It is not a small decision to rebrand your business. Maybe your original brand has developed into something fresh and captivating. If you feel that the changes within your business are large enough to reflect something else on social media, it may be time to rebrand.
If you are looking to update outdated information online, you must consider risks and benefits to understand what your digital marketing strategy should be rebranded as. The following themes explain your digital rebrand strategy and why rebranding is beneficial for your digital media:
- What is rebranding?
- Why should I rebrand my digital media?
- 9 steps to rebranding
- Social media
- Logos
What is Rebranding?
Rebranding is the process of changing the corporate image. It’s a market strategy of giving a new symbol, name, or change in design for an established brand. Rebranding is the idea to create a different identity for a brand from its competitors in the market.
Why Should I Rebrand My Digital Media?
Rebranding your digital media comes with advantages and risks. When evaluating if you should rebrand, it is good to understand the benefits and risks involved. Here are some explanations:
Benefits:
- Refresh and re-establish relevancy
- Appeal to new customers or recapture existing customers
- Improve chances of survival
Risks:
- Loss of awareness
- Costs to launch a rebrand
- The negative customer reaction towards rebranding
9 Steps to Rebrand Your Digital Media
Ready to rebrand but don’t know where to start? Use these 9 steps to get started.
- Review your mission statement. It is time to re-evaluate or create your mission and values. Work with your team and seek guidance to ensure that rebranding is staying true to your core beliefs.
- Develop a strategy. Develop a well-defined plan to ensure that you have covered all aspects of your digital media rebranding. This should cover all aspects such as social media, websites, videos, etc. every step of the way.
- Watch your competition. This might be a time to create an analysis of your competition to see what’s working for them and what’s not. Analyzing your competition could be the best way to set yourself apart by finding missed opportunities and offer what they don’t. Also, you want to know what the trends are in the marketplace to attract more customers.
- Start collaborating with your team. Relying on your team is the best way to navigate through this process. Always ask them for their input and get them involved in every step. Encourage them to provide their feedback, share ideas, show them their roles in this process and how much they will affect the company’s decisions by taking part in this process. You will leave a positive impact on your team as they will truly discover what value they bring to the company.
- Make your rebrand about your customer and keep them posted. Ultimately, your customers will make the final decision as long as your rebranding efforts resonate with them. Make it about them and keep them posted. Ask for their feedback along the way. They will love the transparency.
- Be original. Stay true to your brand and don’t sway away from your values. Ninety-one percent of customers said they would rather buy from a brand that’s honest than a dishonest one. You need to understand why your brand is unique and why should your customer trust your brand.
- Make sure your message is the same across the board. One thing that frustrates customers and drives them away is inconsistent branding. You have ensure that your rebranding looks and feel the same across all platforms. You want your customers to have the impression that your brand is professional and trustworthy.
- Make your rebrand announcement public. Reveal your rebrand to the world and let them know. This can be carried out with a PR agency or your in-house team. Involve your customers and let them know you’ve rebranded.
- Monitor your rebranding efforts. Monitor the results of your rebrand and make changes as necessary. Just because you’ve rebranded doesn’t mean that the work stops. Monitoring the success or failure of your rebranding efforts will affect your bottom line. Keep an eye on what’s happening with your rebrand and evaluate what works and what doesn’t, and revise it along the way.
The rebranding process will take careful planning, research, implementation, and will cost money. This should not be taken lightly. Your rebranding strategy will have an impact on you so ensure it is planned out and well-defined and check your results.
Social Media
Now it’s time to dive deep into your digital media strategy which includes social media. Social media has been around for quite a while but since Facebook launched and became hugely successful, more companies have added social media as a powerful marketing channel. Social media has innovated marketing in the digital space by capturing very detailed customer information to specifically target your customer.
It is challenging to keep brand consistency across all channels. How will your customers recognize your brand on social media? Rebranding is more than just changing a logo and a set of colors. You want your brand to have a consistent image and message in every interaction with your customers. Let’s cover what steps it would take to rebrand your digital media on social networks:
- Cover the nuts and bolts. Audit all your social media accounts and ensure that your logos, banners, bios, and posts, are consistent with your brand.
- Your visual images must be consistent across all platforms. Create a guide that has a consistent font and color for every social media account. Have graphic templates for an announcement (ex. new product has same color & design) Your brand colors should be consistent in your photos and videos on all social media platforms.
- Expand your marketing personality. Research your demographics for each social media channel. Create marketing personalities to match your customer demographic by the social media platform they use. Revise and create your media to match your customers’ personalities.
- Create the voice & tone of your brand. Use social media listening to set up a voice & tone guide. Improve your social media voice & tone by auditing your posts regularly. Get with your team, educate, and let them know to write the brand’s voice & tone with this guide.
- Focus on social media accounts for different functions. If you are a larger company, hyper-focus your branding for specific content. For example, use separate Twitter accounts for customer service that gets many customer inquiries and have many Facebook pages by location for multiple locations. Ensure that your branding templates are consistent across all social media platforms.
- Measure the effects of your branding efforts. Start paying attention to your customer engagements, share of voice, and mentions. Use surveys to better understand the customer recognition of your brand. Learn what audiences you can reach effectively and find out if what you want is how they see your brand.
Rebranding on social media takes effort. While you certainly don’t need decades of branding for social media, some patience is needed. Using the above strategies will set you on the path to improving your online brand.
Logo
Now that we have covered the importance of rebranding social media, we will move onto what it takes for your logo.
Your logo is the cornerstone of your marketing strategy. It highlights your persona, and it attracts your target customer. Since logos affect customer interaction with your brand, you may be reluctant to change because you may feel it will hurt awareness.
If your logo rebranding is done right it may even increase brand awareness and attract a new audience that you never considered reaching. Here are seven ideas you could use to redesign your new logo with knock-out success.
- Isolate the best qualities of your old logo. To help your customers make a smooth transition to the new design, you can play up familiar and positive qualities.
- Look at the history of your brand. Look at some earlier drafts of your logo. You could probably rework your earlier designs for a modern audience.
- Strive towards simplicity. Removing something from the original logo could make it clearer along with keeping the characteristics people know and love.
- The main colors of your logo. Keep the main colors that are consistent with your branding and remove the ones that don’t.
- Adopt new trends as well as classic traditions. You must respect the traditions of your logo, especially if you have a well-established brand. This could be as simple as updating a symbol or adding color to make it more recognizable.
- Optimizing readability. Find a streamlined font that has great readability without compromising your image.
- Use hidden meanings to add interest. This is your way to grab your established customer by using visual elements to hide images or symbols in the logo.
One last word of advice: you might even want to use more than one of these logo redesign strategies… and that’s all okay!
IN CONCLUSION
There are many reasons to rebrand your company’s image digitally but ensure that your brand is still being consistent with the best technology that’s available to you.
A digital media rebrand will highlight an image to your customers of an elevated level of quality and show that innovation is an important attribute to your products or services.
Rebranding your digital media will allow you to get a competitive advantage and ultimately showcase that you are the leader in your industry.
Sources: Digital Branding Institute, The Economic Times, Digital Marketing Solutions, Bloominari, How to Build a Brand