Often, rebranding is a scary term for some companies. Alternatively, some business owners rebrand so often they confuse their audiences, leaving consumers alienated from their ever-changing corporate image. However, successful rebrands have the power to elevate the image of a business, refocus its messaging, and position it ahead of its competition.
In this article, you’ll learn how to rebrand your business, when you might need to do it and 13 different ways you can do a brand update.
What Is Branding?
Many new business owners or those averse to investing in their brand seem to think that branding is your name and logo. However, it goes way beyond that. Yes, a name and logo are crucial elements of a brand, but branding can be associated with the entire experience your customers and target audience have with your brand.
A solid brand strategy has a clear vision, mission and values. This is communicated to your audience via tangible assets, visuals and a tone of voice, reflecting the personality of your brand. Branding is how you connect with your audience and what makes them believe in your offering – it is what makes your business viable and sustainable.
What Is Rebranding?
Rebranding is a marketing strategy businesses use to refresh their brand image. Usually, this entails redesigning a range of tangible elements, such as your name, logo, slogan, website and other visual assets. Overall, the aim of rebranding your business is to differentiate your business from its competitors and attract your desired target audience, investors and employees.
When To Rebrand Your Business
Over time, businesses evolve, diversify, launch new products and services and alter their customer experience. A crucial element of this evolution and to remain relevant is rebranding.
- You want to differentiate yourself from your competition
- Your existing logo and visuals are dated and need refreshing
- You’re entering a new market that may not resonate with your current brand
- Your business has grown and surpassed its mission
- Your reputation has declined, and you want to change that
- A merger or acquisition has taken place
- Your opening in new locations and exploring new markets
- The mission or vision for your business has been updated
This is not an exhaustive list of reasons to rebrand. There are many more scenarios where a business should consider updating its look.
1. Review Your Vision, Mission & Values
Ask yourself these three questions:
What are you doing?
How are you doing it?
Why are you doing it?
If the answers to these questions are different from when you started your business or last updated your branding, it’s probably time for a rebrand.
Vision gives your business a clear sense of direction. It guides every action your company takes and is the end goal.
Your mission is the how. It’s your roadmap to achieve your vision. When you change your mission, your messaging should change with it.
Finally, values are your why. They’re the reasons you’re dedicated to your mission and reaching your vision.
Ultimately, these are the three pillars of any strong brand.
2. Become More Digital-Orientated
A great way to make branding more cost-effective and eco-friendly is to become more digitally savvy. Depending on the age of your target audience and customer base, embracing digital can actually be an incredibly powerful branding tool.
Firstly, it enables you to remove the need for masses of printed marketing and in-house material, thus drastically reducing cost and environmental impact. Secondly, if you’re true to your mission, evolving your use of technology will help to attract new, forward-thinking employees too. A great example of the technological revolution is digital business cards.
3. Update Your Logo
As mentioned, an updated logo is one of the most important factors of a rebrand, as your logo is the face of your company. It’s present on all your marketing materials and internal systems and is crucial for customers and employees to connect with your business.
Refreshing your logo helps reconnect with your existing customers and allows you to establish yourself as a forward-thinking company to potential customers.
4. Refresh Your Colour Palette
Across the globe, colours are synonymous with many brands, such as yellow with McDonald’s and red with Coca-Cola. Selecting the right colour for your brand can be difficult, but it’s highly rewarding if done correctly.
Furthermore, there’s a lot of research in colour psychology, taking colour choices beyond aesthetics. If your mission and vision focus on evoking certain emotions, colour can help you achieve that.
5. Switch Up Your Typography
Another often forgotten but easily altered visual element is typography. As with anything, trends change, and preferences evolve. The fonts you choose when creating your brand may look outdated compared with the rest of your brand. For example, your customers might be a little more hip and creative than you first expected, so a formal font like Arial might not be the best choice.
6. Review Iconography, Images & Shapes
Iconography, images and shapes are used everywhere. Nothing puts prospective clients off and stops customers from returning like out-of-date visuals. Reviewing these crucial elements shows that your business is active, progressing and forward-thinking. If you’re in a rapidly evolving industry, but your business seems stuck in the past, customers will choose your competitors.
7. Changing Your Company Name
Changing your company name is one of the more drastic elements and usually triggers a complete rebrand. You must give this great thought before making the switch, as it will impact your business in many ways, including a loss of brand awareness and reduced organic search traffic.
However, it does present the opportunity to reinvent yourself, create a brand that resonates with your audience, and drive a new phase of growth for the business.
8. Review Your Audience Vs. Desired Target Audience
Rebranding your business doesn’t have to be an overhaul. It can be a simple review of existing elements. When you first began your business, you must have had a desired target audience in mind. Why not take the time to review who your customers actually are vs. who you want them to be?
