Before we start to talk about rebranding and what are reasons you might consider doing it - it is first important to understand what we mean by branding. If you ask 10 people what branding is, you will most likely get 10 different answers from our company logo, our company colours, our messaging, connecting to our target market. All of these are true, but are just components of your brand. Your brand is how you portray and differentiate yourself to your prospects and customers, so can include everything from your look, your messaging, your values, and anything related to how you portray yourself in the market.
There can be many reasons to consider rebranding of your business which could include:
Repositioning of your business
Stagnate growth of your business due to your target market not understanding your brand and messaging
Current brand is resonating with the wrong target market
Your brand is portraying the wrong image to your prospects and customers
Your business was purchased or you purchased another business and need to merge the Corporate branding
Want to a refresh of your business to make it more current
Rebranding of your business is not something that should be taken lightly. It is something that needs to be planned as it can be a very time consuming exercise. Before you think about rebranding of your business, you need to know why you are doing it and how you are going to roll out your new branding. This exercise is very near and dear to my heart as we went through this after a couple years in business. It is time consuming and you need to understand the costs as you need to redo all your online and offline marketing.
Why Branding is Important
Branding is how a potential customer perceives your brand and your business. Branding is one of the first things a prospect sees. Whether they go to your website and see your logo and other graphic elements or read your messaging, or they see your marketing materials at a tradeshow, or see an advertisement on or offline, they are making a determination about your business even before they call or contact you. Branding helps distinguish you from your competition and helps clarify why you should be chosen. Your brand represents who you are as a business and how you wish to be perceived.
Our Reasons For Rebranding Our target market was small businesses which is defined as any business under 100 employees. Our look and feel, our messaging, our content, and even our SEO we felt was targeting this demographic. What we found is that a business that is 15 employees and has been in business over 10 years, though they may only be less than 2M in sales does not call themselves a small business. Though we are happy to work with start-up businesses, that has not been our main focus as there are so many organizations that can help start-ups for free.
Our first look and feel and our messaging resonated with larger businesses, which was an issue and our second was the complete opposite. The terminology small business consultant & coach resonated more with start-ups, but that was not really who our main target was either.
We wanted to create a brand that resonated with business owners of owner operated businesses in how we want to help them and how we differentiate ourselves. After about a couple years, we were able to find the right look and feel and messaging fit our target market and continues to work for us. We were able to rework our messaging on our own, as was my background, but could not able to concur on what the logo should be. We were able to work with a gifted designer that understood what we were trying to portray. We wanted to provide clarity and focus to owner-operated businesses, so the logo she created symbolizes a camera lense. The colours were also changed so they did not resonate with Enterprise businesses.
Rolling Out Your New Brand It is important to pick a time to roll out and announce your new branding. You want to make sure you have everything completed and you do not rush it. When we started I thought we could get it all done in a matter of weeks, but when you have been in business a few years, you have accumulated a lot of materials. The weeks moved into months, so you have to be sure to plan this when you are not during a busy period, or you will need to hire someone to perform the services for you.
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