Rebranding Your Business In 2016: 5 Things To Consider

The most overused tagline for advertising around the new year is “New Year, New You.” Moving to a new year suggests to us that we can start over and do some things differently. For businesses, a new year means new budgets and new strategies.

For some businesses, it means building a new identity through rebranding.

When discussing a rebrand, it’s important to look at your business and the industry to see what changes have happened. Rebranding is not something that should be done frivolously, because it is expensive and will have a lasting impact on your business. As such, it is in your business’s best interest to consider your reasons for rebranding. A rebrand does not provide your business with the direction and purpose; it happens because you have both of those. Maybe what your business needs is a refresh.

As you consider the reasons for rebranding, look at these five areas and the predictions for 2016 to help you not only decide whether to rebrand, but also know how to do it successfully.

Demographic Shifts Among Consumers

Demographic shifts are happening regularly as new groups step to the forefront armed with buying power and new consumer trends. Appealing to this new group of consumers is one of the most compelling reasons for a business to rebrand.

Many businesses have been content to market to those originally called Baby Boomers. Now known as the Aging Boomers, this consumer group will shift into an elderly group who are more concerned about living off their retirement fund and spending their fixed income on health care and other essential products. Your business will not be able to survive if you continue marketing to the same consumers.

Many businesses have already recognized this and tweaked their marketing to reach a new growing group known as millennials. Studies are predicting that by 2017, this consumer group will be spending $200 billion annually. If you are not reaching this group by next year, you will have lost your opportunity.

As you build your plan for rebranding, it is important to learn from your consumer and understanding how your brand will be relevant to them.

• What do millennials value?
• Do these value align with our brand?
• What problems does our brand solve for millennials?

These are some questions to consider to help you determine how your brand can continue to market your products long-term to Millennials. You may discover that all your business needs to is to revitalize and create a new campaign that speaks directly to this new audience.

Personification of Your Brand

Your brand is more than your logo or your business’s name — it is your business’s identity. Going through rebranding process means that you need to give your brand an identity, complete with a personality, values and interests. Determining WHO is your brand is the only way to start differentiating your business from others in the industry.

There are various ways to identify your brand’s personality. These exercises can have you finding the car or celebrity that is most similar to your brand. For some businesses, personification leads to the creation of an easily identifiable character like the Aflac Duck or the Keebler Elves.

One of the most important brand characteristics for millennials is whether or not the brand fits their personality. Your business needs to have your brand personified in a way that will invite your new customer base in and make them just as loyal as they were before the rebrand. When you take a minute and strategically engineer your brand’s personality, you see what kind of customer experience you want to shape. This process will help you plan your strategy and define other aspects of your rebranding including communication.

All-Encompassing Communication

When you see your customer experience laid out, it becomes easier to identify every touchpoint for your new customer base. The most noticeable touchpoint is always the tone of the new brand’s communications directly to the customers.

The biggest headache for consumers is when a rebrand happens. There is a sense of betrayal as their favorite brand tosses aside everything that they used to know and love to try and get a new audience. The way your business communicates the story for the rebranding will determine your success of maintaining your current customer base while bringing in a new one.

A shining example of navigating this post-rebrand customer communication was displayed by Utah marketing agency Eli Kirk  following its recent acquisition of Riser and the rebrand that followed. The merging of the two firms into EKR meant merging customer bases, as well. Bill Brady, President and CMO of EKR, and his team knew that communication would be critical during the transition.

Accordingly, Brady and the folks at EKR crafted 50 case studies to serve as the foundation of the brand’s new website. Clients from both sides of the merger are featured in the content, so both groups  feel a continued partnership with the agency while gaining exposure to its expanded capabilities and clientele. Brady attributes an extremely smooth merger to the process of creating content that would make all clients feel at home while getting them excited about new possibilities for their own brands. “The content we created has made the transition extremely smooth. We haven’t dropped a single client—everyone is really excited about what’s happening,”   he said.

The story is critical to be communicated, but also the tone and voice of the new brand will be the consistent thread to carry customers through the rebranding experience. Your customer needs to know from the beginning that their important values are not lost in this new direction.

