How to rebrand your business to attract better clients

While rebranding might be necessary sometimes, it can confuse your customer base. This is even more true in the case of bigger companies that have built great relationships with their audiences. Is it possible to do a makeover for your brand and attract better clients at the same time?

The answer lies in how you effectively market yourself after a rebranding effort. Given, you will have already taken your existing customers into account during the rebranding, but it is equally important to communicate the change to your audience once it is complete.

Changing your logo, brand name or product offerings is critical to how your organization is positioned, and it’s important to give your audience prior warning. Failing to communicate these changes adequately might harm your company’s reputation and the trust you have worked so long for.

Here is how to rebrand your company to attract better customers.

  • Keep Customers in The Know

Continuous dialogue and engagement are critical to protecting your brand’s image and inspiring customers during a rebrand. You should make conscious efforts to inform your customer base of the changes. If possible, they need to be involved in the process too. It helps to ask for feedback before you make such crucial changes to your organization’s brand.

  • Highlight the Advantages of Rebranding

Do not just stop at informing your customers of your intentions to rebrand, but go one step further to explain why it’s a good thing.

If the rebranding has been occasioned by a merger or an acquisition, your company needs to assure customers and even employees that they will still get what they loved about your former brand. For best efforts, it might be necessary to get professional business consultations before you start.

At the same time, you should allay any fears of rebranding and instead focus on the potential benefits. If, for instance, the rebranding has been due to acquisition by a bigger corporation, it’s possible for your customers to be worried about losing customized attention. Employees will be concerned about job loss. The best thing is to position the larger corporation as an “umbrella company”. The benefits will include an expanded national network, agility, and increased resources.

  • Have Consistent Messaging 

An attempt at rebranding often accompanies a time of change, evolution, and growth within your business. For this reason, it’s critical that your marketing decisions represent your new company’s vision accurately. It is important that everyone is on the same wavelength, and it’s crucial to stay on-message.

Once you have rebranded, there is a need to ensure that you align all your brand presence—both online and offline. Consistency is very important, especially if you consider that rebranding involves a lot of things, including logo, naming, social channels, color/imagery and much more.

  • Be Authentic

Whatever you do needs to be consistent with your true values to ensure that you are connected with your stakeholders. Also, companies that rebrand must factor in the whole customer experience and how they currently see the brand.

When choosing a design, it’s important that it represents the customer experience maximally. The whole purpose of rebranding is to balance who you used to be and who you will be. While you are definitely taking a step forward, you should avoid going so far to the extent that your brand fails to resonate with the customers who made you what you are today.

  • Make Sure You Involve Your Team Fully

While you should make all efforts to focus on your external stakeholders during a rebranding effort, do not ignore the internal team that you will need to help you make your brand makeover a reality. For a rebranding campaign to be successful, everyone involved with the company (your employees included) must be on board with it.

As a business leader, it’s important to note that you aren’t rebranding the organization alone. You will certainly not be able to incorporate feedback and ideas of everyone, but always ensure your staff has a chance of being heard. Create and present a clear action plan for the rebrand to ensure the whole team is taken along.

Bottom-line

If your brand is not performing the way you may want, rebranding could be the solution. Done properly, it can help you get better clients and improve on your bottom line. While there are several tips about rebranding, the above-highlighted factors will ensure that your effort leads to attracting more clients to your business.

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.