readers, get blurry on different devices, and make color contrast control a challenge. Stock photography can also present challenges in terms of cultural neutrality.)

Implementation

Anyone who has been through a rebrand will tell you it’s an "all hands on deck" proposition. Our brand team, which included both writers and designers, crafted and iterated on new copy and graphics, while the executive leadership team provided guidance at every step.

Izabela kept track: "All told, dozens of Siteimprovers were involved in our rebrand, including writers, designers, internal comms managers, product managers, professional services teams, and accessibility specialists."

Naturally, our own platform played a crucial role in our rebrand: As one of our WebOps team members shared in a blog post, we used our own Accessibility Checker, our Accessiblity Checker browser extension for compliance checks on the go, SEO Advanced for monitoring keyword performance, optimizing content, and analyzing the competition; Prepublish to ensure pages were error-free before they went live; and our Performance platform to optimize load times.

Finally, since improving SEO should always be part of any brand and content strategy, our in-house SEO expert used the rebrand to comb through our site and tick a bunch of tasks off his list: keyword research and prioritization, optimization of page titles and meta data, and technical SEO updates like redirecting altered and deleted pages.

Results

Comparing the two months before and after our site relaunch, the results speak for themselves:

• 39.7% increase in search impressions
• 19.5% increase in organic traffic
• 13.5% increase in conversions from organic traffic