There are any number of reasons a business may decide it’s time for a rebrand — from evolving products and services to changing target audiences to a need to boost your competitive position in the market. Whatever the reason, a prospective rebrand is an exciting time for a company. It can also be incredibly daunting.
To help you get started, let’s walk through the five key steps of a successful rebranding process. (And, as we go, we’ll show you how OneTouchPoint can help!)
Step 1: Conduct an Audit of Your Current Branding
Before you go back to the drawing board, get clear on what you’re already working with — from logos, colors, and taglines to campaign strategies and stored collateral. What, if anything, is currently performing well? What elements of the old brand might you want to preserve, and which ones should be thrown out with the bathwater?
Once you’ve cleared out the clutter and gotten a good idea of what you’re working with, then it’s time to start looking toward the new you.
Step 2: Visualize Your New Brand Identity
As much fun as it might be to start with the flashy stuff like colors and cardstock, the first step to visualizing your new brand identity is taking a careful look at who it’s serving: your audience. Customers and potential customers should be at the heart of your rebranding initiative, with their needs, values, and communication preferences driving the strategy.
Whether you’re targeting new customers with the same products or the same customers with new products, start with the messaging you know—from extensive research, persona development, and even customer interviews—that will catch their attention. With that locked down, then you can start to have fun with the colors, logos, assets, and turns of phrase that will best convey the messages that will capture your customers’ hearts—and wallets.
Step 3: Design & Create New Collateral
Here comes the fun part—for us, at least. A new brand requires all new collateral, from postcards and signage to social media assets to business cards and letterhead. Once you’ve got the designs nailed down, however, producing all those assets can feel like an imposing task. How can you ensure great quality (quality that’s worthy of your beautiful new brand) without busting the budget? How can you minimize waste while ensuring every brand rep has all the materials they need? What about distribution — who’s going to address all those postcards that will announce the rebrand to customers?
That’s where a full-service distributed marketing and distribution partner like OneTouchPoint comes in. We pride ourselves on being a single production vendor for our clients. With a central management platform and five production facilities across the country, we are equipped to ensure every marketing asset is produced accurately and efficiently, meeting and exceeding each brand’s quality, compliance and consistency standards — whether you’re printing one new flyer or a whole suite of brand-new brand materials.
(Learn more about how OneTouchPoint simplifies print marketing management in our recent blog post.)
Step 4: Roll Out the Brand-New Brand
Collateral ready? Now it’s time to launch your new brand, rolling it out across marketing and sales teams in every location where your brand operates. This is an exciting time, but it can also be a logistical nightmare, especially with lots of cooks in the marketing kitchen. National marketing leaders have to ensure every local marketer has easy access to all new collateral — plus the ability to customize and print or digital assets as needed (within the confines of preapproved brand guidelines, of course).
Here, while emailing everything to everyone (or uploading it to Google Drive and hoping it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle) is one option, relying on a through-channel marketing automation platform (TCMA) is a better one. Also known as distributed marketing platforms, TCMA platforms, like OneTouchPoint’s U.Connect, are SaaS solutions that help brands centralize their distributed marketing efforts, enabling retailers, distributors, agents, franchisees, and any other local brand representatives to quickly access approved marketing collateral and resources twenty-four-seven. No more micromanaging, and no more concerns about brand integrity — only empowered brand representatives and killer campaigns at the global and local levels.
Step 5: Track Performance, & Adjust as Necessary
Once you’ve rolled out the new brand (and maybe popped the champagne to celebrate), it’s time to keep an eye on how the new campaigns are performing, how much collateral is on hand, and what local reps are spending. By keeping a close eye on these metrics — and any other KPIs the marketing team has identified — you’ll be able to catch any weak spots in the new branding strategy and refine as necessary, ensuring all your hard work pays off in the form of a healthy ROI.
Your TCMA platform can be a key partner in tracking, too, providing real-time data on expenses, inventory, and other important stats from every local marketer, without the global team to spend time chasing down brand reps to round up the info.
Think Your Business Is Ready for a Rebrand?
OneTouchPoint can help! A rebrand is a serious undertaking that can work wonders for a business’s reputation, market share, and bottom line. A trusted marketing management partner can make the process much easier. At OneTouchPoint, we pride ourselves on easing the burden of procurement and distribution and on making it easy to maintain brand integrity across every location. Learn more about how we support our clients’ most important print and online marketing initiatives — from multichannel marketing campaigns to full brand overhauls — and when you’re ready, we invite you to contact us or request a quote on your next project. Our experts will provide insight and ideas to deliver phenomenal results at a great price.