“But…we want an analytics agency, not a creative agency?”

It was a line we were tired of hearing.

When we started our agency, we were full-service digital agency but over the last two years, we began to focus more and more on analytics and business intelligence as a core service offering. In fact, most of our new business came from referrals from our clients who were ecstatic that they were able to measure true ROI for the first time.

Why It Was Time to Re-brand

In 2017, because of our focus on advanced analytics, we were so busy that we shut down new business for seven months so we could focus on our current clients! The fast growth was a good problem to have, but the confusion about our brand was becoming more and more obvious.

The timing for a rebrand was perfect and terrible at the same time. We had committed to a few title sponsorships in 2019 (including MDMC, right here in STL), so we knew we needed to act fast if we were going to launch our rebrand in time for the events.

After extensive meetings and brainstorming with a cross-section of our team, we decided on the name Anvil Analytics + Insights. The name choice felt like our brand was evolving versus starting from scratch, which was important to us because of the time we have spent investing in our employee culture.

The Process of Re-branding

We were growing, not starting over.

In total, the rebrand took about two months and included a logo, new website, collateral materials, and updated language to better describe our services and areas of focus. It was a very time consuming (and expensive) process, but the results have been very promising.

Clients love they can still call us “Anvil” and be right (ha!) and introductions are much easier for them now. We have been receiving more and more leads from the web that are not a result of a referral because prospects now understand what we offer without having to dig through our website.

One of the most exciting elements of our rebrand is a new focus on training. We have always offered training to our clients that are wanting to build their skills within their internal team, but we have never advertised this offering.

Delivering On Our New Brand Focus

One of our key areas of focus now is to up the game in the St. Louis region for marketing leaders around truly leveraging analytics and insights to make marketing decisions. We’re going big with our first training event, hosting an all-day summit called Data Over Instinct.

The summit is not a sales pitch for us. In fact, Anvil only has a couple of speaking spots.

We have brought in speakers from a variety of industries to talk about topics like compliance issues with data collection, pros and cons of building an internal analytics team, the culture change required to become a data-driven company, and much more. We’ll be announcing a variety of half-day training events that we’ll be holding in our training room in our new office in downtown Clayton soon as well, with topics like hands-on Google Analytics training, Power BI training, and much more.

It’s never easy to do a rebrand, but we have found that broadening our rebranding efforts beyond just a name and logo to a broader mission has been fulfilling and well worth the effort. Technical savvy with analytics within marketing leaders in STL can directly impact the growth of local companies.

That’s an exciting mission to get behind.