How To Successfully Rebrand Your Company The Stress-Free Way

When it comes to running a successful business, the importance of investing in brand identity can’t be underestimated.

Unfortunately, this is an area in which many companies tend to underperform, instead opting to channel their funds in other directions and neglecting to invest enough in their image. As a result, they often find themselves failing to stand out from their competitors, and having to go for a bold and eye-catching rebrand to attract new customers.

On the other hand, sometimes a business needs to rebrand in order to rebuild its image after a scandal, such as an accident or a worrying product recall. Investing in a shiny new brand can help customers to regain trust in that particular company, and smooth over the problems of the past.

Whatever the reason behind your need to rebrand, the great news is that, if you find yourself facing the daunting prospect of overhauling your company’s image, there are some simple tips and tricks you can follow that will hopefully make the whole process hassle-free. Let’s dive right in and find out what they are!

1. Go Back To Basics

To help you make the most of your rebranding, the first and arguably most important step you should take is to sit back and take a long hard look at your business. Think about the journey it has taken from its opening day all the way through to today. Think about the mission the business began with, and how its goals and values may have shifted over the ensuing years. Consider your target demographic, and what they have in common with your company.

Finally, think about your business’s unique selling point. What makes you different from all of the other companies in your niche? What makes your particular business stand out – and how can you represent this one-of-a-kind quality in your new branding materials?

• Eye Up The Competition

Before you actually begin hiring designers to draw up new logos and create new forms of advertising, it’s a good idea to conduct some thorough market research. Scrutinise your biggest competitors to see what they’re doing right. In other words, analyse the nuts and bolts of their own branding to find out how they’re managing to project an alluring and relevant image to their target audience.

Once you have a sound knowledge of what your closest rivals are doing, you will have a better idea of what direction to take with your own brand identity. You will know what kind of techniques work – and what you can do to capitalise on your rivals’ successes without actually copying them, to make sure your company’s new brand stands out.

• Lay The Groundwork

Because rebranding is such a big deal, it’s important to get everyone involved from day one and make sure that you come up with an effective creative strategy. This will help to ensure that all of your employees are on the same page and know what they’re doing and how the rebranding process will unfurl.

To achieve this, it’s a good idea to sit down with your whole team at the very beginning of the rebrand and work on constructing the strategy together – ideally with the help of rebranding specialists who have the know-how and expertise to help you make it a success.

Together with your employees, come up with some key objectives that you can keep in mind throughout the rebrand, as having clear and achievable targets will remove a lot of the stress from proceedings. You should also come up with a new set of brand guidelines, which will serve as a helpful handbook for your workforce to follow going forward, to ensure that they help to maintain a consistent tone of voice for your business.

Not sure what to include in your brand guidelines? This vital document should contain every element of your company’s identity and image, from its mission statement and values to its logos, preferred colour palette, any relevant imagery and iconography, and even what kind of typeface you like to use in your advertising materials.

Having these clearly defined qualities laid out in an easily accessible document will help to make sure that every piece of marketing your employees create is consistent with your company’s refreshed image. This, in turn, will help to guarantee that your rebrand is a success going forward.

• Don’t Jettison Everything From The Past

While you and your team are probably intensely focused on creating a new look for your company, don’t feel that you have to scrap absolutely everything from the past. There may be some old marketing materials and other documents that can still be useful, with a little tweaking; and, of course, you should keep all of the previous work you have done for your clients.

This is where some streamlined document management will come in useful. When you have so many materials, both new and old, to deal with, it’s vital that your company’s digital assets are safely and secured stored.

Of course, this can take up a lot of time and effort, not to mention physical space on your company server, so it’s a good idea to start organising all of your assets in the weeks preceding your rebrand. To help with this process, don’t be afraid to use innovative tools and software to make your document management as hassle-free as can be.

For instance, to make sure you don’t overload your company server, you can shrink down bulky PDFs with the help of the PDF compressor devised by Smallpdf. This handy tool can compress PDF files by up to 99%, so you will be able to free up plenty of virtual space for your new branding materials.

• Test Out Your New Look

Once you and your team – not to mention any third-party experts you’ve brought in, like branding consultants and graphic designers – have hashed out some new branding materials, it’s a good idea to test their appeal. After all, you need to ensure that your rebranding is going to be a success, so it’s important to find out if any details of your new brand identity need tweaking or if they have to be entirely reworked.

Put together some focus groups consisting of people from your target demographic, and show them your new materials. They can then give you their feedback and tell you if your new image is appealing, if it’s memorable, and if there’s anything they find off-putting.

Using these invaluable insights you and your team can then go back to the drawing board, if need be, and crystallise your new brand, knowing just what will work and what doesn’t.

• Choose Your Rebranding Technique: Bold And Brassy Or Subtly Transformative?

Finally, once all of your hard work has paid off in the form of some glossy new branding materials and a new identity to unveil to the world, you need to decide how you’re actually going to make the transformation. Are you going to draw attention to your rebrand, or will you follow in the footsteps of many other businesses and quietly make your changes in the background?

You may find that it’s best to make a bit of a fuss around your rebranding, so your customers get the impression from the very beginning that it’s an exciting new start. There are a number of ways to do this, such as organising a big giveaway or a competition, or even just starting a rebranding countdown across social media and your email marketing campaigns. You could even get the mainstream media involved!

Presenting your rebrand as a bold, exciting, and positive move will help your consumers to see the changes as a good thing and will hopefully make the whole process as seamless and stress-free as possible.