Running a company is hard work. Full stop. There’s always something to do. And now it’s time for a rebrand. It could be because feedback shows your current branding is out of date, especially on the website. Or the content on the site doesn’t quite fit to the business ideal any more. Or you simply think it needs a refresh.
As more and more companies have an online presence, you do not want to be left behind, and understand that your website can be a real driver of business. So, that’s it – you’ve decided you’re going to redevelop your website branding.
Despite sounding like a massive task, it doesn’t have to be a headache, if you have everything covered and know what needs to be done.
A good place to start would be to look at what needs addressing and included. Sit down with the team of designers, photographers, copywriters, SEO specialists or anyone else, and work out a strategy that works for you.
Define your business strategy
Not just for today but the future. The best branding reflects the objectives of the business. Review again your mission and objectives, and where you can see it going in the future. Do you have a five-year plan? Is the business growing? This will all need to be included in the website branding.
Website design
So now you have decided on what you want to say and what your business strategy is, you need to think about design. Questions to discuss with your designer/developer could be: Do you want the website to remain the same in terms of size? Or do you need to expand the amount of pages? Is the website too informal/formal?
One thing to remember though, is not to make it completely foreign to existing/regular customers who still need to be able to recognise the website as yours.
Brand imagery
The images need to be on brand too, and this may take some time to research and decide on. Work with your team to come up with ideas and remember that good, high quality, optimised images need to appear on the website.
Website copy
The text on the website is SO important. It needs to be on point, without too much repetition on different pages (this is vital for Google ranking – it won’t recognise too much of the same content), and be be high in volume (at least 300 words per page, again for Google) without ‘waffling on.’ The text needs to be concise, and one of the most important things is to include keywords across all titles, pages and tags (again for Google ranking, and also for customer experience).
Google Keyword Planner is a great tool to research relevant keywords for your business. Also a good old-fashioned brainstorm workshop will help!
Marketing strategy
There’s not point in doing all the work if you’re not going to market it. As with the website, the marketing strategy will take some time and will need to be implemented slowly over time, perhaps with a big launch campaign.
Social media strategy
Part of the marketing strategy, and perhaps as a separate campaign, we would recommend using social media to promote your new branding. After establishing the right platforms to use, social media will really help to reach a wide audience, organically and through paid campaigns, as well as monitoring traffic to the new website and who is learning about your rebrand.
Analytics and tracking
You’re going to want to see results and if all the hard work has paid off – so you tracking and analysing how your website is doing will do this. Something like Google Analytics will not only help with Google ranking, but it will show you what pages people are visiting, how long for, where the they are visiting from (clicking from social media, searching your product etc). You can look at the results as much as you want and make changes to the site accordingly.
The key to website rebranding is to make it look to a new customer that the branding has always been the same, and also to the existing ones that this is a smooth transition and nothing has changed to them as a customer.
If you need some advice on how to target your branding to your ideal client, want help coming up with a re-branding strategy or need some website design help, contact us.
Remember, technology, trends, tools, platforms and prices may have changed since your last branding project, so just be open minded, and take the opportunity to look at the bigger picture.
Good luck!
