On behalf of the BlogMutt team, I’m really excited to introduce the new BlogMutt brand and site with you, our customers, our writers, and those just stopping by to kick the tires.
One quick note before we get into the story: While our look has changed, the heart of our service remains the same. If you are a current customer or writer, everything should work the same when you are logged in. If it doesn’t, let us know.
As with every big change, the first question is “Why?” It’s a fair question. The BlogMutt logo and look had served the company well. BlogMutt was recently named the fastest growing company in a town packed with fast-growing companies. Customers LOVE what we do and are fiercely loyal. Writers rave about our encouraging and postive environment. Why mess with that?
As the director of marketing, it wasn’t something I undertook lightly. I didn’t want to be the guy that pushed re-naming Netflix, or introducing “New Coke.”
But as BlogMutt has grown in sophistication and an abiliity to meet the needs not just of small businesses, but of the agencies that serve small businesses, I thought it was time to have our look match our abilities. I wanted our visual language to match our skills with the written word.
The journey from that decision to this point was not easy, and much of what we went through, I hope, can be helpful to you—especially if you are thinking about a similar change—so I’m sharing it here in the first of a few posts.
So, how’d we get here? What does it all mean? I’m glad you asked.
Start With a Mission.
We started this project back in November 2014. The most important part of our rebrand required buy-in from the entire team on the mission of BlogMutt.
We built our mission by answering a few questions first.
What does BlogMutt believe in?
In order to rebrand BlogMutt we had to define the word “brand” for ourselves.
Ted Manasa wrote an awesome definition of brand:
A brand is a belief in a better world that differs from your competitors’ worlds and is a world that your customers want to live in.
We believe that every business should have an active blog.
It’s that simple. We’ve believed that for years.
To establish a viable online presence, blogging is the foundation and most elemental piece of a solid marketing strategy. Blogging isn’t just an SEO play (although it helps immensely). Blogging establishes credibilty, fuels a social media presence, informs customers and potential customers, starts a conversation, answers a question, and gives a company personality—to name just a few benefits.
Why does BlogMutt exist?
Considering we’ve been in business for years, it’s kind of a weird question. But put another way, we’re asking ourselves: ‘What would our customers be missing if BlogMutt didn’t exist?”
The answer to that is simple: blogs. And the reason for that is equally simple: Writing is hard.
It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re writing about, writing is hard.
Writing.
Is.
Hard.
Show of hands:
How many of you have started a business blog or even a personal diary only to see it quickly flame out?
Nothing makes us sadder than going to a company’s website, visiting the blog, and seeing the last post is from six months ago. Or worse, not seeing a blog at all. Customers and prospects simply don’t look at or see self-reverential advertising any more. It just doesn’t work. So, the need to create interesting, informative, or helpful content for your visitors has never been more important.
We want to make it possible for business operators and agencies to live in a world better than the one they’re in now. The one they’re in now, a world of infrequent blogging or no blogging at all, is the world we want to rock. It’s the world we want to save.
Imagine a world where your blogging is already done. Where you don’t have to stare at a blank screen, the cursor just blinking in your face as you try to get a blog post started without distraction.
With BlogMutt doing the blogging, your time can be put toward building your business, strengthening client relationships, thinking strategically, and being able to blog because you want to, not because you have to.
That’s why BlogMutt exists.
What does “BlogMutt” mean to us, our customers, and our writers?
At BlogMutt HQ in Boulder, Colorado, we’re a tight-knit, hard-working group that likes coming to work every day. We want BlogMutt to be a fun environment for its employees and extend that same ethos to our writers and customers.
BlogMutt’s motto has always been “We work like a dog, to fill up your blog.” And although that’s not a motto you see in the rebrand or on the site, the spirit of that quote still holds true today. (And it will always be the first line our CEO, Scott, uses when he gives a speech because it gets a laugh every time.)
But we’ve come to realize that as we’ve grown, added new features, selected new writers, and acquired new customers, we’re not just filling up blogs anymore. We’re building a service that makes content marketing fun again. We’re saving customers time. We’re giving our writers an opportunity to share their talents with businesses around the world.
What business operators and agencies need is not someone to fill up a blog, what they need is someone who will be attentive to the blog, who will understand the needs of the blog and its readers. What they need is a loyal companion looking at the blog. What they need is embodied in our new tag line:
Your business blog’s best friend.
What makes BlogMutt different?