Ever-expanding Technology

Technology has continued to play a big part in any business’s future. From the launch of Apple Pay this year and to the rise of Snapchat, there is always going to be a new channel or a new technology tool that will be adopted by your customers and may affect your business model. During the rebranding process, your business has to look into the future and consider how people may be communicating in the future.

This year, many websites were hit with Mobilegeddon and most experts express that this is only the beginning. If you haven’t considered mobile technology for your product or even website, you are already behind the crowd. When your business rebrands, you can make the changes to help your business grow in a new direction more quickly than if you had tried to do a refresh.

Content Remains King

Regardless of all these changes and meetings you are having, your content still reigns as king in the castle and cannot be neglected. Remember EKR’s case studies? Through content you will effectively communicate your new identity to your new consumers. You must make sure that your content remains true to your business’s values and purpose.

The rebranding process can also give you the chance to expand beyond your current content media and channels to your new audiences. Old Spice turned their business around and built a YouTube channel by rebranding through a campaign. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” video has now received almost 52 million reviews and their YouTube channel has amassed over 500,000 followers. Old Spice realized their rebrand opened new doors to sharing their content that made more sense for the new millennial audience.

The new year is a few weeks away and while others may be rushing to finish holiday gift shopping and plan budgets for 2016, it’s a great time for your business to take a minute and consider whether it’s time to rebrand. Or as others say, “Out with the old, and in with the new.”

By Laurel Teuscher

10 Christmas Email Marketing Tips

If Christmas is magic, the build-up is manic. You could definitely be forgiven if you currently feel like you are spread as thinly as bread sauce on Boxing Day. But that doesn’t mean your marketing has to suffer. Here are ten, easy-to-integrate tips that will keep your email campaigns sparkling this festive season.

1. Stay steady with your sender field

Do not underestimate the value of a familiar name in a crowded inbox. The sender field allows your reader to see exactly who the email is from. A Christmas-themed pun on your business name can be fun, but if in doubt consistency is the best policy.

2. Make your subject line a cracker

If there’s one part of your email worth laboring over, it’s the send title. It’s the single biggest factor in determining whether or not your readers open your email or hurl it towards the trash can. Getting the right mix of words can be a challenge, but the following is best practice:

• A total of 50 characters (including spaces) or fewer
• Don’t repeat anything from the sender field
• No typos or spelling mistakes
• Nothing too salesy or spammy

Be original. Be enticing. Speak to your reader’s fears, needs, desires, doubts or ambitions. It’s also a good idea to use split testing to find out which of your send titles is most effective at driving open rates.

3. Find your festive spirit

Whether it’s adding a Santa hat to your logo or adding snowflakes to the background of your email, a sprinkling of seasonal imagery can bring lots of festive charm to your emails. Just stay on the right side of kitsch. If your email makes the average Santa’s grotto look reserved, you may have gone too far.

4. Optimise for mobile

There’s no two ways about it: your email has to display well on smartphones and tablets. More than half of all emails are opened on a mobile device. That means if you fail to cater for mobile users, you might be alienating more than half of your email list. Scary stuff, huh? The best way to check how your email is performing mobile-wise is to send a test to yourself and open it on your own device. Easy.

5. Keep it brief

When it comes to email marketing, less is more. The average person’s inbox is as cluttered as Santa’s toyshop and regularly pelted with new emails. Brevity is a skill you’d do well to master – and your reader will respect your efforts. Besides, nothing shouts louder than simplicity. If it takes longer than a minute or two to absorb your message, it might be time for rethink.

6. Monitor your email frequency

Again, it’s about respecting your reader’s time – or rather lack of it. Bombarding your list with multiple emails is unlikely to get results. Worse, your unsubscribe rate could surge. Keep your list happy by exercising a little restraint.

