Rebranding? Don’t Skip These 5 Crucial Before-and-After Steps
Just like your brand development and marketing strategy, branding is not a once and done process. Regularly updating the visuals and messaging for your business is a necessary component of a well-designed marketing strategy. When done right, a branding overhaul can be extremely beneficial to your business.
But rebranding is an investment that requires time, effort, and funds, all of which can be wasted if the process isn’t handled properly. Rushing to choose new designs can result in confusion. A botched roll-out that isn’t clear about what is and isn’t changing about your business can alienate long-term customers. If you’ve been around for years, muddled messaging can undermine the hard-won trust you’ve built with your customers.
Here are four steps to take before and one very important necessary step after that can help ensure a successful rebrand.
Step 1: Get clear on why you’re rebranding
Before you agree to embark on a complex rebrand, know why you’re choosing to change your current look. Rebranding doesn’t happen overnight, and you’ll need help staying motivated as you work to define your business and make decisions about how you present to the world. When you set out for the wrong reasons, doubt can set in and your drive to follow through can quickly diminish.
First, let’s look at some of the wrong reasons.
Change for the sake of change
Most people hate change and rebranding requires reconnecting with your audience. Once your branding has been established and customers are familiar with it, changing can mean losing brand recognition. Regardless of how great the new design is, rebuilding customer familiarity can take time. Without a good reason to make a change, the potential for attrition is too big of a risk.
Chasing a competitor
Just because a competitor rolls out a different look, doesn’t mean you should. In fact, when a competitor rebrands, the disruption may provide you with a window of opportunity to step in as the established brand with the recognizable identity. Rather than mirroring their choice by updating your proven branding, you may be able to think strategically. Use the downtime after their rebrand to reinforce your business’s image as stable and trustworthy and attract the customers who may not be happy with your competitor’s new direction.
Rehabilitating your reputation
Mistakes happen and, in unfortunate circumstances, brand loyalty can be lost. Changing your branding to distract from bad press can be seen as doubling down on deflecting from taking responsibility for the mishap.
Now, for a few good reasons to rebrand.
You need a fresh look
Outdated branding can undermine your business credibility. While nostalgia marketing can certainly be a draw, an outright old-fashioned visual identity always sends the wrong message. This is especially true in fields where customers expect you to be current on industry best practices and use cutting-edge technology to provide high-end products and services. A modern brand identity signals vitality, competence, and a commitment to providing state-of-the-art solutions.
Your company is changing
Customer preferences are never static. Priorities and needs change and markets evolve. If your branding is a decade old, you may not be attracting the new customers you need to sustain your business. Branding that resonated strongly a decade ago probably won’t connect with today’s consumers or accurately reflect your company’s current product offerings. So, whether you’re targeting a new audience or expanding to an entirely new market, a change in branding may be required to support the change.
You’ll know what you’re trying to achieve
An effective rebranding requires a thoughtful approach to the message you want to communicate, a thorough understanding of your business goals, and the willingness to make a series of decisions around who and what your business is. Knowing what you’re trying to achieve with the rebranding can help you stay focused and productive once the process starts.
Step 2: Connect with the right people
The complex process of rebranding is almost impossible to complete alone. The support of experienced and knowledgeable marketing experts like the team at K-Kom is a must-have. Beyond the help of a marketing expert, you need feedback from a few additional sources.
First, the employees who interact with your customers every day have an intimate knowledge of who they are and what they respond to. Their frequent contact gives them insight into your target audience that can be difficult for leadership to meaningfully understand.
Checking in with your team is important, but don’t stop there. Your second source of knowledge is the customers themselves. They’re the ones who were initially attracted to your branding, have chosen to continue working with you, and will be most affected by the change. Sending out a survey to loyal customers may yield some of your most valuable information about what will attract new business.
Your vendors may be a surprising choice, but often their knowledge about what makes your company successful runs surprisingly deep. Since they typically work with many different companies their impressions of your marketing can have a unique impact on design choices. Plus, because they work with you externally, they may be more willing to provide honest feedback.
A few good questions to ask these sources are:
- Who are our customers now? Are there any cultural or market differences we need to account for?
- What do you think our company stands for?
- What about our current branding resonates with our customers?
- What, if anything, should we keep?
- What are our competitors doing?
- What five words describe our company?
- What should we avoid in our branding?
Keep in mind that not every question should go to each group! Employees, customers, and vendors will each have their own areas of expertise on your current and future branding. But a quick survey by email should yield some excellent insight into your rebranding process.
Step 3: Figure out what’s working and what isn’t
A rebrand, even one you consider a complete overhaul, doesn’t necessarily mean throwing everything out. The old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” definitely applies when it comes to marketing. A rebrand can totally freshen your look while still building on the recognition you’ve built throughout your years in business.
So, before you decide on the scope of your rebranding, evaluate what you currently have. What’s working? What’s not? While the answers to these questions can be informed by the survey you conducted in Step 2, you have additional facts available to you that can be an important piece of your design decision making.
Collect data from website traffic including clicks, conversions, and engagement. Look at your social media to determine what gets the most views, likes, and shares. Responses to email campaigns, brochures, and signage can be important as well. Based on the results you’ve collected, decide what you actually need to change, what you don’t, and what will preserve a connection to your past.
Specifically, assess what messaging continues to resonate with your customers and what elements of your brand are so established with your customers that a change would be detrimental.
Step 4: Always have a plan
A disorganized rebrand is going to lose steam quickly, waste time and money, and provide no positive results. Asking questions and determining what you want to include in your rebrand is just the beginning. You also need to figure out how you’re going to approach the rebrand in an organized and manageable way.
Start with the phases you’ll go through to complete the redesign and end with a rollout plan. How will you publicize your new brand? For instance, shocking customers with a new website out of the blue can be off putting. Prepare your audience by letting them know about the upcoming redesign and getting them excited about what’s changing, what’s staying the same, and what they’ll gain from the change.
Don’t waste this marketing opportunity! A rebrand draws attention and new interest to your business, so you want to capitalize on that as much as possible. Plan to publicize your rebrand across as many platforms as possible, including your website, email, social media, and print materials.
Step 5: Evaluate effectiveness
After our four recommended “before” steps, we’ve finally reached the “after” step. It should come as no surprise that this step is simultaneously one of the most important and ignored steps in marketing: evaluating effectiveness. The truth is, once your rebrand launches, the real work begins.
Decide on reasonable metrics that can be used to accurately reflect the effectiveness of your new branding. Remember, there are never guarantees with a rebrand. But, even if customers aren’t responding to the changes, the rebranding doesn’t have to be a failure. Nothing is permanent (especially digital marketing) and the need for minor changes to visuals or messaging should be expected.
The same metrics you used to evaluate what was working with your old branding can be applied to your new branding. After the initial excitement about the changes dies down, you’ll hopefully continue to see an increase in website visits, improvement of search engine rankings, higher engagement rates, better lead generation, and positive brand sentiment.
Considering a rebrand? Talk with one of our marketing experts today!
