Regardless of your product or your target audience, the digital world is as competitive as it's ever been. Audience demands are higher than ever.
Do the following apply to you? If so, it may be time for a brand refresh.
1) You blend in. Whatever your industry, you will have competitors. Competitors that are also fighting the attention of your potential consumers. One way to ensure you are striving for your branding potential is to focus on and promote your USPs. What makes you stand out, compared to other products in your line of industry?
2) Your message is unclear. Using unnecessary, elaborate or challenging vocabulary doesn’t make your branding sound exclusive. Instead, you seem unreliable and uninteresting to a new audience that can’t determine what you offer, or how you can help them.
3) Your company has evolved. Brands grow, develop, expand and even change their objectives over time. If your branding portrays the same values it strove for 10 years ago, but your main principles and USPs have evolved since then, then so should your branding! Audiences pick up on a lack of consistency between your brand messaging and your digital marketing efforts. Branding should always be relevant with your company values and aims.
4) Your branding is inconsistent. Brand consistency is the key to building customer trust and credibility. If your colouring, font styles, copywriting, content production and tone of voice are largely out of scale with each other, it builds a confusing and conflicting brand image. Not only will this reduce your credibility, but it will also make it more challenging to create a consistent following.
So the million dollar question...
How do you refresh your brand’s image for relevance and longevity?
1) STRIKE THE BALANCE! Rebranding can be a refreshing, needed and powerful move for companies marketing digitally. However, rebrand too often and it can be a confusing and overwhelming journey for the customer. Always ensure that your rebrand is justified, well planned and done in a timely manner...and always keep longevity in mind.
2) Focus on visuals. Infographics gain 200% more shares than text content. 94% of marketers say video content has helped increase user understanding of a product, so don’t cut corners! When it comes to visual content, don’t cut corners! It is one of, if not the most effective form of branding! Younger audiences especially have high engagement with visual content such as images and videos.
3) Don’t forget the basics! Upgrading content creation equipment can help a brand’s content do a 180. (Think tripods, more advanced editing software and higher quality cameras). No one wants to watch a poorly recorded promotional video, or listen to a muffled interview. Also bear in mind the reputation poorly created content builds for your brand. If you don’t take your promotional content seriously, chances are customers will feel as if you won’t take their loyalty seriously.
4) Experiment! Your first brainstorming session won’t always be the winning one.
Experiment with branding pathways, A/B test content and track engagement, and keep up to date with industry trends to inspire your rebrand. Alternatively, it could be that your current content needs repurposing…think of this as ‘polishing old content’. Invest in photo editing software, add licensed music, or edit longer videos into snippets to open a loophole of new content without creating new ideas.
5) Get feedback! As well as tracking engagement analytics, verbal feedback, (specifically from your target audience), will give you an in depth response to new strategies, and help you understand what users from your feed. People who have interacted with your channel and brand before the rebrand are particularly valuable in terms of feedback as they have a comparison of the methods implemented before. Ask them about any struggles, misunderstandings or dissatisfaction they face with your content and strategy. Understand their painpoints and fix them.
Rebranding is a risk. But not a risk without potentially huge rewards. When restrategising, do thorough research on your audience's painpoints, as well as doing competitive research. Keep your existing audience in mind when restrategising, as any rebranding should not be at the expense of your current following.
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