It’s been ten months since Motion Manor launched and we wanted to take this time to share with you some of the things we learned in such a brief space of time. These lessons led us to implement certain changes to our brand and messaging to ensure that the business was in line with our mission, values and goals.
Without further adieu, here are some of the things we learned;
We spent a long time coming up with a message that meant something, but it didn’t take long for it to lose its spark…. We just weren’t as excited anymore. Why was this?
After much brainstorming, we came up with an ‘idea’ that seemed practical, but it didn’t line up with our personal values. When you come to think of it, as a small business, your business values should be….your values. What really mattered to us was leaving the world a better place than we found it. We’ve been saying it for years but it still wasn’t front and centre. We wanted people to know that we were an ethical business, that both founders are vegan and that we are taking steps to be carbon positive in the near future. We also wanted our audience to know that we want to work more with business owners who are also ethical so that we can help share their stories through animation.
Our messaging before was “Seriously Persuasive Animation” but is now “Changing the world with video, one audience at a time”. This shift in language made us feel so much more connected to what we were saying and we felt so much more passionate about what we were doing.
In hindsight, what was more important was picking any messaging, anything, and trialling this in the marketplace. Through our own conversations with other people, we were able to eventually narrow down what it really was we were passionate about and what was missing.
The power of language is certainly real!
Now that our message was in alignment, we realised that our visual identity had to be brought back into alignment as well. Therefore, we looked at various colour palettes, created many illustrations as well as made slight changes to our logo to tie everything together and make them look more cohesive.
This led us to another realization, the brand doesn’t have to be set in stone. Like people, we grow, change, learn, adapt. You don’t have to wait five years to make changes if you realise something sooner.
Change that comes from growth, is the most authentic kind of change. Not the “I’ll wait until New Year to go to the gym” kind of change. If you see a problem that you’re passionate about, fix it now....not later!
We had our messaging and brand sorted so it was finally time to splash them out onto the website.
And this was no easy task...
With the help and expertise of Avid Panda, we now have our brand new Motion Manor website. We’re still adding more pages and developing the content and likely always will be!
Our key takeaway though, was the pages on your site aren’t about you, or what you want to say. They’re about your audience, just like video content. You have to consider the language that appeals to them, what their problem is and how the page flows.
Our journey of growth and discovery hasn’t stopped and likely never will!
The ONE thing this experience has taught us is to keep growing. Remember that as we grow the business will grow, which means we have to implement what's necessary to keep up with our needs as well as our customers' needs.
We are still growing every day and this is why one of our core values is “Be Better”. Not be better than you, them or someone else, but be better than we were yesterday. Create better content, tell better stories and be more ethical.
This is why we’re proud today to say, with a big cheesy grin on our faces,
We are Motion Manor, The Ethical Animation Studio.
Changing the world with video, one audience at a time.