If you find you aren’t reaching the right people, you can figure out why and make the necessary changes.
9. Redesign Printed & Digital Marketing Material
Often, the visual representation of your business is the first connection someone makes with your company. If you’re a forward-thinking, out-of-the-box creative agency, your visuals should present that. Alternatively, the visual design will differ greatly if you’re more to-the-point, serious and professional.
A redesign of your marketing material empowers you to align your new mission, vision and values with visual elements.
10. Review Your Tone Of Voice
A tone of voice description should be part of any good brand guidelines document. Likely, many businesses forget that words are just as important as visuals when it comes to branding. From a snappy slogan and landing page content to lengthy press releases and customer-facing emails – tone of voice dictates the language your brand should use and the personality traits it should exude.
11. Get Ideas From Your Team
A great way of keeping costs down when rebranding your business is to use existing resources and get ideas from your team. They are the people that really know your business, understand its true values and have meaningful connections with your customers.
Furthermore, allowing them to voice their ideas is the perfect way to make them feel more connected to the business, helping improve employee satisfaction.
12. Hire A Rebranding Expert
If you’re unsure how to rebrand your business and how to avoid costly mistakes, hiring a rebranding expert could be the ideal option for you. They’ll guide you through the entire process, help you figure out your aims and objectives and create a rebrand that resonates with your audience within your budget.
On the face of it, you may think this would be a more expensive option. Yes, it is costly, but you’re likely to get your rebrand correct the first time around. If you choose to go it alone without the input of an expert, you run the risk of having to rectify mistakes and potentially need a second rebrand.
13. Hire A Graphic Designer
As you can see, the majority of our 12 points discussed so far include visual elements. In fact, the visualization of your brand is often deemed the most important part. With that in mind, we think it’s crucial to hire a graphic designer experienced in rebranding.
Why Should You Hire A Graphic Designer?
Exceptional visuals are the secret ingredient for getting consumers to connect with your brand. An experienced graphic designer will create a streamlined and consistent collection of visuals that follow your brand guidelines, evoke the desired emotion and represent your brand perfectly.
Furthermore, if you’ve yet to create brand guidelines, they’ll be able to use their expertise to build one for you, giving you the foundations for any visuals created going forward.
How To Find The Best Graphic Designer For Your Business
Understand Your Business & Customers – Create A Brief
Before looking for a graphic designer, you need to research internally and get to know your business and customers. To help find a graphic designer that will deliver results, you must have a refined project brief that gives the project focus.
The perfect starting point for this is knowing who your target audience is as well as your company mission, vision and values. A good graphic designer will take this information and forge a visual identity to match.
Decide The Work Needed
Are you on the journey of a complete rebrand, or do you need a few elements revised? If you’re thinking of only updating your logo, research the best logo graphic designers. However, if an entire rebrand is on the cards, you need a graphic designer well-versed in refreshing brands.
Essentially, when you hire a graphic designer, you need to be confident that they can produce exceptional visuals for all the platforms and media you need.
Review Portfolios & Testimonials
Ideally, you’d like to hire a graphic designer who has experience in your industry and facilitating rebrands. One of the best ways to assess their suitability for your business is to review their portfolios and speak to clients who have worked with them previously. This gives you an opportunity to see the style of their work and if it will be applicable to your business or not.
Know Your Budget
Breaking News: hiring a graphic designer isn’t free. Furthermore, as with any industry you pay for quality and experience. The more proven the graphic designer, the higher their cost will be. If you’re operating on a tight budget, don’t expect to get an industry-renowned graphic designer to conduct an entire rebrand.
On the same topic, don’t overpay an inexperienced and unproven designer – this can be a costly mistake.
In Summary
Rebranding your business and be as cost-effective or costly as you make it. It entirely depends on your existing resource, budget, and depth of rebrand you desire to undertake. If you’re scrapping your existing brand and starting from scratch, it will require more time, effort and cost.
Remember – if you’re unsure how to rebrand your business, hiring a graphic designer or a rebranding expert will make the journey easier and more likely to succeed.
The Perfect Way To Bring Costs Down – Digital Business Cards
What puts most businesses off rebranding is the dreaded cost of reprinting all marketing material, including business cards, brochures, POS, trade show signage, packaging and much more. However, Wave Cards negates this by making everything digital.
Our ground-breaking NFC business cards keep all your marketing material in one place. With a simple tap, scan or wave, prospects and customers are directed to downloadable marketing material, websites, social media profiles and your contact information, so there’s no need for printed marketing material.
If cost is getting in the way of your rebrand, click here to learn more about Wave Cards – rebranding your business might be closer than you think.