Stellar branding always gets me. Some all-time favorites include coffee shop swag that reads “get grounded,” a KubeCon booth decked out as a backyard BBQ (complete with AstroTurf and a cooler full of beers) and the witty LinkedIn comments from the Slack corporate account. A brand is more than just a logo. It’s how people engage with your company — from how they use your product or service to the experience that employees have at work each day.
We recently went through a rebrand at Look Left Marketing to better reflect how we show up for clients, partners and our team. Once we refined our messaging and completed a series of creative workshops with our branding agency, we landed on a direction that felt perfectly “Look Left.” If you’ve recently gone through a similar process, or are about to embark on a rebrand, here are our tips for bringing it to life.
Rebranding Your Website
For most B2B companies, your website is your greatest marketing asset and will be the main place where your audience interacts with your brand. The website platform you use impacts how you bring your brand to life and how much effort it takes to maintain and grow it over time. Developing your own website in-house may be great at first, but it can be difficult to integrate with other tools and update without engineering resources. Choose a platform that will allow your marketing team to complete simple tasks like publishing a new web page, conducting A/B tests and adding plugins for things like a chatbot or newsletter.
A new (or fully updated) website should be one of the deliverables from your brand agency. Make sure that you leave plenty of time for testing and migration so that there’s minimal impact on the user experience and SEO.
Rebranding Social Media Accounts
Whether or not social is a big part of your marketing strategy, you should have a presence on all of the relevant platforms, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube — and don’t forget culture sites like Glassdoor and Built In. Update your company profiles to reflect your new brand, and post to let your audience know that even though your look and feel have changed, you’re the same company they know and love.
Social media is a great place to get your employees involved. Provide a new branded profile banner and company description, and consider new headshots. Ask them to share the new brand with their networks and write an authentic post about how it impacts their role or employee experience.
Rebranding Marketing Materials
Updating all of your marketing materials can be tedious, but it’s a necessary evil. Use templates to streamline the process. Update the files wherever they’re hosted, and create redirect links if needed to replace branded terms in URLs.
Brand Events
In-person events are a great way to let your audience experience your new brand. If you’re planning to attend or sponsor a conference, the first step is to update any marketing materials, like your booth design, swag and physical assets that you hand out. Think of creative ways to bring your rally cry to life — for example, if speed is a main theme for you, consider hosting a morning run before the conference kickoff. Have fun with it and create a way for your audience to interact with your new brand that they’ll remember.
Brands Live and Breathe
Launching a new brand is a monumental task and there’s a lot that goes into sharing it with the world. Remember that your brand is the foundation of your company and can be brought to life in many different ways. Have fun with it, gather feedback about how it’s performing and iterate over time.