Ever flown? You’ll always hear the: “You have a lot of travel options and we appreciate you flying with us today” spiel when landing.
We’re no different.
As the content marketing world grows, you have a lot of writing options at your disposal. You can get “SEO posts of most wonderful relevancy” for $1 from overseas. You can spend thousands on a single blog from Contently.com and others.
Like our home page says, we want our blogging service to be the simplest, most straightforward option available to your needs.
Like art, writing is a subjective medium. For every author I like, you might hate. That’s writing. Remember? It’s hard. But in our effort to simplify the process, we pride ourselves on our service, responsiveness, and accountability. We have over 8,000 writers now. No two writers are alike. No two customers are alike. And no two blogs are alike. That will always be the toughest part of our job—aligning our expectations with the expectations of our customers and writers.
With BlogMutt, you can expect a support team with no pretense, writers invested in your business, and a service that saves you time while helping bring your business into the world of content marketing successfully.
We don’t make customers sign contracts. We don’t push a particular platform, and we have no hidden fees. What you see in our service is what you get. Same thing applies with the people working at BlogMutt.
Our new logo.
Meet Buddy.
Our new logo is based on our CEO’s mutt and is the most apt representation of our brand. And he actually exists! If you ever have the pleasure to meet Buddy, you’ll find the most excitable, loyal, cuddly, loving dog any family could have.
So we redesigned our logo with those same characteristics in mind. We wanted our dog to look so friendly that you’d let your kid pet him outside the grocery store. Buddy is attentive and looking right at you—ready for action. We added the brown, cocked ear, because Buddy’s not only a mutt, he’s listening, waiting on the smallest of signals to jump into action. That’s BlogMutt.
We also wanted a logo that was fun. We want our communication to customers and potential customers to be fun. We can’t have a good time in our communication and slap on a logo that makes us look like Acme Industrial Content Writing, Inc.
Our new site.
Oh man, where do we start?
We’ve changed quite a bit with the sole intention of making it easier for you to navigate and find what you want on your desktop and phone. (That’s right, our site is now mobile-responsive.)
We also want to inform our potential customers with pertinant information about blogging’s impact on business.
For businesses, we’ve created a graphic showing how blogging fuels the cyclical nature of content marketing. We’ve provided insight and statistics from leading content marketing companies to support the notion that every business should have a blog, and post to that blog regularly.
We’ve also illustrated the relationship BlogMutt wants to have with agencies and their clients. Agencies today have to become experts in content marketing as well as prolific writers. As a partner to agencies, we help alleviate the growing content needs of their clients so that agencies can continue focusing on the strategy, direction, and creativity of their accounts.
We’ve updated our color palette to better represent our surroundings. Nestled in the foothills of Boulder, we wanted a palette that represented the flatirons, high desert, Rocky Mountains, and the aspens that change with the seasons.
Logos.
We’re going to host the logos, brand book, and brand essentials on our website soon. But in the meantime, if you plan to use the BlogMutt logo, you can access versions here:
Brand book.
For a closer look at our branding and copy standards, check out our brand book (.pdf). This brand book is a compass for our brand and how we communicate. This book is the culmination of the work and mission we all bought into back in November. It’s also engaging in its own way, and can serve as a great basis for any company thinking of going through a similar exercise. If it helps you in any way, please let us know.
Brand essentials.
For usage guidelines of the BlogMutt logo, color palette, and fonts, check out our brand essentials book (.pdf).
What’s next?
Lots.
Thanks in advance for your patience as we continue to add new features to BlogMutt’s service, website, and our communications. Recently, we’ve rolled out longer/higher quality posts written by our most tenured writers. And speaking of writers, we introduced writer profiles to create a more familial relationship between writers and customers.
We’re working on how-to videos to inform customers about better ways to use BlogMutt. We’re going to make our blog an even better blogging resource for small businesses and agencies to stay informed on what’s new and important.
To everyone that follows us on social media, you’ll see even more blog-related information and advice. And if you ever have a question, you can post to social media and we’ll respond quickly.
This journey has had some bumps and glitches, we expected that. But we didn’t expect how much fun it would be. Maybe that’s the nature of our fun brand, and maybe it’s that we took time out to look at examples of funny stuff that we wanted to avoid. (We didn’t want to be this kind of video, for instance.) We’ll have a few more posts about this, but now it’s time for me to stop writing.
Why?
Because… Writing. Is. Hard!
