Rebranding your small business is a natural part of a business lifecycle. After all, everything in life goes through change, and your business is no different.
So, how do you rebrand your business successfully? And by ‘successfully’ I mean
Protecting your SEO rankings and traffic
- Without losing customers and clients
- Minimising rebrand stress and spending
- Feeling confident in your new brand
What is a brand?
Okay, so let’s start at the beginning and define what your brand is.
Many people think of their brand as being the logo, colours and fonts of their business. But, your brand is WAY more than that.
Your brand is your business identity. It’s
- The conversations you’re known for
- The journey through your business to success
- The logo that represents your small business
- The name of your business
- The colours, fonts and images you use
- The feeling you generate in your customers
- The tagline that summarises the successes you bring your clients
Used together, these elements give you the brand identity of your business which helps keep your business in the front of your clients minds when they’re looking for help.
So, rebranding your business involves shaking all this up and creating a new brand identity.
Why rebrand your small business?
As I said at the beginning, things change. No business stays exactly the same year after year. You don’t stay the same either!
Especially in the first few years of business, you’ll find you become more specific about what services or products you offer.
You’ll probably get a clearer picture of who you want to be working with.
Rebranding your business is a natural part of a business lifecycle and can help you refocus and bring in more of the clients and customers you want to be working with.
But STOP!
Before you go any further, let’s talk about why YOU want to rebrand!
Here are some questions to ask yourself if you’re thinking about rebranding your business.
- Why do you want to rebrand? Are you bored with your visual elements? Is your website looking outdated? Are you not getting the customers you want to be working with? Are you changing your niche?
- What are you hoping a rebrand will bring to your business? More clarity about what your business does? More of the right types of clients? Growth? Standing out in the marketplace?
- What do you need to rebrand? It is just your visual elements - logo, fonts, colours - and where you have these (website, social media etc)? Or do you need to look at your customer journey, user experience, services, products and packages as well?
What do I need to do to rebrand my business?
Well, that all depends on what you’re rebranding (see that last bullet point above?!).
Remember that your brand identity helps keep your business in the front of your client's minds when they’re looking for help.
So, the first thing to do is anchor all your rebrand work on a clear, detailed customer profile. Not sure how to do this? Check out my blog on creating a really useful customer profile.
Now you know all about your clients and how you help them, you can use this to guide all the other elements of your rebrand - colours, fonts, logos, images, words, messages, blog topics, social media topics… the list goes on.
If you’re going whole-hog and rebranding EVERYTHING, starting with a really clear customer profile and marketing playbook will make everything else so much easier and save you money in the long run.
- Decide on who your dream client is
- Super-stalk your clients!
- Create a marketing playbook with your talking points and brand story
- Decide on new/updated services, products and packages that help your dream client achieve success
- Create a new customer journey through your business
- Create a new visual brand identity for your small business
- Update your website, social media, printed documentation
- Communicate the changes with your clients and customers.
Who do I need on my team to help me rebrand my business?
You can do it all yourself! The courses at The Helpful Academy are perfect if you want to or have to DIY it.
Here are the courses I recommend
- Catch Your Dream Client (create a customer profile)
- The Brand Identity Project
- Plan your System for Success
- Write your Site E-commerce
- Write your Site Services
It may be more expensive, but working with a professional can take the effort and pressure on you to get it done.
Especially with visual branding, there’s a heap of psychology behind colour and font choices that you miss if you do it yourself.
You might need
- A StoryBrand certified guide to create a customer profile and brand story (hey! That’s me!)
- A graphic designer
- A web developer
- A photographer
- A copywriter (again, with the “Hey! That’s me!)
How to protect my SEO and organic traffic during a rebrand?
One question I often get asked is how a rebrand will affect SEO and organic traffic to websites.
- Large website changes, including changes in page names, should be rolled out over a couple of weeks to minimise SEO losses. If you’re not changing webpage names, meta descriptions or page titles it shouldn’t make much difference.
- Make sure you set up redirects from old pages to new pages.
- Wait 2-3 months before you see what’s really going on.
- During the first 2-3 months after a big website rebrand plan lots of blogs and links back to your website from social media posts or other sites.
How do I get my clients on board with a rebrand?
One of the goals you might have for your rebranding is to attract more of the right people to your business. What might happen is that you lose some of the wrong people. But that’s all good!
So, how do you get your current clients on board with your new brand?
- Tell them why you’ve rebranded. Explain your business has moved on over the years.
- Tell them how/if/why the rebrand affects them. What’s in it for them?
- Invite them to view your new website/social media
- Make them part of the journey
Mistakes to avoid when planning your business rebrand
Here are some classic mistakes to avoid wasting your money, time and effort when starting a business rebrand.
Forgetting/not setting your goals. So you know WHY you’re doing this big chunk of investment in your business. At the end, you can go back and check off your goals to make sure you’ve done what you need to do.
Don’t just focus on logo and website updates. If you’re going through this process, make sure your whole customer journey is super-focused on your clients. Then you’ll get more significant results than just prettying up the outside.
Don’t go along with everyone else. Using the StoryBrand framework, I often come across people who want the same old same old style of website copy. You’ve probably seen it. “I do this. I do that. I help these people.” All very ‘me’ focused.
Sorry, I don’t do that because I know how much it sucks for client conversion and damages your business.
Rebranding your business means focusing on YOUR clients, THEIR needs and how YOU help them achieve success.
It pays to step out of the box and create something a little different that works for your clients and your business.
Is it time your small business rebranded?
Ready to talk about rebranding your small business?
Embrace the change!