BE MORE YOU | BRAND STRATEGIST, DESIGNER & SEO EXPERT
The Academy of Modern Celebrancy (AMC) is one of the world’s leading providers of Celebrant training. They’ve trained hundreds of Celebrants worldwide and the quality of their training is next-level. I worked with founder & CEO Jennifer Claire when she first launched, so when she approached me about a strategic rebrand and SEO for the business I jumped at the chance.
The Academy of Modern Celebrancy (AMC) is Jen’s baby, it’s one of four businesses she owns and was born from a passion to help Celebrants become wildly successful. Jen’s been a celebrant herself for over 10 years; coming from a marketing and fundraising background, she was quickly able to establish herself in the industry, build a brand and create an incredible life for herself and her family, but she saw how many people were struggling to make ends meet as a celebrant, stuck charging low fees, unable to differentiate themselves or get the bookings they needed. Jen is a disruptor, enigmatic and full of energy. She’s been instrumental in changing the face of the industry.
AMC provides Celebrants with high-quality, comprehensive training in everything they need to become celebrants, and it also provides next-level support to build a wildly successful celebrant business.
AMC: The rationale behind the rebrand
AMC was performing well, but Jen felt that the website and brand was letting it down. When she started the business, AMC only provided Wedding Celebrant Training, but had quickly evolved to provide Wedding, Funeral and Naming Celebrant training. She felt like the brand was lacking energy and I agreed.
Jen had also invested in SEO but wasn’t seeing returns and when I looked at the site I could see why. The content was random and she felt like they’d run out of ideas for content. I, on the other hand, saw a huge opportunity for AMC.
Overall, we agreed, the brand and website needed to convey the passion and energy of the AMC team, it needed to feel exciting and hopeful and reflect more of Jen’s personality. The SEO needed a strategy that went beyond basic keyword research and a wild stab in the dark.
What does a strategic rebrand and SEO look like?
I like to talk about having an integrative or holistic brand strategy. This means that you build your brand, brand experience, and touchpoints to achieve strategic goals within your business, i.e., build trust with your audience, focus their attention on shared values, and illicit specific responses from them.
A strategic rebrand and SEO strategy aligns your SEO with the goals of the business. It goes beyond raising brand awareness by showing up in searches; strategic SEO aligns with your customer journey, supporting your customers and underpinning your brand every step of the way, from building awareness to education, shaping and supporting their buying decisions and converting them from customers to brand advocates that with sing your praises from the rooftops and recommend new customers to you.
Done right, over time, strategic rebrand and SEO will both support and grow your business.
Strategic Rebrand & SEO Phase 1:
The project consisted of 3 phases: Phase one of the strategic rebrand and SEO project involved visual rebranding and brand messaging. I realigned the messaging to communicate the brand values and value clearly, and the brand was given a bright and fun visual glow-up.
A bright and colourful brand glow-up
Out with the muted, elegant, wedding-inspired brand of old and into the bold, bright, sunshine-filled colour sensation that is their new brand. We kept the name and logo but gave the rest of the brand a complete glow-up. We opted for a bright, high-contrast colour palette and paired it with a fun font palette. View the full colourful brand glow up here.
We also took a hard look at the brand messaging, which didn’t convey any of the brand values, or communicate the quality of the training on offer. This was a careful balancing act. Jen didn’t want the message to sound boring, but she also wanted people to understand the professionalism of the academy and their dedication to providing expert tuition and unrivalled support.
After listening to some of Jen’s concerns and struggles, I felt strongly that they hadn’t nailed their brand positioning. They needed to align the brand as a professional training provider more than a wedding brand, and it was a hill I was prepared to die on. Jen trusted me on the proviso that we could change it back if it didn’t work and with the inclusion of some of her more aspirational messaging.
Building a strategic brand often requires balancing the business’s needs with the brand’s vision and the customer’s wants. It’s not an exact science; it’s a dance, and on this occasion, we got a perfect 10! Keep reading to learn what results we achieved with this strategic brand glow-up.
