A professional services organization may explore rebranding your business for a variety of reasons. Most of them are motivated by a desire to reposition the company in the marketplace.
It could be anything as easy as a merger of two companies or something as complex as a substantial shift in target clients or company strategy. Whatever the reason, a company must eventually determine how to rebrand in such a way that the desired commercial consequence is achieved.
What is the best rebranding plan for your professional services firm? That is what we will discuss.
What is the Definition of Rebranding?
Rebranding is a marketing technique that involves creating a new name, symbol, logo, and related visual assets, such as marketing materials, to change a company's corporate image or organization. The goal of rebranding your business is to create a new and distinct brand identity in the minds of consumers, investors, prospects, competitors, workers, and the general public.
What are the Benefits of Rebranding?
Forbes claims that you only have seven seconds to make a good first impression. Customers are sometimes turned off by brands that employ the wrong logo, have a difficult or unappealing name, or work with an unclear vision and objective.
Because we live in a world where trends are continuously changing, businesses must adapt in order to attract new clients. Rebranding makes this possible. You may only need to rebrand your firm, create a new logo or name following a merger, or declare new corporate objectives, mission, or vision. So, let's look at some benefits of this method.
1. New Clientele
The ability to reach a new target audience is the major benefit of rebranding your business. People will notice if you focus on your company's goal, vision, and values and express them effectively.
Consider the case of Old Spice. After realizing that women purchased 60% of men's body washes, they followed this tactic. With their new commercial, the well-known business sought to target female viewers. Their new commercial generated 105 million views on YouTube, 1.2 billion impressions, and boosted visitors to the brand's website.
2. Higher Pertinence
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You may keep your firm current by rebranding. Your brand should always be relevant, no matter how old it is. To keep up with the competition, businesses must move quickly and adopt new marketing trends. As you may be aware, design trends have a significant impact on how customers view your brand and the products you provide. Maintaining constant updates can assist you in gaining clients' trust and faith in your brand's superiority.
Consider the case of Adidas' successful rebranding campaign. The company was founded in 1949 and has undergone various rebrandings in order to remain relevant to its clients. To appeal to millennials, the firm halted the manufacture of the popular Stan Smith sneakers in 2011 and reintroduced a new version in 2014. Adidas was able to grab the hearts of their new audience and improve sales by publicizing a launch on social media and engaging with merchants and influencers.
3. Brand Recognition Has Improved
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During rebranding, humanizing your brand using a genuine story or video can help your company stay in the thoughts of your customers. Customers are more inclined to engage with a brand that provides an experience, shares their viewpoints, or stimulates specific emotions, according to research.
Dos Equis, a Mexican beer company, one of the good rebranding examples, opted to update its branding story. With a clever and powerful story, this company launched "The Most Interesting Man in the World" campaign. The commercial was memorable, well-crafted, and amusing. Beer sales climbed by 22% as a result of this.
4. Increased Google Page Rank
Given that SEO is second only to email marketing in terms of return on investment, investing in your firm to establish a powerful brand is a wise option. Google will consider your efforts if customers engage with and recognize your new brand. For example, after months of hard work, Neil Patel's website traffic increased from 240,839 to 454,382 people.
5. Streamlined Collaboration
If your company's goal, vision, and strategies aren't clearly defined, you have the opportunity to restructure them to meet your needs. This structural clarity is essential for increasing your firm's efficiency: hiring the proper workers and ensuring that they work accurately, managing corporate operations, and making the best business decisions.
It's critical to understand the benefits of rebranding strategies. Furthermore, it is critical to understand when this dangerous maneuver should be considered.
When Should You Consider Rebranding?
Rebranding is a time-consuming and costly process that comes with significant hazards for both large and small businesses. As a result, you should have compelling reasons to use this strategy in your company. The following are some of the most compelling reasons to consider rebranding:
- If there is a repositioning of the market.
- When you wish to improve the image of your organization.
- In the event of a corporate merger.
- If there is a change in leadership, or if you wish to go international.