7. Write for an audience of one

It makes no difference whether your email is being sent to 10 people or 10,000. Try to get into the habit of building a mental image of your model reader andcrafting a message that speaks to them directly. Crude example: “Hope you have a merry Christmas” is more engaging than “Hope you all have a merry Christmas”. Imagine yourself having a conversation with your reader in person outside a coffee shop. One-to-one. It will help your writing pop.

8. Don’t hide your hyperlinks

You want your reader to click through to an article? Or browse your latest products? Or fill in a survey? Then cast an eye over your email design to make sure your hyperlinks and CTA buttons have all the zing they need to stand out.

9. Be smart with segmentation

Targeted marketing is more effective than scattergun campaigns that take a catch-all approach. You need to be prepared to produce different content for different list members at different times. Example: let’s say you have an online shop and you notice that a customer’s first interaction with your business was last Christmas. Segmentation allows you to send an email to last year’s festive purchasers with vouchers that can be put against another purchase this year. Hey presto — you’ve turned a one-time customer into a repeat purchaser. The more you know about your list subscribers, the more potent segmentation becomes.

10. Check, check and check again

Marketing and urgency rarely go well together. If you are rushing to get a campaign into the digital ether, there’s no substitute for checking your content with a fresh pair of eyes. Do your links go to the right page? Does the design look as it should in the most popular email clients? Is the writing free of typos and spelling errors? It’s worth checking — really checking – before you hit the send button.

Let’s wrap this up…

Clever creative and gorgeous email design is all well and good, but you can’t beat doing the simple things well. Remember the basics of email marketing and you will be on your way to festive outreach that gets results. 

by Jeremy Taylor

5 Marketing Changes Small Businesses Need to Make in 2016

Whether your small business marketing is thriving or falling flat, it’s still important to perform a marketing audit of 2015 to see what’s working and what’s not. But don’t just put what’s working into overdrive for the New Year. Instead, treat these techniques as important assets within your 2016 marketing plan -- but don’t stop there.

The upcoming year promises to be a game changer for small business marketing, especially those who have largely skated by with the help of social-media marketing and a decent referral network in place. Indeed, there are a number of immediate changes small businesses can -- and should -- make if they want to see skyrocketing growth and success in 2016.

Here are five ways to get started:

1. Focus on relationship marketing.

Forging ongoing, personal relationships with consumers is nothing new. But how that evolves in 2016 goes beyond just being helpful to customers, staying in touch and offering exemplary service. Relationship marketing will see explosive growth in 2016, especially as more consumers turn to their smartphones for shopping reviews and advice.

Focusing on short term wins won't work in a world where consumers are shifting their focus to ongoing service and relationships with brands and are looking to their peers to see which companies offer the best buying experience.

Take Starbucks, for example. The coffee giant has been quietly mastering the ins and outs of relationship marketing for years, so much so that it’s now a seamless part of their marketing plan. Stores frequently offer afternoon discounts or free cups when you bring in your same-day morning receipt, change up their seasonal drinks and treats based on customer feedback, and offer their online subscribers rare, small-lot Starbucks Reserve coffee delivered fresh to their door.

Your business may not be able to ship free goods to all of its customers, but it’s the thought process here that matters. How can you go above and beyond in the relationships you’ve built with your clientele?

2. Get on board with mobile.

I’ve already touched on how mobile and exploding smartphone usage will impact relationship marketing in 2016. But there’s another reason small businesses need to fully adapt to mobile -- or prepare to be left behind. There are officially more searches on mobile than desktops or other devices, and Google has responded accordingly. The search engine now penalizes sites that aren’t optimized for mobile by giving more weight and relevance to those who do.

It may sound harsh, but in reality, Google is simply responding to what consumers actually want. Google knows that mobile now serves as a primary touch point for customers on the path to purchasing. That type of direct feedback and clarity works to the advantage of small businesses. Start thinking like an on-the-go and mobile consumer instead of relying on the same tactics that have been working online for years.

3. Embrace content marketing.

Content marketing has gone from being an emerging trend and buzzword to the mainstream norm. But that doesn't mean everyone is doing it right. Content marketing should incorporate the philosophies of relationship marketing and mobile in order to succeed. It also requires more robust content than simply throwing together a blog post and adding some links. More businesses now offer video content and free, in-depth white papers and infographics to compete.

