How to know when you’re ready for a rebrand

Five clues your brand is telling you it’s time for a refresh

How to know when you’re ready for a rebrand

Five clues your brand is telling you it’s time for a refresh

Figuring out your branding isn’t always smooth or simple. Discovering your brand voice and aligning all of your design elements is often a journey rather than a pit stop. Along the way sometimes we realise that what we started creating isn’t quite ending up how we’d like it to. Or we find our brand has morphed into something we’d never foreseen.

If your brand has gone from Tom Hanks to Chris Hemsworth, you need a change of outfit.

Brands are like book characters, they take on a life of their own. It’s your job to document and shape it so they can be at their absolute finest. 

Changing your brand identity might be a little daunting if you’ve already got a decent audience and loyal customer base. But keeping your brand fresh is one way to get an old audience excited. They’ll be curious to know what colours you’ve chosen and the changes you make to your brand’s style.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – you can’t market to everyone. Rebranding is the perfect opportunity to show your followers whether you’re the right brand for them.

Sure, you may lose a few email subscribers or Instagram followers. Guess what? They weren’t going to buy from you anyway. They were just idle loiterers, you don’t need them.

Let’s take a look at when your brand is ready for an upgrade.

 

Take the hint when your brand needs a freshen up

Brand’s drop little clues to let you know when they’re ready for a change. So deciding whether or not to rebrand is less about feeling bored and more about your business goals. (But if your brand is bringing vibes of meh, let’s chat. Our brand design experts know how to put the pep back in your brand step.)

To gain a little perspective from your branding, you need to look at where it aligns with your business and marketing goals and where it’s treading a different path.

A change to your services or products

Perhaps the most obvious signal, if your offer is different from when you first launched, your brand needs to reflect the change. Nothing loses customers faster than confusion. They want to feel like they’re in the right place from the very beginning. So ensuring your branding makes sense the whole way through is vital to making customers feel comfortable.

As soon as something feels a little off, they’ll vanish. Whether you’ve switched from beauty to hair products or interior design to home organisation. Your branding should provide visible clues so that your audience knows who’s talking to them.

You avoid sharing your website

If sharing your web address has you cringing, it’s okay, you’re not alone. 

Many businesses pop up a website in haste because they need it done yesterday. You might have spent months tweaking the layout or just hit publish and left it alone for the past two years. Either way, your website is an important landscape of your business that you should be proud to share.

With customer expectations of digital businesses growing, your website needs to be appealing and functional to support your brand. 

Your website design needs to be responsive too. This means it knows when a user is on a mobile device instead of a desktop and changes the layout of your site to suit. Mobile conversions are 64% higher than desktop because consumers are less willing to compare when they’re using a mobile.

A brand new website to show off, sounds nice, doesn’t it? When you know it’s likely to bring more people to your business and boost your conversions, well, we think it’s worth it a little digital investment.

You want to reignite your audience or target a new one

No matter how loyal your audience may be, sometimes their interest starts to wane. Maybe your competitors have a sparkly new offer or maybe there’s a new Netflix series your audience is binging. 

Keeping attention on your brand is much easier when you’ve got a new look to share.

Another sign that you’re ready for a rebrand is when you’re looking to target a new audience. The colours, shapes, fonts and layouts you choose need to resonate with the people you’re creating content for. If your offer has been for women only and you’re now adding a product line for men, you need to ensure your branding is relevant to your new audience.

Your brand is lost in the crowd

If every architect uses a neutral palette and you chose cappuccino brown as your brand colour, how will you attract attention?

Getting your brand to stand apart from your competitors needs a clearly defined brand strategy. It’s your roadmap to get your brand from where it is now to where you want it to be. Once you know where you want to go, taking the steps to get there is straightforward. 

The only time you want to blend in is when you see that old irritating high schoolmate at the supermarket. 

It’s a little like Tetris

From a distance, your brand may look like it all fits together but up close it’s a bit of a mish-mash. This often happens when a business has developed its branding slowly, adding pieces in as they’ve grown.

Each touchpoint of your brand needs to seamlessly flow on to the next. 

Why? Because you can’t control where people will jump on or off your customer journey. They might start on your Instagram feed, flow to your website and make a purchase. Or they may hit your website after a google search, then jump to your YouTube channel, trail off to your Twitter account, back to your website, over to your Facebook page…you get the idea.

Rebranding allows you to look at all the parts of your brand which don’t align with your brand heart and swap them for a better option.

Like the gooey deliciousness of toasted marshmallows, a little reinvention is good every now and then.


Want to chat with our brand design experts about whether your business needs a rebrand? Email us at hello@byninja.com.au, call 1800 749 286 or fill in our contact form.

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