Rebranding Your Business in 15 Steps

4. Have you budgeted for a website refresh?

Changing your business name, logo and content etc. may well mean it makes sense to invest in a new website. For example, if your old brand colours were dark blue and light blue, your new bright orange logo may look very much out of place on your existing website.

5. What values should your new brand stand for?

Whatever size of business you have, coming up with a set of brand values helps put out a clear and consistent message to your customers and also internally. For example, these values could be something such as “transparency and clear communication at all times.”

6. Are you planning to involve your employees in the rebrand and take their feedback on board?

There’s nothing like keeping your employees out of the loop to make them disenchanted. To give your rebranding the best possible chance of success you need to involve everyone and make them feel their opinions are valued in the decision making process.

7. How will your rebrand affect your SEO?

When it comes to SEO, your rebrand may have a number of consequences. Things like making sure your old website URL has a permanent 301 redirect to your new URL will mean you keep as much of the authority and rankings you’ve built up as possible.

You should also look at your website meta titles and descriptions as these may include your old business name.

Another good idea is to use a backlink checker tool to get a list of incoming links to your site and contact the site owners to let them know your company name has changed.

8. Should you change your social media handles?

When you rebrand your company as a whole, you will want to make sure the changes are reflected in your social media presence. This could involve changing your logo, background images and also your handles. For example you might be @xyzlettings on Twitter and want to change it to @xyzproperty

9. Have you got a record of online and offline directories you’re listed in that you need to update?

If you’ve gone down the route of a new company/trading name, you should also think about what online and offline directories your business is listed in and get these updated as soon as possible.

10. Budgeting for offline marketing collateral

With so much focus on digital these days, offline marketing materials are often neglected. If you rebrand, that will mean your company letterheads, vehicles, invoices, brochures and point of sale material could need refreshed as well as your online presence.

Make sure you consider this carefully and how much it will cost before going ahead with your rebranding exercise.

11. How will you communicate with your target market?

You don’t need to be a huge global brand to have tone of voice guidelines. For example, if different people communicate in writing or face-to-face with clients, it’s useful to have a document outlining what kind of language should be used and individuals should portray the company.

12. Can you be consistent from day 1 of your rebrand?

Rebranding shouldn’t be viewed as a quick fix. Consistency is critical and ideally you’ll want to have everything updated ready for a specific launch date. The alternative is to phase it in gradually, but this may cause confusion, if for example your company vehicles have a different logo and name from your website and email addresses.

13. What’s it all going to cost?

We’ve seen companies start their rebranding process without having costed it out first. In a few of these cases, they never saw it through to completion which meant an inconsistent, confusing and fragmented brand.

Make sure you consider all the points in this list when deciding on whether or not to rebrand and assign a value to people’s time as well as looking at the monetary costs of using any external agencies for web and logo design, vehicle vinyls etc.

14. Don’t keep your customers in the dark

People are much more receptive to change if they know about it in advance. Suddenly changing your branding without any consultation or prior warning is likely to be met with much more opposition than if you engage people in the process as you go.

15. Get your new brand out there

Once you’ve launched your exciting new branding, don’t make the common mistake of thinking that’s the job done. In reality, that’s actually just the beginning.

The real hard work involves putting your company out there in the right places online and offline to achieve visibility and engagement with your target market.

What’s the point in rebranding and keeping it to yourself?

Summary

Let’s finish up by recapping those 15 rebranding steps:

• Know your target market
• What are you going to rebrand?
• Check URL availability
• Do you need a new website?
• What should your brand values be?
• Involve your employees
• Don’t forget SEO
• Refresh your social media presence
• Remember directory listings
• Consider online and offline marketing materials
• How should you portray your brand verbally and in writing?
• Consistency is King
• Cost out a detailed rebranding plan before you start
• Engage your customers in the process
• Promote, promote, promote

We’ve been on the rebranding journey with clients of all sizes in many different sectors.