With that said, start your brand refresh process by reviewing your message. Don’t just glance over slogans and marketing headlines. Take the time to sit down with your marketing team to improve your marketing and mull things over.
Consider if you’re truly adhering to the guidelines you’ve created for your brand. Does your brand exude the kind of personality you’re aiming for? Your brand identity should clearly communicate your company’s vision, mission, ethics, and goals to the right audiences.
Without solid brand identity, it’s easy to come across as confusing, disjointed, and even inauthentic. When speaking about personal branding, Bob Goldwater, founder of the Birth Injury Lawyers Group, explains that “any PR firm worth its salt can come up with a terrific campaign that emphasizes a caring, personalized approach, but if the everyday reality doesn’t measure up, word will get out fast.”
In other words, if your methods don’t match your message, your branding is going to suffer. Start by reviewing your original branding intentions and make sure they still align with your current activities.
Check Your Brand’s Continuity
Once you’ve ensured that your brand’s message is authentic and on track, consider if your audience is aware of that fact. Do consumers even know what your brand identity is, or do your branding efforts lack a sense of continuity?
Branding continuity tends to involve two important areas. First, you want to ensure that your brand identity, message, vision, and similar critical components are consistent. This can be challenging. The multi-channel aspect of modern marketing can make it difficult to create a genuine sense of continuity across so many different mediums.
For instance, conveying a certain sentiment or a brand-specific message on Instagram may look very different when it’s reworked for your email subscribers or a page on your website. Nevertheless, you want to ensure that your brand’s message is as unified as possible across all of your customer touchpoints.
In addition, consider the visual elements of your branding. The seemingly superficial aspect of how customers see and interact with your brand is very important. Elements like your logo, color scheme, and typography should all be the same. Make sure you’re using the right tools to create compatible, harmonious marketing content for your brand.
Integrate New Trends
Once you’ve reviewed your brand’s message and continuity, it’s time to consider where you can make meaningful changes. These should be strategic tweaks, not major adjustments. Start by considering two things:
Your customers: Here’s where your dataanalysis can be very useful. Usecustomer data, surveys, and other analytical metrics to research your customers. Where are you still in line with their pain points and their needs? Where have those needs shifted or developed, leaving you behind in the process?
Your competitors: Competitive analysis is another way to gauge potential changes to your brand. Review what other businesses in your industry are and are not doing for their branding. Compare this to your own efforts and see where you can make changes.
Along with conducting market research, you can also look for cutting-edge marketing tactics that can enhance rather than replace your current branding efforts. For example, SEO marketing in 2021 is being influenced by video content, FAQ pages, and voice search. Consider how you can integrate these elements into your brand’s marketing content and messages to give them a fresh, modern feel.
It’s tempting to throw in the towel and start over with a struggling brand. But that can be more effort than it’s worth. Rebranding is expensive, time-consuming, and confusing for your customers.
Before you decide to rebrand, make a serious effort to refresh your brand from within. Review your messaging and authenticity. Make sure all of your branding activities have continuity. Look for marketing trends and shifts in customer needs and competitive branding that you can use to revitalize your existing brand. If you can invest in a brand refresh, there’s a good chance that you’ll never need to go through the stress and upheaval that tends to come with larger rebranding efforts.