Georgia Mining Association

Mining is one of Georgia’s most expansive industries. From kaolin extracted from one of the world’s richest kaolin deposits to granite, marble, sand, clay, and more than a dozen other industrial minerals, Georgia’s mineral industry extracts more than $2.2 billion in value from the Earth each year.

GMA performs several roles in supporting the state’s mineral industry:

• Unifying the industry’s voice and message to legislators and regulators
• Providing educational resources to the mineral industry, including safety and conservation resources
• Connecting members of the industry through regular networking opportunities
• Helping build the next generation of mineral experts through college and technical school scholarship programs

The mining industry worldwide has to deal with a perception issue and the widespread misconception that all mining is dirty, unsafe work that’s destructive to the environment. Georgia’s mining operations are no exception, despite the fact that Georgia’s mining industry is environmentally sound – no fossil fuels are mined, and 100% of worked mines are returned to a near-natural state – and safe, with one of the best safety records in the nation.

GMA approached M&R with a need to create a new image: a modern trade association for a vital sector of Georgia’s economy. They wanted their new identity to reflect all the benefits that membership in GMA offers, to attract more mining and associate members, and to better educate the public about mining in the state of Georgia.

To address GMA’s need for a new image, we recommended a rebranding, including the introduction of a new logo to replace their existing dated, underused brand identity. The rebrand also included new corporate colors, a fresh tagline, and an updated website with more helpful content and a better overall user experience.

Once the rebranding was complete, we began providing ongoing marketing services to help GMA cement its position and reinforce its value propositions for potential members:

As of the beginning of 2025, M&R and GMA have worked closely to complete the rebranding, launch the new website, and establish the organization’s LinkedIn page and business listings.

Logo and Colors

Our designers enthusiastically tackled the job of designing a logo for GMA. Our team wanted to ensure that the symbol and wordmark worked together as well as independently. After designing multiple concepts, M&R realized that the use of the state of Georgia would allow for the clearest representation of the area GMA serves. For the colors, we knew they had to have meaning. So, we researched the minerals most commonly found in Georgia and built a palette around tones were based on those minerals and that worked well together. We were even able to work with the client to understand the order in which those minerals are found when digging, so the order of the colors in the logo are as accurate as possible.

Tagline

GMA’s new brand required a new tagline. The tagline needed to do a lot of lifting – making a relatively niche organization more accessible to the public and potential members and communicating a large number of value propositions. Our copywriters worked together in several brainstorming sessions before arriving at GMA’s new tagline:

Our State, Our Resources, Our Future

The tagline presents GMA as connecting the state of Georgia to the value contained in its land. The repetition of the word “Our” creates a sense of shared ownership: the state, its natural resources, and its future belong to all Georgians, and GMA is helping bring that value to the surface to grow Georgia’s economy and workforce.

Website

Our writers, designers, and website developers came together to create a new site that better reflects GMA’s position as a significant player in the mineral industry. A new navigation design improved site navigability and a new mobile-friendly design turned their site into an appealing, engaging, and informative resource for GMA members and the organization’s many external audiences.

LinkedIn

Georgia Mining Association launched its new brand at an event in August of 2024, and the response was overwhelmingly positive.

The new website began attracting immediate attention as well. While we couldn’t access web traffic data from the previous GMA site, web traffic estimators show that visits to the site roughly doubled since the new site came online. Other impressive outcomes:

• New, informative content has driven the site’s engagement rate to above 60%.
• After the transition, SEO performance improved dramatically—the site now ranks for almost three times as many keywords as the former site, and its rankings in the top 10 results have increased by almost 50%.

GMA’s new LinkedIn account was also an immediate success. In its first five months, the account has already earned more than 43,000 impressions and more than 1,700 engagements.

Georgia Mining Association has a long history, but our existing branding wasn’t effectively conveying the scope of our work, nor was it particularly attractive or engaging. We were pleased that M&R worked diligently to find out what makes GMA unique and was able to convey through our updated branding that we not only serve companies in the mining industry but also provide educational opportunities, help protect our state’s natural resources, and work to keep industry workers safe.

They worked in coordination with our marketing team to create a new brand – including a logo, tagline, corporate color scheme, new website, print materials, and more – that reflects the importance of mining in Georgia. We appreciate M&R’s ability to achieve our vision and that the custom solutions provided by M&R make us more effective at sharing the importance of mining and minerals to audiences, including legislators, schoolchildren, educators, the general public, and – of course – our valued members.

– Cynthia Peterson, Georgia Mining Association