Serve the people you love to work with and actually love your business
As a business owner with an evolving brand, it’s hard to know what to do and when to do it to grow your brand. Ironically, branding or rebranding is considered a nice-to-have or lower priority by those who don’t know what it can do for them. But, often it’s exactly what you need when there’s disconnect occurring in your marketing.
When you have been in business for a while, have a great offer, and know your vision is worth working toward, but can’t seem to get there because there’s a disconnect that is causing you to lose leads and limit your reach to ideal audience members, that’s the time to act.
Rebranding with a team that helps you build or rebuild your foundations – from your core identity descriptors to messaging and visuals – will help you connect all the right dots between you and your audience so people invest in your offers with confidence and excitement.
In this article, we’ll share how rebranding can be just the boost you need to give your business the momentum necessary to connect to the right audience and make your vision a reality.
Reason to Rebrand #1 Articulate Your Unique Character’s Voice and Tone
Not only do you have to know who you are and what you stand for as a brand – your audience needs to know, too. It is more important now than ever for audiences to believe in your vision and values just as much as you do.
Once seeds of doubt and confusion are planted in the minds of your ideal audience, it’s hard to win them back. So, you’ll want to make sure you’re setting the right impression with your branding from the beginning.
Ensuring you have the proper foundations in place and processes for using that foundation to align your brand across platforms and mediums will help you build recognition, likeability, and trust into your business.
Rebranding your business can give you the foundation you need to show up authentically and well-positioned so your audience is never confused or skeptical about your brand.
Reason to Rebrand #2 Have an Attractive Purpose and Promise
If your purpose and promise is unclear to your ideal audience, they won’t know they need to invest in your offers. You’ll want to have an irresistible offer – and you’ll need a clear purpose and promise for your overall brand and each offer to do that.
Think about the gaps your brand fills that isn’t offered by others that would be considered competitors or alternative solutions and how you uniquely serve in a way they don’t.
Rebranding your business will allow you to build your foundational brand image around your purpose and big vision. Having a well-positioned and clearly articulated purpose and promise should be part of rebranding your business.
Reason to Rebrand #3 Become Known for Your Philosophy
If you have a unique approach focused on your core beliefs or way of thinking about the work you do, people you serve, or impact you make, it’s important your audience knows about it.
What is your brand philosophy? What do you believe? What do you hold true about your vision, purpose, or ideal clients or audience members?
How can you use that philosophy to make an unbreakable promise to your dream clients that will help them trust and grow loyal to you?
A brand strategist can help you clarify your philosophy and articulate the promise you’re making to the people you want to serve.
Reason to Rebrand #4 Become In-demand and Irreplaceable
A couple years ago, one of us worked with a very large organization who was offering multiple, complex, tiered solutions to 3 different audience segments. They had grown as a company very large very fast, almost in spite of themselves. Their organization grew faster than their team.
They didn’t pause to think about how all their offerings were coming together to serve their big, meaningful mission except as an afterthought (sometimes). They reached a point where everyone was working in silos, their audience got overwhelmed and confused, and their revenue took a downward turn. They lost sight of their big, meaningful mission when they grew and focused on individual campaigns and projects, getting lost in the weeds of metrics.
Eventually, they came to a decision that something drastic had to change or they weren’t going to be able to turn the fate of their company around, so they decided to completely rework their positioning, brand messaging, audience, business model, and solutions. It wasn’t a decision that was made lightly, but it was completely necessary..
Sometimes, you have to put what you think is your differentiator aside and look at what your ideal audience members most value about you to find your “it” factor – your big, meaningful message. This is why it’s such a huge part of the process we use for our own clients through Brandividuation®. In fact, it wouldn’t be Brandividuation® without this piece of the puzzle.
Positioning yourself well in a way no other business in your sector is positioned will earn your brand recognition, a reputation, and allow you to become in-demand. You want your brand to be irreplaceable in the minds of your ideal audience and rebranding can help you make that happen.
Reason to Rebrand #5 Attract Your Perfect-fit Audience
It’s important to identify how you serve this niche with your unique purpose in a different way, how you help your ideal audience reach their goals and become fulfilled, and align your brand’s values with their values.
You want to take your passion and build onto your momentum by going deeper. Impact-focused missions don’t spread and scale by staying surface level. People need to know about the lives you touch and how you do that.
The right branding team will reach out to those you serve and your supporters, gathering quantitative and qualitative data and insights. They’ll ask them about what makes them so motivated or invested in your work, the value they get from the solution you offer, and find out what they truly care about.
In this part of the rebrand process, this information is collected to pinpoint commonalities about their values, identities, struggles, and goals. When we take clients through a rebranding process, we always share this body of client intelligence so it can inform content and marketing efforts moving forward.
Taking time to clarify your best-fit audience will allow you and your team to attract ideal clients and customers, plus serve these specific people in a much more meaningful way.
