Rebranding Your Business - What is involved

Before we start to talk about re-branding 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 re-branding 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 a few years back and it is time consuming and costs as you need to redo all your online and offline marketing.

Our Reasons For Rebranding

• Our target market was small businesses which in Canada defines 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 is not our main focus as there are so many organizations that can help start-ups for free.  Our previous look and feel resonated  more with the start-up business versus those businesses that  we can truly help more.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• We were not happy with our first logo as it really didn't stand out and was nothing more than our name.  We wanted our logo to go with our new look and brand, which it does.
  
  

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.