Online Marketing: When it’s Time to Rebrand

You’ve taken years to create your brand, as many businesses have, including big names like business.com. And, whether you’re a small business or a corporate giant, changing your brand can be scary.

Many customers find you online based on brand alone – the logo in your Facebook picture – for example. However, with the business world evolving at a rapid pace, it’s important that your company is able to keep up, and for some that means taking the leap to rebrand.

They key to making it a smooth online transition is planning, prep and flawless execution.

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Create Your Plan

When making a brand change, it’s imperative that you have a plan and process in place for creating your new brand and implementing it; this starts at a higher level, asking the right questions.

For example, Tony Uphoff, business.com’s new CEO told SearchEngineLand.com in an interview, “We’ve been collecting data on how small-to-medium enterprise buyers research, compare and ultimately buy products on the Internet today.”

After answering these types of questions, business.com became fresh and modern, like many of their competitors in the online business sphere.

So, once you’ve been able to answer the high-level questions and collected the right information, you need to determine how the new brand will be incorporated into your online marketing efforts. There are two steps you need to take: Prepping your customers and perfecting your timing.

1. Prepping Your Customers

If you’re creating a new logo, not only do you want to prep your current customers but get them excited too. There are a number of ways you can use your online presence to do so – both on your website and your social networks.

• Poll on Facebook: Ask your customers what they think is going to happen – design change, new product, etc. This gets them thinking about it and makes them want to check back to see if they were right.
• Related blog posts: Business.com chose to run a teaser blog post – Top 5 Companies That Have Teased a New Product. The final company was business.com; but with no new product. They opted for, “Stay tuned to see the final product of our learnings.” The tease gets them involved and interested.
• Enticing shares: Intrigue your customers by reminding them of the upcoming change – perhaps you release a clue about the new product, a blurry photo of the new design, or an employee working on the “project.”

2. Having Timely Execution

Finally, the most important piece of the puzzle is how you execute your new brand. After all the hard work you’ve put into it, you want the final reveal to go off without a hitch. To do that, you want to be sure your updates and public changes are timely.

• Social assets and verbiage: The moment your new product or look is launched, be sure to update all your social networks, and direct customers and followers to the home or product page. Ideally you should have a statement from the company, whether in a blog post or press release, explaining the news.
• Follow up posts: Business.com followed up two days later with the blog post: Logo Upgades: 5 B2B Companies that Made the Change. The key is bringing awareness to what you’re doing in the context of your industry and competitors.
• Scheduled interviews: Be sure that you have done the necessary PR so online interviews and articles covering the changes will be live within 5-7 days of launch; this will keep people buzzing about your news.

Your brand is an integral part of online marketing, and making that change can be nerve-wracking. However, many big names, like business.com, have done it thanks to good preparation and timely execution, and you can too.

Post By Jessica Sanders. (1 Posts)

Jessica Sanders is a professional blogger and copyeditor for ResourceNation.com, B2B lead generation resource. She writes on a variety of topics including online marketing.

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