Remember not to make changes simply because you've grown tired of your logo or phrase, or because your brand awareness efforts have fallen short of your goals. If you believe that changing your brand is the quickest and easiest approach to boost your business, you are deceiving yourself.
How to Rebrand a Business?
Take a closer look at the following stages to apply this approach in your firm once you've decided whether you need a partial or complete rebranding strategy.
1. Begin by Outlining Your Goal, Vision, and Values
If your firm doesn't already have a purpose, vision, and set of values, now is a fantastic moment to get the team together and come up with these crucial brand cornerstones. Keep these in front of you and refer to them frequently to verify that the company's branding decisions are consistent with its basic values.
2. Develop a Comprehensive Approach
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Rebranding is about the overall appearance and feel of the brand you represent to the world, not just a new logo or website. Make sure your brand's strategy is consistent and unified across all aspects (logo, packaging, signs, flyers, commercials, etc.) and platforms (digital, social, brick-and-mortar presence, etc.). This is especially crucial to remember if you're undertaking a partial rebrand because the newly improved brand elements must work with the existing ones. Consider how a fresh, lighthearted mascot emblem would clash with the website's and social media's more serious tone.
3. Examine Your Present Branding
Consider what is already working well in your brand before tossing everything. In most cases, you'll want to preserve at least your business name. Some components of your current brand should be kept in the rebranding process so that there is a sense of continuity and you don't lose the elements that currently resonate with your target audience. To put it another way, if it's not broken, don't fix it.
4. Examine the Marketplace and Competitors
In order to assure an informed and modern upgrade, research what's working among your competitors, market trends, and new branding trends. However, if the most recent branding trend does not correspond to your company's principles and brand identity, don't pursue it. The idea here isn't to be cutting-edge (i.e. going too far with the term "leading edge"), but to keep brand longevity in mind.
5. Turn This Into a Team Effort
To achieve buy-in and input from key stakeholders, involve them from the beginning. Use this as an activity to strengthen the company culture by involving all divisions of the organization—leadership, business, design, engineering, and marketing. You may also get your customers involved by polling them on different branding aspects like logos and taglines. Add a contest to the poll to boost participation and interest!
6. Oversee the Rebranding Project from Start to Finish
A rebrand, particularly one that fully transforms your look and feel, can be a lengthy and time-consuming process. This is why project management is so important for completing a rebrand on time and on budget. Project management can be as simple as a spreadsheet that tracks timelines, deliverables, risks (and methods to mitigate them), and team roles for each work item.
7. Finally, Inform the Rest of the World
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You've put in a lot of effort, so take pride in your new or refreshed brand. Make sure to explain why and how the adjustments were made when presenting them to your target audience. By including your customers in your brand story, you can reduce the danger of them being confused when the changes occur, as well as improve their brand loyalty.
Rebranding your business is critical in shaping the proper perception, whether your firm merely needs a makeover or a fully new brand identity to reflect its evolution. Both the process and the final product have worth. Internally and externally with your employees and customers, rebranding can be used to enhance and reaffirm your company's identity and principles.
Introducing Strikingly
We understand that when it comes to rebranding a company, there is a lot on someone's mind. That is why we strive to make as many things as possible easier for you. For example, if you use Strikingly to construct a website, you may choose from a variety of templates.
Strikingly allows you to add your own personal style as well as the fundamentals of your organization or business's identity to your website. It enables you to experiment with a range of features and inclusions while ensuring that everything is consistent with your branding.
Conclusion
Creating a rebranding plan is a soothing experience. You'll be defining your new brand, a better brand, the ideal brand, throughout the process.
As executives and employees are busy being busy, any brand can become ossified over time. Everyone, at some point, is focused on getting today's deliverables out the door. It's a frantic race from one deadline to the next. A brand might become stale and old as a result of this process. It's easy to lose sight of the goal and meaning of the work you're performing.
A rebranding plan can be as explosive as dynamite. It requires you to maintain a laser-like focus on the present moment. With a large, bold bolt of energy, it clears out the old to make room for the new.
