Nothing is worse than business branding that is obviously outdated. Start planning a crucial brand refresh to ensure your marketing assets, online presence, and product packaging feel contemporary. You don’t need to fully rework your branding, but you do want your marketing to look modern. Integrating fashionable color palettes, emerging design trends, and contemporary art aesthetics into your marketing campaign will keep your company up-to-date. A branding refresh doesn’t demand an overhaul of your website layout or logo design. Instead, a refresh enhances your brand identity. Play around with new phrasing, images, and layouts to see what best fits your brand. Align your different platforms, including social and print, to polish your technique and set your company up for success.
Why Refresh Your Brand?
Marketing trends are constantly shifting. Keeping up with trends helps you attract new customers and prospective clients. And it’s crucial to stay competitive with other companies. That doesn’t mean chasing every fleeting trend. Rather, you should carefully consider what new approaches have staying power and how you can include them in your branding strategy.
Assess Your Current Style
Try to look at your current website, social media accounts, email layout, and print marketing guidelines from an outsider’s perspective. What impression would a first-time customer get from your website? How does your Instagram feed showcase your products or services? Does the text clearly explain what you offer compellingly? Can shoppers easily locate the most popular products? Consider your logo, overall layout, and any additional graphics that are used across your digital assets and physical prints. Since these established design elements likely won’t change anytime soon, any new colors, fonts, or graphic artwork should complement your long-term marketing style.
Don’t view this as a limitation. Instead, a fresh perspective will strengthen your brand identity. Combining evolving trends, color palettes, or photography techniques with your existing approach gives you the chance to attract new audiences without isolating your current customer base.
At the same time, you should look at what your competitors are doing. Take note of how they balance text and art, what visual aesthetics are popular, and how they are showcasing products. You don’t want your company to suffer because your competitors kept up with the times while your brand was stuck in a routine. Don’t copy them exactly, as that won’t make your brand stand out. But this exercise can help you see what you’re up against, and it might inspire you to try something new or identify an untapped opportunity.
What to Update in a Brand Refresh
Your brand refresh is on your own terms—update whatever you think needs polishing. Changes at a small level can make a large difference. Update your website banner with new artwork and content. Find new models to display products or change how you present them online. Use different filming styles and video trends on your social media accounts, including Instagram, TikTok, and even LinkedIn.
Print advertisements are the best place to explore different branding aesthetics. From mailed postcards to sales catalogs, you can quickly find out how your customers respond to your updated approach. Custom posters placed across your physical storefront, like a retail store, restaurant, or event venue, also let you advertise new products and promotions. Seasonal catalogs for products or services are another space where you can try different types of content, photography aesthetics, and sales tactics. If you’re selling clothing or other items in a storefront, you can play around with the layout of your product tags. Ideally, your current audience will feel re-engaged with your brand, and new customers will be excited to shop with you.
This doesn’t need to be a complete 180 in your approach. All you need to do is tweak your approach to further refine your marketing strategy and promotional materials. Content-wise, you can focus on all the small details that establish your tone: word choice, sentence structure, and product descriptions. Apply these changes across different channels. Digital content, social media posts, email marketing, and print ads should be consistent. You can also improve your artistic strategy. Play around with font families, typography, and text colors to find something that fits. Plan one big photo shoot to document your products or explore different graphic design trends.
Fit Current Trends into Your Pre-Existing Branding
Consistent branding shouldn’t stop you from embracing change. Being stuck in your ways can be a detriment to your brand. You need to capture new customers without turning your returning customers away. Integrating small changes, such as typography, tone, and product packaging, can help you accomplish both. One option is to use popular fonts in your brand colors; another is to update headlines and product descriptions. By the end of this process, your customers should still feel like your brand’s core ethos is intact.
Be Consistent
Your visual and written style builds your brand story. Your brand design should create a connected narrative and a seamless shopping experience. If someone finds your company through social media, the website they visit should appear related to the post that caught their attention. The most obvious way to accomplish this is through cohesive visual language. If you’re sharing marketing and product photos, the style should match. Use similar lighting, staging, and models for photos taken across email marketing, social media posts, and your website art. Other graphic designs should use similar themes and color palettes. For your text, the tone should be uniform. This will depend on the type of products or services you offer. High-end luxury products will likely use more formal language, while more affordable, casual products can use relaxed, informal language. This tone of voice should extend to how your customer service team interacts with people, as it solidifies the impression your brand leaves. While there will be some differences across platforms (an Instagram caption is often more casual than an informative brochure), the general feel should be the same.
The entire marketing team needs to be on the same page. Your social media directors, email marketing team, website designers, content writers, and anyone else working on your marketing and ad teams need to work with one vision in mind. Update your style guide and brand guidelines accordingly. This gathers all your changes, whether they’re visual, content, or philosophical, into one convenient location.
Part of that consistency requires you to commit to your new approach. Changing your style every few months will give the impression that your brand lacks identity. Before you make any changes, you want to be confident that you can rely on this approach for a while. That’s why testing things out with short-term custom prints, like flyers and postcards, provides the opportunity to experiment before committing to a company-wide refresh.
Fresh Marketing Prints for Your Brand Refresh
If you’re passionate about your new style, you can get started with your new custom prints. Design postcards, flyers, brochures, door hangers, and more to spread the word. Your mail marketing and other promotional prints will be sure to send your brand in the right direction. And your brand refresh doesn’t have to end with your custom marketing materials. Use this new enthusiasm to reinvest in your team. Order custom business cards for your employees to network with next year. Then, stock up on other office supplies: notepads, letterheads, and folders. Unifying your internal and external marketing is the easiest way to set yourself up for success as your brand evolves.