Common branding success goals are to have your brand connect to your ideal customers’ needs and emotions while standing out amongst competitors. To make sure you’ve met these goals, it is good to have a strategy. Having a brand strategy means implementing a long-term success plan for your brand development. That long term plan should include periods of reassessment. Nevertheless, there have and will be situations when a brand strategy is successfully executed, and before the brand assessment time has come, the business grows and expands. Sounds awesome! Why would anyone want to change that? You know the famous euphemism: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
That’s true, if your brand isn’t broken, you shouldn’t fix it. But brand refreshment doesn’t necessarily need to be a fix; a little refresher is like brand maintenance.
Brand Agility and Maintenance
Now, people don’t just take cars into shops only when they are broken; they take them in for routine maintenance to prevent anything from braking. The same goes for your brand. You want to perform regular assessments to make sure your strategy is working or to see if it could work better!
Refreshing your brand strategy shouldn’t only be something you’ll consider if your marketing goals and/or bottom line aren’t met. Taking time to freshen up your brand should be something done periodically to allow for brand growth. I suggest incorporating an agile method into your strategy. Meaning, once you’ve implemented your brand strategy, allow for phases of reassessment and adaptation of new tactics.
Allowing agility into your branding strategy can help your business grow as well as nurture the connections your brand has already made with its customers. Also, refreshing your brand helps you stay relevant so your brand can stay in the forefront of people’s minds.
Phases of Refreshment
Now its time to freshen up your brand, but how do you do it? How do you adjust or incorporate any changes? To effectively refresh your brand strategy, you must make sure to assess three key aspects of your brand and incorporate a refreshment in phases.
Phase One: Your Message
If you haven’t already solidified your brand message or voice, now is the time to do it! Determine what you want people to know and understand about your brand and what you offer. An exercise I recommend is writing a paragraph describing your brand as if it were an individual person. What would you want people to know about this person? What character traits and values does this person have? What adjectives best describe this person? The goal is to develop a brand persona, to humanize your brand for people to build a real connection to it. This exercise should help you get an understanding of your message, so you can create the writing content to successfully convey it.
If you already have a message and voice, now is the time to assess it! If you are an established brand, chances are you might have some customer reviews floating around online. Take some time out to sit down and read them as if they were talking about a person. How is your brand persona being perceived? Are you satisfied with what they said? Based on the feedback, has your message been effectively delivered?
Once you know exactly what message you want people to receive, you can start adjusting your copy content to match your message. If you’re satisfied with your brand message but need to work on the delivery, then let’s move on to phase two!
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Phase Two: Cohesion and Branding Kits
A cohesive brand delivery is a vital factor to integrate into your brand strategy. A cohesive flow can give your brand a personalized familiarity that can help to develop or maintain your brand persona when your message is being delivered. To do this, you must create a branding kit for your business. In it should include your brand’s color profile, fonts, logos, and tagline.
People can begin to identify your specific brand if you establish a look that flows on your marketing content. A client should be able to recognize the look and feel of your brand whether they are on your website or social media. Once you begin your brand refreshment make sure to preserve the same visual feel on multiple platforms to ensure your brand is consistent—leading us into our next phase.
Phase Three: Consistency
Once you’ve gotten your message and cohesive brand kit established, you can start creating content that will incorporate it all together. Creating content that maintains the attributes of your branding kit and stays true to your message gives you a dependability and consistency that clients grow to trust. Building trust within your brand is done in a multitude of ways all from the quality of the product or service you provide to the consistency in your look and delivery.
Consistency within your brand strategy and delivery will also improve your brand recognition. You want people to easily recognize your brand, keeping you in the forefront of their minds, not only now but when they’re looking for the services you offer. So, keep your message clear, cohesive, and consistent for successful brand refreshment results!
If refreshing your brand is something you feel you need but want more information on how to do it, LB Composition is here to help! Learn more…
Refresh your brand and maintain growth!