Reason to Rebrand #6 Repel People Who Aren’t a Fit
Not only do you want to attract the right people for your offers, you want to repel people who aren’t a good fit. This means you’ll be turning away people, which isn’t always easy for leaders to accept. But, it also means you’ll:
- Spend less time worrying about why the wrong people are interacting with your brand
- Taking up less time to talk to the wrong people who won’t convert to clients or customers
- Focus more on helping people make decisions and less on handling objections
Helping the wrong audience see that you aren’t a good fit is a good thing because it opens space for attracting the right people so your business can be profitable.
When you work with the right brand strategists, they will help you see who you should and shouldn’t be attracting to your business and give you the strategy to make it happen.
Reason to Rebrand #7 Have a Central Body of Consistent, Clear Messaging
People won’t know how important and relevant your big, meaningful mission is or if your values align with theirs unless you tell them. Everything you put out in connection to your brand should align with its values, purpose, and promise. All your key messaging, visuals, and marketing efforts should reflect your brand’s core identity and help cultivate the belief people have in you.
To make sure you align your brand properly (and continue to keep it consistently aligned), it’s helpful to have a master document that serves as a guideline for your brand. This guideline should include key messaging so you and your team build on the foundation you’re taking the time to establish.
It’s helpful to include key words and phrases that will be used consistently throughout your brand, both for cornerstone content and marketing messaging. Some other elements in your messaging that are important to define clearly are your:
- Brand values and personality traits
- The voice and tone that will represent your brand
- Unique Brand Value statement (that we developed before)
- Brand purpose, philosophy, and the promise you are making to your audience
- Positioning direction so that you continue to connect what you care about with what your ideal audience cares about
- Your brand story and how to frame it to your ideal audience
The right branding team will help you in creating these guidelines and continuing to show up effectively to your ideal clients and customers.
Reason to Rebrand #8 Give Your Vision Visuals That Are Relevant and Lasting
If your visuals are not aligned with your vision, there will be a disconnect in creating a lasting impression with your ideal audience.
Visuals are a reflection of your overarching brand personality or vibe. Have you heard the saying “Your VIBE attracts your TRIBE?”
Relevant imagery, graphics, icons, brand photos, patterns, textures etc, will create an emotional connection to your bigger mission.
On social, if you’re posting random images, graphics or memes, your audience will be disconnected and confused about your brand.
Curate a collection of royalty free images that reflect your brand colors and personality. Hire a photographer for a brand photoshoot. Keep these images fresh and updated a few times a year, and mix them in with behind the scenes, inspiration, testimonials, etc., so your audience can make the connection to you.
Confused people do nothing! Remember when scrolling through Instagram, you see one image at a time. If that image is not relevant and long lasting for your brand, your could-be ideal clients will not make the connection to who you are, how you help, or want to learn more about your offers.
Reason to Rebrand #9 Uplevel Your Visual Presence to Give It A Premium Feel
When your branding is cobbled together, DIY’d, or pieced out among freelance designers without cohesive alignment, your business image can be unprofessional at best.
As you’re growing your business and enhancing the value you offer, you’ll want to ensure your brand has a premium feel to it – especially if your offers are premium, you’re in a luxury or professional services sector, or working with an evolved audience.
Not only is your visual branding identity important (logos, styles, colors, fonts, etc.), image curation is as well. When you have a professional brand photoshoot or have an image gallery curated especially for your brand, you are positioning yourself at a higher level. Wlevating your brand and opening opportunities to reach prospective clients.
Having invested in your branding to gain clarity in your messaging and communicate that in your visuals, you’ll be sharing your vision with newfound confidence. Having on-brand visuals will help make your brand stand out and be recognized amongst all the others.
Your ideal clients will seamlessly connect the dots from your vision to how you can help them, through your visuals!
Do your images reflect who you are, your personality and create a lasting impression?
Is their consistency in color, style and function? If there is a disconnect or another band-aid you will be doing more harm than good.
Reason to Rebrand #10 Use a Brand Identity & Style Guide to Keep Your Brand Aligned and Consistent
Having all the essential brand elements in a master resource allows you to have a dedicated visual, messaging, and marketing guideline to help your brand and big vision get visible with consistency and conviction.
Differentiating your brand and having a central source of truth allows you to remain cohesively aligned to your powerfully positioned brand and:
- Be known for something unique and in-demand
- Clearly speak to only the right people
- Earn recognition, a positive reputation, and trust
- Help people move toward a decision to invest in your business
- Cultivate brand advocates
As you create assets and marketing materials, you’ll be able to use your source of truth brand guideline to maintain alignment to what matters most – your values and promise.
Once you figure out how to hone in on your unique brand value for your big, meaningful mission and get this foundation in place, it’s way easier to scale your brand. And it’s way easier for people to work with you once they’re confident they know without a doubt you can help them.
Rebranding can be just the boost your business needs right now.
Having a solid foundation and repeatable system will allow you and your team to stay focused, deliver the most impactful message to the right people, stay consistent and believable, spread your message far and wide, and scale your impact.
Before You Can Step Out & Level Up, You Have to Know Who You Are and How You Want to Show Up!
