Businesses of all kinds are very much living, breathing entities. In fact, it’s normal for businesses to grow and change over time. Many businesses will follow a pretty direct, straight path, while others will take a more noticeable turn here or there. Big (ish) changes to a small business are much more noticeable to current and potential customers than a change made to a medium or large business. And when those larger changes happen, often some degree of rebranding needs to take place.

Here are a couple examples of changes of direction to your small business that require rebranding work.

• You’re a real estate agent or some type of service provider that is niche-ing your work. For real estate, it could be that you want to focus on a specific zip code or town, or want to work just with luxury home buyers or only relocation clients.
• You’re some type of coach, and after years of working one on one with clients, you have written a book and are planning to launch a course, both of which will be firsts for you.

Rebranding your Small Business? 4 Things to Know

First, let’s discuss the most obvious part of rebranding: your visual branding. This includes things like your logo, header to your website, and social media cover art. Even if your overall visual branding strategy is staying the same, it’s likely you may want to add or update text or images being used to reflect your new business direction. For example, if you are launching a course, you might want to call that out on your social media cover photos or the header image on your website.

Second, let’s talk about your website. Rebranding work on your website can – and often does – include content work as well as layout work. If you are now working with luxury home buyers and sellers, for example, it’s not likely that your existing website content properly speaks to them and their needs. If you are publishing a book, you might need to make adjustments to your home page layout to showcase your book front and center.

Third, you need to update your social media accounts with your new branding info. All social media platforms have a bio, so make sure the new direction of your business is reflected in your bio. For platforms like a Facebook Business Page and a LinkedIn Company Page, you have additional fields for text to explain more about your business, what you sell, what your specialities are, and who you serve. Give your social media profiles a thorough once-over to make sure they are properly reflecting your new direction.

Lastly, your content strategy. Whether it’s content you create like blog posts, videos, and quote images, or it’s content you are curating from other sources, your content mix now needs to “speak” to your new customer type(s) if you want to be successful in your new arena.

Rebranding doesn’t mean starting over completely, but it is critical to put the time in to update your business’ website, social media accounts, visual branding and overall messaging to make sure you are giving your current and potential clients the correct view of who you are, what you offer, and how you can solve their problems.