See the full brand reveal: A colourful brand glow up & web redesign for AMC
A complete web overhaul
Jen built the original AMC website herself and evolved it over time. Her original website had served her well, and the business had become extremely successful, but she knew that her hastily thrown-together website was disjointed. It was what I affectionately term a Frankenbrand ‘Frankenstein monster- meets brand identity’: a mishmash of visual brand identities and messaging that was causing a confusing and jarring user experience.
Jen is a visionary, incredibly creative and impulsive, and somewhat of a perfectionist at times. She had a last-minute deadline, which made our cross-timezone website sprint even more challenging. Luckily, she had her web developer on hand to implement the brand changes, and after an intensive weekend rewriting the website for both SEO and conversion, the website had a new home, about, and course pages.
Strategic Rebrand & SEO Phase 2:
Building the SEO strategy was a key part of the strategic rebrand and SEO project. Phase 2 involved an overhaul of key existing articles with a clear focus on achieving the new goals. The strategy was closely aligned with the business goals and leaned heavily on demonstrating google’s foundational SEO principles: EEAT Expertise. Experience. Authority & Trust.
Demonstrating Expertise
Jen and her team of Celebrant mentors are at the top of their game and the training they provide is industry-leading, the initial SEO project involved a huge content audit to highlight weaknesses in the existing content and opportunities to demonstrate the expertise of Jen and her team. Cue watching hours of Celebrant training, Q&A sessions, listening to conversations between celebrants and infusing the content with the knowledge and expertise held within the organisation.
Showcasing Experience
We infused the website with content, quotes, interviews, stories, testimonials, and real-life advice from the AMC team to showcase the level of experience on offer. This created a unique content bank that competitors can’t easily duplicate, it feeds into the Authority and Trust areas too as you’ll see.
Display Authority
Done right, your brand can help build authority and trust. The Academy of Modern Celebrancy was built for Celebrants, by Celebrants, award-winning ones at that, which is why their training is highly regarded in the industry. We updated the website to demonstrate the number of Celebrants that they’d trained, as well as adding details about their industry-recognised and approved training certification. We also built out a content strategy with Pillar and cluster content that was written specifically for Celebrants.
Signal Trust
A cohesive brand experience with a professionally designed website and smooth purchasing journey goes a long way to signalling trust for users. Add in social proof, authority triggers (industry-recognised accreditation), and story after story of happy customers, and you create a brand that people feel confident they can trust.
Strategic Rebrand and SEO Phase 3 – ongoing
The last phase of the strategic rebrand and SEO project is where the strategy really starts to come to life. It’s possibly one of my favourite phases. Armed with our glorious new brand identity and SEO strategy, we steered the content in a new direction, creating high-quality, helpful and inspiring articles for the AMC audience of aspiring, trainee and newly-trained Celebrants.
In a beautifully synergistic way, expertise and experience is captured from AMC’s existing content, reformatted and shared via the blog and then repurposed by the Academy’s incredible social media and ad team.
Frequently asked questions are captured and answered in-depth in a shareable, evergreen content format that is now compounding over time to provide a valuable resource for AMC and its audience.
The website now feels like a celebration of all things Celebrant, showcasing the passion and dedication of AMC to support their community in this thriving industry.
Strategic Rebrand and SEO results: AMC
Typically, SEO is a strategy that offers long-term results. In this instance, with the intensive efforts put in to the rebrand, website redesign and strategic website rewrite, the results were almost instantaneous and incredibly impressive:
- Impressions are up 82% YoY
- Web Traffic has almost doubled
But here’s where it gets really exciting. At the same time as bringing me on board, AMC replaced their entire marketing team with a new Google Ads specialist and a new social media specialist. They rejigged their course offerings and, just 1 month after rebranding, had their most successful month to date.
AMC have maintained and surpassed that success, breaking all previous business records and proving the value of having an aligned strategy and a great team with everyone working together and pulling in the same direction.
Inspired to start your own Strategic Rebrand and SEO project?
If you’re ready to skyrocket your business’s success with an integrated branding and SEO project, schedule a call, and we can discuss how I can help you achieve your goals.
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