Other companies have discovered the hard way what happens when you cut corners. Back in 2011, the New York Times found that JC Penney paid to have thousands of links point back to the retailer’s website, and incurred a Google penalty as a result. Overstock was also penalized for offering schools and students discounts in exchange for inbound links. Companies may have wised up to paying and inflating their inbound links, but that doesn’t mean they’re not trying to take short cuts. Google is working to identify and penalize sneaky mobile redirects that trick consumers into landing on specific content. Don’t get caught unprepared.

4. Create geo-precise marketing.

Small businesses can officially stop worrying about how to reach every consumer that could possibly want their goods and services: Geo-precise marketing and precision targeting is now leading the pack in consumer marketing. Businesses can use their analytics and purchasing data to identify zip codes that are extra active when it comes to purchasing -- or even use IP targeting to narrow down their focus to individual households.

Tools like Google Adwords, Facebook ads and just about any other serious advertising platform offer robust geo-targeting services that help businesses find the perfect consumer -- either around the corner or across the globe -- based on exactly where your buying power is coming from. By fine tuning their targeting, small businesses can increase their conversions by focusing their landing pages or content marketing campaigns to the geographic norms and preferences in the areas where their consumers are coming from.

5. Keep testing.

The importance of continued testing and experimentation will never change for large corporations and small businesses alike. Make regularly studying your analytics, tweaking your marketing campaign and testing the results a major part of your evolving marketing plan. The huge time commitment involved in testing may feel out of balance in comparison to actually executing your marketing plan. But failing to test and adjust your plan accordingly is fumbling around in the dark and expecting to find success.It just won’t cut it in 2016.

So now, I want to hear from you. What other marketing changes do you plan to make in 2016? Share your plans and what you hope to achieve by leaving a comment below.

by Sujan Patel

Managing Your Brand Is an Intangible Investment That Pays Off Big

We live in a return-on-investment-driven society that is obsessed with instant gratification. Whenever we implement a new product feature, make a pitch to investors, launch a marketing campaign, interview a key job candidate or make a sales call, we want to see tangible and immediate results.

Our obsession with seeing measurable business results can make it easy to forget the most important intangible investment we can make: managing our brands. When you do things to manage your company’s brand (or your own personal brand), the investments tend to eventually pay off tremendously. Journalists start randomly writing about your company. You start getting inbound emails from investors. Your product goes viral because of traditional “word of mouth” rather than because of any of the social features you’ve been deliberately pushing. Or your 1 year-old startup can raise $100 million and buy a 100-year-old manufacturing company.

The challenge is that the individual tasks needed to build your brand are often thankless. Collectively, however, they create exponential benefits. The only way to achieve a high level of brand strength is by making brand management a recurring part of your job. The following are some activities that can help you build your brand in the eyes of key people in your industry:

• Skype (or have coffee) with your top customers often.
• Write blog posts about your company's lessons.
• Attend industry events (and be social).
• Mentor other founders.
• Introduce like-minded friends to each other.
• Do favors for journalists.
• Send handwritten thank-you notes after a key meeting.
• Mail holiday cards to clients, partners and co-workers.
• Host a dinner for awesome people.

While none of these activities produce immediate or measurable results, they plant seeds of credibility that tend to grow exponentially over time. Building a strong brand means getting people to talk about your company and spread the word on your behalf. These things may not seem like the most tangibly profitable way for you to spend your time right now, but much of your future success springs from having made these cumulative small brand investments over several years.

Of course, it's often hard for a CEO to make time for brand management when there are so many other tangible concerns that require our day-to-day attention. I, myself, can be guilty of forgetting to invest in non-measurable activities for Brainscape, especially considering that I teach a class on building a metrics-driven culture.

But I need to remind myself that the strongest brands do not build themselves with metrics alone. By investing in thought leadership and intangible personal relationships, we can set ourselves up to reap large tangible rewards down the road.

by Andrew Cohen, Founder & CEO, Brainscape