Bronco 2023: Refreshing Bronco’s Brand Identity

Today we’re introducing Bronco 2023: a zingy, new update to the way that we present Bronco across the board.

We’ve redesigned Bronco’s site and image every few years throughout its life but have recently neglected to focus on the less visual side – now it’s time to give Bronco a personality overhaul!

Don’t worry, we’re not doing a Facebook/Meta style rebrand, and don’t even think about mentioning Google Data Studio’s rebrand to Looker Studio to Steve! Instead, think of this like Bronco getting a snazzy new haircut; we’re still the same inside, except feeling a little bit rejuvenated and more motivated.

Here’s the Bronco 2023 Vision

We’re a boutique digital agency

We’re a small but nimble team with an established presence. We have long term clients who trust us and new ones who want to become part of the Bronco bubble.

We’re the parents of the digital world

Yes, we might not be young and cool and edgy any more, but we’re like the mums and dads of the digital world – with the jokes to match. We know what we’re talking about – we’ve been round the block, we’re experienced.

We’re a Yorkshire agency with Yorkshire values

We won’t just tell you what you want to hear! We’re open, honest and friendly. We want an open friendly exchange of ideas to help you get what you need. And we’ll tell it to you straight with no jargon.

Why are we having a brand refresh?

There was no need to totally ditch our old brand identity but, as with the digital world as a whole, things have moved pretty quickly in the past few years and, as a result, we’ve been left feeling a little stale. The digital world has become more and more saturated, Covid happened, and updates have become less dramatic and more fragmented. We were still the experts, but we became a “safe place” in an unfamiliar world for clients. For us, this wasn’t the time for being dramatic or taking big risks, but we were a constant, always ready to tackle new challenges.

Back to today, we’re just about to hit the big 2-0. We can’t really claim to be a young business anymore, and we don’t want to make our name as edgy and dramatic. Our team has stuck it out through lockdown, we have veteran members on the team, many of whom have made it well over a decade of service with Bronco.

For more background, when I joined Bronco – almost 10 years ago to the day! – we were primarily an SEO and web design company offering paid search and content services as more of a sideline to the big ticket items that made up our identity. We were digital pioneers into a crazy world that was full of unknowns, and we had the tone of voice to match that: edgy and tongue in cheek – our tagline at that time was “You can’t beat a good rank”!

Nowadays, Bronco offers a full range of services that is always expanding and adapting to the current marketing world, and as such, we felt we’d outgrown our old personality.

Maybe it might help if I explain my own role at Bronco and how that has changed. 

In 2013, I joined Bronco as an “Outreach Specialist”. Hired because of my experience in blogging, my job was to reach out to bloggers and writers to feature our clients with the primary goal being gaining links for SEO benefit. I started to help out the content creation team, which gently evolved into an early version of Digital PR. The Digital Media Marketing (DMM) team was created and I became a Digital Media Executive. We created and ran creative digital PR campaigns using infographics, surveys, mini sites, widgets and press releases.

We still offer all these services today, but then we also started to use social media to promote our digital PR pieces. After seeing the benefits first hand, we began to offer social media management and paid social media advertising.

2020 hit, and I don’t think we need any further explanation of that! Lockdown meant a rejig of our services and who was doing what, and ultimately I was thrown in the deep end of paid social media – learning on the job but discovering that, even though I’ve always thought I live in the creative world, I’m also obsessed with the number crunching, data analysing and troubleshooting of paid ads. 

Bronco came out the other side of lockdown even stronger than before – you only need to hear it from Nadeem at Fireplace Saver, one of our long term social ads clients:

“Bronco’s work on our social ads has absolutely transformed our business!

“We started our first ever paid social media campaign on Facebook and Instagram at the beginning of lockdown with the help of the team at Bronco. They guided us through setting up our ad account and creating the ads. Now we are still actively investing further into our paid social ads as our sales have massively increased. We are more than happy to recommend any business looking for a paid social media campaign to speak to Bronco – they are the experts in this field.”

It was time for the big Bronco refresh. Not only letting the world know about all the different services we offer, but also shouting about what makes us Bronco, what sets us apart from all the other agencies out there.

So how are we making our identity our own again?

It was time to get the team involved – everyone put their ideas into the pot as to how we wanted to present ourselves as Team Bronco. Luckily, the vast majority of these ideas aligned perfectly! The main trends were:

• Approachable
• “Well experienced, innit”
• Friendly
• Small but perfectly formed
• No jargon

Tone of Voice and Brand Identity

The most obvious place that we put ourselves out into the world is our own social media, so that made the perfect starting point to review what we were doing and what we want to do going forward. It became clear that we needed to work on creating a consistent tone of voice, since that would bring together our many voices as one brand. And consistency is memorable, that’s a fact.

As part of discovering our tone of voice, we looked at:

• Our brand archetypes
• Who our customers are
• What they need
• Why us?

Our tone of voice can be summed up in 4 words: friendly, honest, experienced and straight talking. We’ve also broken this down further into how we balance these, toning up or down depending on who we’re talking to and where, such as on social media, to clients, to the media and so on. 

But we wanted to go deeper, so the result of this was a clear outline for our key messaging and our core values, which we have distilled down to:

• Trust – Trust us as the experts, put your business into our hands.
• Optimism – There’s always a solution…
• Curiosity – …we’ll help you find it.
• Vision – Creative ways to see what you might not.
• Evolution – A small nimble team, willing to try new things and always learning.
• Generosity – In our local community.

In real terms, this has meant a few larger scale updates to our image as a whole as well as a reorganisation of our services. We’ve developed a few new pages on our website to promote the new breakdown, including Paid Social, Influencer Marketing and an overall Digital Marketing page, among others. We’re also investing in new imagery for our team page and social media that show our personality – our faces and voices rather than generic social posts.

If this all sounds great to you and you’re wondering how your business can be part of our Bronco family, get in touch with us today. Even if you’re not sure what your business needs in terms of marketing online, we can make some suggestions, and you can trust us to be honest!