Rebranding is necessary for keeping your business afloat. It allows you to keep your business current and reinvent your image so your brand can resonate with your audience. Brands lose steam over time, so it’s important that you put on a fresh face and offer your audience something new.
However, rebranding your business isn’t easy. Much of the challenge involves modernizing your brand identity without straying away from your business’s core principles. If you do it poorly, you could end up losing loyal followers and having a hard time generating new ones.
You need to come up with a rebranding strategy that creates opportunities and not risks. Here are a few tips to help you down that road:
Commit to a goal
What is the main reason you are changing your brand identity in the first place? Are you losing customers? Is your business becoming less relatable to younger markets? Whatever the case may be, it’s important that you have a strong reason for sprucing up your business’s image.
The amount of time you have to spend setting goals is understandable. Rebranding your business is a major decision, so it’s important that you make the most of it. Without a reasonable purpose in mind, you could end up wasting time and resources on needless brand improvements.
Do some research
It’s not enough to have a realistic goal; your ideas for rebranding must be supported by research. As you build your rebranding strategy, you need to make sure that you’re hitting the right targets with the help of real-world information.
If you want your brand to appeal to the interests of today’s generation, you will need to spend time analyzing their browsing and buying habits. You can also enrich your research by analyzing how your competitors handle their brand-building activities. Learn what makes them unique and see if their efforts lack impact.
The best way to know that is by looking at how their audience interacts with their brand. Are they motivated to engage? What do your competitors have that you lack? Making comparisons allows you to improve on existing brand formulas and adopt these in your strategy.
Try to be unique in your approach, and avoid copying others. Instead, you should see if you can improve on your competitors. From there, you will end up with a fresh brand image that gets people’s attention.
Stay consistent with tone and appearance
For most people, a rebrand leads to a radical change in the appearance and personality of a business. However, this isn’t always the case if your brand has cultivated a loyal following. If you want the rebranding to focus more on keeping up with aesthetic trends, it would be better to retain certain elements such as your brand colors and the tone of your messaging.
You can use a logo generator to help you change your brand kit, but be sure it doesn’t stray far from what makes your business authentic. Apart from the logo, consider making subtle changes to the marketing materials you publish. You might want to revamp your social media and graphics templates. Try to experiment with different styles without having to stray far from your core imagery.
Build interest through promotions
A rebranding is an important milestone for your business to reach. It shows your willingness to innovate, and it gives your audience a reason to keep engaging. You just need to promote your rebranded business the right way. For this, consider publishing video teasers and sending emails that announce major changes in your brand identity.
Don’t give too much away. Provide them with subtle hints and let your audience build enough interest in time for your big reveal. Apart from that, you should also use a social media and SEO-driven branding strategy for raising awareness further.
If you want to keep existing clients engaged, you can take this opportunity to introduce a loyalty program. Pass it off as a way of appreciating their continued trust in your brand. Eventually, they will become advocates who will introduce your brand to new audiences.
Keep track of your numbers
Rebranding your business is a continuous process. It doesn’t end at your official launch date, and there is still ample space for changes. Even if you have done an extensive research to support your rebranding efforts, you need to prepare for when the results fail to deliver on your expectations.
For this reason, it’s crucial that you keep tabs on how well your new image is performing. How do customers respond to the change in appearance? Take both positive and negative feedback into account so you will know if you’re falling behind on your targets.
You also need to track customer engagements across every platform. Look at the number of new users that liked, shared, or commented on your social media posts. In addition, compare the amount of time website visitors spend before and after rebranding your business. If there are certain aspects of your strategy that fail to accomplish your goals, you can either change or discard these entirely.