In our previous post, we discussed the importance of maintaining a consistent brand voice online and how consistency and a patience adherence to your brand can give a significant boost to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Modern search engine algorithms place a strong emphasis on a consistent brand voice applied uniformly to websites, blogs, social media accounts, and other online services. If your small business doesn’t have a consistent brand voice applied in this manner, your SEO might be needlessly hampered as a result.
Do You Have A Strong Brand Voice?
Unfortunately, even an excellent brand voice and strong SEO cannot fix a brand that is misaligned, misapplied, incoherent, or just plain ineffective to your target market. If you believe that your brand needs to be tweaked, updated, or even completely redone, you may simply not have enough time to do so before the start of the holiday shopping season. How can you determine if your brand is ineffective or broken, and more importantly, how can you tell if rushing through changes to your brand or if a total rebranding is the right decision to make?
The Perils Of Rushing Through A Rebranding
The first question to ask yourself before you attempt to make any changes to your brand or even push through a rebranding this close to the holidays is why am I doing this now? Waiting until the last minute to make changes to your brand or rebranding completely is a perilous and complicated process, and it is a very bad idea to attempt such an effort without professional guidance. Not only will a professional brand expert help you avoid many of the more common problems associated with such an effort, but they can also help you determine whether or not your existing brand really is broken or even completely ineffective. If the problems that you believe are directly related to your branding are really the result of problems elsewhere, then making changes to your brand now could be disastrous, especially if you’ve spent a significant amount of money on marketing and advertising campaigns in order to build awareness of your existing brand.
Give Yourself Enough Time
If you do decide to make changes or to rebrand without professional guidance, try to allot as much time as possible to not only making the right decisions in regards to choosing and customizing your branding elements, but also heading off as many potential problems and pitfalls as you possibly can. For instance, if you decide to change your Internet domain name, be sure that the domain you want is available to purchase and that you can make all of the necessary technical adjustments necessary, including redirecting your old domain to your new one. If you decide to change a logo or a tagline at the last minute, give yourself plenty of time to carefully consider and approve the changes you’re making before you’re forced to implement them and/or include them in a holiday advertising or marketing campaign. Also, be sure to seek out the advice and consultation of colleagues, employees, and even family and friends. One of the worst-case scenarios would be to find yourself forced to implement a branding element you aren’t happy with simply because you’ve run out of time to either make further adjustments or to switch back to your old branding elements.