Organizations undergo rebranding for any number of reasons. It could be that the company is changing its name or brand identity, has been acquired (or has acquired another brand), or is attempting to significantly change brand perception in some specific way.
But, what happens to your hard-earned brand recognition if your organization needs a rebrand? Mindshare and brand salience are key to growing a B2B company, and rebranding puts all that share of mind at risk of fading away.
Intimidating though it may be, rebranding can also be a golden opportunity if approached correctly. By homing in on the kind of messaging and narrative you’ll need to truly speak to your B2B audience, you can learn a lot about what you’ll need to stand out in your market.
Read on for guidance to help you make the most of this opportunity.
Use Brand Purpose and Values to Guide Messaging
When helping navigate a rebrand as a marketer, the first question to ask is why you’re doing it. What is the driving force between this effort to bring a new or different brand identity to the forefront? If an acquisition took place, center on the common mission that brought the two companies together. If it's an internally-driven rebrand, focus on creating continuity between the company's founding vision and how it's being reshaped as part of this initiative.
The bottom line is that you don't want your brand to lose all of the momentum it had built through this process of reinvention. Marketers can play a key role in harnessing existing brand awareness and channeling it into the new path forward. For all that might be transforming as a part of a rebrand, the fundamental purpose that guides an organization and its people usually does not.
If your brand’s purpose is your “what,” then your values are your “whys.” Using these “whys” to form the foundation of your rebrand will help you hone in on the most authentic and effective messaging while staying true to your organization’s original purpose. Once you understand your brand’s overall purpose and values, start thinking about how your new rebrand can communicate them even more effectively?
Consider How You Want Your Relationship with Your Audience to Change
Reassessing your brand’s purpose and values is a crucial preliminary step to rebranding, but it probably won’t give you enough to start rebranding on its own. Next, consider the kind of relationship you wish to develop with your audience under this new branding.
To do that, start by re-examining your brand’s core B2B audience from square one. If the rebrand involves targeting new audiences or segments, it's worthwhile to invest in research to gain a strong understanding of the people you're trying to reach. Even if your target audience won’t change much, this is a great opportunity to step back and evaluate how you’re connecting with customers. As Magsman Design shared in their LinkedIn newsletter, "By gaining insights into your audience's perceptions and desires, you can shape a rebranding strategy that resonates with them while reflecting your business's evolution."
You might consider using customer surveys or focus groups to gain insight around perceived strengths and weaknesses of your current branding. Or conduct a competitor analysis around brands operating in the new space you're entering, to learn which topics are trending and what people are engaging with.
Get Everyone on the Same Page
One of the main obstacles to successfully rebranding is a lack of engagement or support within the organization itself. Your co-workers are busy with their day jobs and may not immediately understand how the rebrand will affect (or even help) them. If they don’t, they won’t share your new branding material, update their client-facing documentation, or work on incorporating your new brand identity into their approach to customer service.
If you want your rebranding to be successful, your team should make securing top-to-bottom buy-in a major priority. Consider the internal marketing you do to support your rebrand as a core element of the rebrand itself.
Consider putting together a presentation for the company on the rebrand where you can educate them on why you’re taking this step now. Explain how the rebrand will help them, specifically. For example, show the sales team how new rebranding materials could be used to update and enhance their prospect outreach.
One of the best ways to engage your co-workers in your rebrand is by offering them a role in its creation. Start by following a process called stakeholder mapping. This will help you understand the level of interest and power each relevant group has concerning your brand. It’s important to have your sales and marketing teams align as closely as possible, so make sure to involve sales leadership in key branding meetings.
You could even try hosting co-creation workshops between your marketing team and other stakeholder departments. Use these meetings to define how changes to brand positioning or messaging will affect your approach to work and client relations. Not only will meetings like this help engage the rest of your organization, but chances are, the other teams will have some highly useful suggestions.
Invest in Brand Awareness
To reduce the risk of brand salience decay, make sure your rebrand launch is paired with a strong brand awareness campaign. This will ensure that your core audience is an active participant in the transition, so they recognize your fresh brand in the future.
Increase your ESOV
You have “Extra Share of Voice,” or ESOV, when your Share of Voice within a category exceeds your Share of Market. A B2B Marketing Institute study found that raising ESOV is one of the most effective ways to grow a B2B brand in the early stages: a 10% ESOV corresponds to a 0.7% growth in B2B brands.
The higher your ESOV, the more effective and efficient your marketing campaigns will become. To best increase Share of Voice, you’ll have to invest in high-funnel brand awareness-raising marketing targeted at your audience. Brand marketing is especially important in B2B, because 95% of B2B buyers are “out-of-market” at any given time.
Investing in ESOV early in a rebranding campaign is valuable because you want your audience to recognize your new branding as quickly as possible. Treat your rebranding like the major company event it is: Try running an awareness-raising marketing campaign dedicated specifically to announcing and characterizing your rebrand. Talk about why you’re doing it, why you’re excited about it, and how it will affect your customers.
By “resetting” your company narrative like this as clearly as possible, you can on-board your audience to your new branding faster and get them excited about what comes next.
Embrace emotional messaging
Studies show that emotional messaging is the key to capturing the attention of buyers. This is where your purpose and values will shine. For awareness campaigns, focus less on how your brand is going to solve your audience’s problems and more on why you care about solving them. If you can make a passionate case for why you want to help your audience, your passion will get your audience’s attention – and they’ll remember it next time they think about buying.
Get in touch With LinkedIn to indicate you’re rebranding
If your organization has more than a few employees, LinkedIn recommends you get in touch with us directly when rebranding. Send us a publicly shared press release indicating your organization’s name change (if applicable) and the reason for your rebranding. Our team will review the materials and help facilitate a name change or follower migration as needed.
The public press release you create can also be a valuable piece of marketing content in its own right; consider using it as a key part of the content in your ESOV campaign to demonstrate how seriously you’re taking your rebrand and get your audience’s attention.
For more tips on how to rebrand into a B2B company, subscribe to the LinkedIn Ads blog.
Topics: Brand building
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