What happens when things change and your brand no longer reflects the message you want it to even after starting your business with a winning strategy? Whether your target audience has changed, or your business has suffered damage to its reputation. Whatever it might be, the answer may be that your business could be in need of rebranding. But what some business owners don’t recognise is that a true rebrand is so much more than just a new name, logo or site; it’s a complicated and lengthy process which requires worker productivity to increase in order to produce a successful rebrand.
Are you ready to change the image of your business? Well here are 9 tips to help you with rebranding the correct way.
1. Make sure your focus is always on the big picture
- It’s quite easy to get lost in the mythology of the story behind your business assets but try to not spend a lot of time thinking about it. Branding experts can be quite good at telling stories but just remember, majority of people aren’t going to pay that much attention to the meaning of a tiny element of your brand logo.
2. Be very specific
- Always keep in mind that branding is just as much about who you are not, as it is about who you are. A large number of businesses fail to use the discipline which is required to close in on what makes them so unique and special. They all try to include all of their customers and end up getting wound up with a brand that is indistinguishable from their competitors. Robert Sprague, the President and CEO of PCI, once said “A brand that means everything is a brand that means nothing” and that has a lot of truth to it.
3. Make sure you hire an industry expert
- When going through rebranding or just freshly starting up a business, get help from a professional and find a strategic copywriter to rewrite your copy to suit your new brand, either you or your team members can sometimes be too close to the brand to be objective. Whether you hire someone for a few hours or a few months, it’s completely up to you, but getting the unbiased opinion of an expert early on in your branding or rebranding phase is extremely valuable moving forward.
4. Think about who your target audience is
- Make sure you take time to think about who your target audience is and who your ideal consumer is because then you have a better understanding about your product. For example, if you are a sports physiotherapist in Geelong, you will be looking at targeting people ideally in the Geelong region. You have to ask yourself if you’re looking to attract new customers or make your current customers excited again. It’s tricky when rebranding because you want to make sure that you are gaining attention for your new look and feel but also not losing the key customer that holds your bottom intact.
5. Have a good strategy in place for your announcement
- There is always so much weight on the rebranding that it is quite easy to forget about the strategy for announcing it to the world. It is crucial to remember that people don’t pay much attention to the names or logos when developing a strategy; they care about how the rebrand is going to change their experience with your company positively. At the same time, you have to make sure you are not leaving behind certain things about your company that people love the most. You must thoroughly explain with a digital strategy why this is better and explain to your consumers that they are still getting the parts they already love plus some new and exciting benefits.
6. Make sure it’s legal
- When branding or rebranding, make sure you have full rights to the name you have chosen before you go ahead and make branding decisions such as your website, logo, signage etc., because you don’t want to go through all of that time and effort to then find out that someone else already has the legal rights for that name. One of the most essential steps a business can take when branding/rebranding is consulting with a trademark attorney to have a search report done on your chosen name.
7. Carefully consider forms of social media
- When rebranding, it is smart to work with an experienced branding company who has experience in naming. You must make sure that your chosen company name is an available trademark, the domain is available, and it is very clear, particularly with the advent of social media so also make sure that your priority social media addresses are available.
8. Don’t have anything outdated
- When rebranding, you have to make sure that you rebrand absolutely everything and not leave any traces of your old logo behind because that looks very unprofessional. When your consumers see your new logo in one place and then your old logo in other places, it looks extremely unorganised and reflects negatively on your business. If just starting out and doing branding for the first time then doing an online business coaching program would be quite ideal to assist you with the process and making sure you aren’t leaving anything out of your branding process.
9. Don’t have it as a surprise for your customers
- When rebranding, you need to let your audience and customers aware that something big is coming. Keep posting about it on social media and send out newsletters regularly keeping them updated and informed on what is happening with your rebranding so they aren’t caught off guard. Just start with saying that you are rebranding and have a special launch coming very soon. Giving customers a sneak peek of certain things from your rebranding, such as your new logo, can act as a teaser and can really gain the attention of your customers and audience and leaves them wanting to know more.
