New Year, New Brand Refresh: How to Refresh your Brand for the Year Ahead

Posted on January 12, 2022, by Nicola Lighterness

Your branding is your business’ very first impression. Good branding will tell a story in an instant: what your company does, its personality and who your target audience is, all within a glance at your logo and identity. Therefore, if your branding is no longer doing all of this for you, it’s time for a brand refresh.

So if it’s out with the old branding and in with a brand refresh, where should you start? Here’s how to give your brand a refresh for the year ahead:

1. Carry out a brand audit

There are many reasons why you may be considering a brand refresh: maybe your service offering and skillset has grown and your branding no longer reflects this. Or it could simply be that your logo wasn’t designed professionally when you began trading and you now want to upgrade it to something smarter.

No matter what your reasoning is behind boosting your branding, if you’re at the point of considering a brand refresh, it’s likely that you’ve already been thinking about, or have started carrying out, a brand audit. This is the point where you need to think about why your current branding is no longer working for you.

There are some points you may wish to consider as part of your brand audit, which could include:

Does your branding continue to represent what you do, who you are, who your target audience are and your brand’s values?
What are your competitors doing, and how have their brands evolved?
Is your website in alignment with your brand? Does it match your brand’s visual identity and its ambitions?
Has the personality of your brand changed over time, and does your branding reflect this?

These are just a few points to consider when thinking about a brand refresh; there may be other aspects to think about, and more than one point above may come into play. Whatever your reasoning is behind the refresh, discussing your reasons with your creative agency will help them to create branding which reflects your business and where it is now.

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2. Work with your creative agency

As well as discussing the reasons behind your brand refresh with your creative agency, a good agency will work alongside you to get to know your brand and its ambitions, ready to create a new identity for your business. This means not only taking on board why your current branding isn’t working for you, but also looking at your wider marketing strategy and how you should be targeting your audience in order to drive sales.

The beauty of working with a 360 creative agency is that there is a wealth of skills under one roof which can help you to work towards these goals: from marketeers who can create a strategy for your brand, through to the designers who will bring your new branding to life, copywriters who can give your brand its tone of voice and web developers who will build your shiny new website!

Whether you opt for all of these elements or are just after a simple tweak of your logo, by working with a creative agency, your wider marketing strategy will be borne in mind at all times.

Matt speaking to a client about a brand refresh

3. Refresh your brand!

And now for the fun part: time for your actual brand refresh! A good creative agency will get to work putting all of the elements into place for your brand refresh. This is likely to be different for each and every brand: for some, a simple tweak of the logo to make it look more professional will be enough, whereas for others, you may wish to consider a new logo as part of a wider brand refresh. This could include looking at your use of fonts, colour palettes and even your tone of voice.

Once your creative agency has sent over some options for you to review, consider them against your initial rebrand research: do the options immediately tell your brand’s story? Does it stand out from your competitors, and / or is it in line with competitor brands? Is it future proof and will it grow with your brand? And most importantly, do you like it?

Often, you’ll find that there are some branding options and certain elements that work better for you than others, but by working closely with your creative agency, they will create branding with an identity which feels right.

4. Roll out your brand refresh

Once you’ve decided upon your new branding and have given your brand a refresh, it will be time to roll it out across all of your marketing material. This could include, but is not limited to, the following:

Printed material: don’t forget to include business cards, brochures, invoices and letterheads, roller banners and any other printed material you may use regularly.
Your website: this could be simply updating the logo, colours and fonts. Alternatively, a brand refresh might inspire you towards a completely new website design, too.
Social media: remember to update your logo and header images across all your social media channels.

It’s important to update your branding across all marketing material, as consistency creates an element of trust and efficiency within your brand.

Ready for a brand refresh? Contact Blue Serif!

If you’re ready for a brand refresh, the New Year is a great time to do it. As a creative agency with a wealth of experience in innovating, creating, and elevating brands – including a recent brand refresh of our very own – we are able to nurture your brand at whatever stage it’s at in its growth. Get in contact today to start your brand refresh journey and elevate your brand for the year ahead.