Now if you’ve been following Stone2Stone for a little while, you may have noticed something slightly different recently. I know what you’re thinking. Is that a new haircut? In a way, yes, it is. Along with a new shirt. And a new house. Our B2B Marketing Agency has recently undergone a rather sexy rebrand, which is not only more engaging than before but gets across our core values a hell of a lot better. Let’s see how rebranding can be so beneficial to your B2B marketing strategy.
Let’s talk about the reasons one might want to rebrand their website/ marketing strategy. First and foremost, it is crucial to stay relevant. Keeping up to date with current trends will stop you from being pushed to the back of the crowd and forgotten about. Whilst your B2B marketing target audience might not have changed (in fact it almost definitely won’t have), the values, thoughts and feelings of that target audience will have likely undergone a change over the years/decades your business has been running for. Furthermore, if you continue to push branding from say, 10 years ago, the risk of said branding actually damaging your business by clashing with current ideals and trends increases by quite a lot. Bringing in fresh leads requires fresh branding, so keep up to date!
Another thing to be aware of that might give you a little push to rebrand is the ever evolving world of technology. We are using our mobile phones to do more and more tasks we would have ordinarily done on our desktops. In fact, data taken this year has shown that almost half the time spent browsing on websites was on mobile devices. So you built your website back in 2008. People were only really using their phone to make calls and text. I for one had just got my first ever phone – a Nokia candy bar that had a changeable back and I exclusively used to play snake on. Due to this, companies really only focused their efforts on making their websites look gorgeous for desktop. Skip to today and if you truly want to stay current and be visible to as many people as possible, you ideally need to be rebranding your site to work just as well and be just as engaging in a mobile phone format as it is on a computer (I wonder which one you’re reading this on right now?).
Now there are some warnings that come with rebranding. Firstly, only rebrand if you have some good reasons to. Don’t simply do it because you thought ‘what the hell, might as well’. Doing this not only means you lack focus and a solid plan for what you want, but the lack of reasoning behind it will reflect in the lack of goals achieved by the rebranding. Furthermore, if you rebrand every time you’re bored or just feel like doing it, you’ll create a constantly changing brand that nobody can relate to or build a relationship with. Trust takes time and consistency, so if your leads come back every day to a different look, they’ll see you as unstable and erratic – and who would want to put their time and money into that?
Secondly, whilst a totally new look is an attractive idea, make sure not to lose your core principles in all of the change. Unless you’re trying to rebuild your reputation after a PR disaster (I sincerely hope not), you want to keep your values consistent, no matter how much you visually reinvent yourself. At the end of the day, your customers aren’t there because of the bells and whistles, they’re there because of the services you offer and how you can help them personally. It is crucial that you maintain integrity by standing by those services, don’t change them along with your image.
It’s also important to note that whilst change can be good sometimes, too much change is just asking for trouble. Take the famous clothing brand Gap for example. They decided to (very briefly) change their iconic logo and to say people were incensed was an understatement. Cries of the new logo being ‘ugly’ and ‘basic’ swiftly pushed them to revert back to the iconic original blue square just a week later. In contrast, Heinz have changed their logo three times since the 60s, yet I sure as hell never noticed (granted I wasn’t alive to see the first iteration). The difference? Heinz were much more subtle in their rebranding. The logo is one of the first things you see in a brand, if it completely changes overnight it becomes difficult to stick to that brand as you won’t automatically associate the new logo with the brand for a while. The same goes for colours and imagery. Whilst Stone2Stone has changed both the colours and our logo, if you look closely you’ll see we actually kept our base colour and logo font. Remember to keep the perfect ratio of new and old – don’t just throw your customers in the deep end and expect them to swim.
So there you have it. I hope your future B2B marketing rebrands go as swimmingly as ours (not to toot our own horn), and I look forward to seeing your brand new (albeit still familiar) look.
