Have you ever given a thought to why so many web-based ventures do corporate rebranding? Having stellar products and services is not enough if your website does not convert. Or if your brand does not have recognition among prospects. Eventually, suffering a revenue decrease becomes one of the main reasons to think about rebranding your business.
Both your website and brand are essential to the success of any online business, big or small. Marketing your brand the right way will facilitate customer recognition. This is why overhauling your branding strategy goes hand in hand with giving your website a serious revamp. Using pre-built websites for corporate rebranding can reduce the costs of rebranding a business and save your precious time.
At that, having little or no experience in web design is not an obstacle. Choosing best drag and drop website builder will provide you with a vast selection of customizable business websites for a reasonable price. Thanks to the built-in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, you can easily mix and match the elements to create the perfect layout for any web page.
Rebranding a Business: Where to Start?
The secret to a successful rebranding lies in changing the public perception of a business through every channel. In other words, rebranding process doesn’t involve only a website. It also affects brand design (logo, typography, icons) and brand message (company name, slogan, value proposition, etc.). Sometimes, a total overhaul is needed to present a business on the market in a more competitive way. A branding agency can help.
It won’t be an understatement to say that corporate rebranding is mainly shaped by business goals and market realities. With so many elements involved in a rebranding process, logo redesign is what typically draws the most attention. If you don’t know where to start, MotoCMS logo design services can help you create a new logo for your web project in minutes. For sure, a business logo revamp is a contributing factor to a successful rebranding. Take a look at a few examples below:
- Airbnb
After a highly publicized legal disputes, Airbnb took a shot at rebranding a business. According to Brand24 blog, their objective was to create the sense of belonging, which of course reflected in their logo and website. As a result, the “WELCOME HOME” campaign appeared.
Source: Brand24
This is how an old Airbnb logo looked before the rebranding:
Source: Brand24
The new Airbnb logo after the rebranding:
Source: Brand24
The Airbnb logo got the A-shaped Belo symbol representing people, places, and love with its 3 corners. Meanwhile, the color scheme was changed in favor of vibrant red, while blue and white colors were abandoned. As a result, in two subsequent years after the rebranding Airbnb’s market worth rose to $30 billion!
- Pizza Hut
Being the juggernaut in the food business, Pizza Hut was dramatically losing its market share. Due to the fierce competition and reputation damage, Pizza Hut’s market share took a downturn from 19% in 2008 to 16.7% in 2013. After doing consumer research, Pizza Hut presented a modernized logo in 2014 and introduced a new “Flavor of Now” menu.
The old Pizza Hut logo:
Source: Brand24
The new Pizza Hut logo:
Source: Brand24
Rebranding process took a lot more than just a logotype revamp. Based on customer research, the pizza chain introduced a broader choice of ethnic flavors with more organic and fresh ingredients to the menu. This resulted in a steady market share increase after a few rocky years.
Google is one of the most peculiar examples when it comes to corporate rebranding. Over the years, it has retained its original logo design and brand message, despite growing into a corporation. Now, Google is not only a search engine but a company associated with mobile phones, business apps and driverless vehicles. Still, you could have noticed the changes in color schemes and typefaces used in Google’s logos. Subtle rebrands have also been made to the sub-brands and products.
A few examples of Google’s rebranding a business logo in 1998, 2007, and 2017:
Business logo redesign can improve brand recognition and help in customer retention. Take note of the fact that all the rebranding decisions will eventually impact the look and feel of your web resource. Still, corporate rebranding is a complex process that involves website redesign as one of the stages.
Does Your Business Website Need a Redesign?
With rapid changes in search engine algorithms and growing popularity of mobile search, website redesign takes a lot more than new appearance. In particular situations, a business might need to have a new online resource designed from scratch. Giving answers to the questions below will help you define if it’s time to revamp your business website:
- Have you had a website redesign over the last three years?
- Does your website look favorably compared to the competition?
- Has your website traffic steadily increased over time?
- How long does it take website pages to load?
- Does it take longer than 3 seconds or less to load your website across all devices?
- Is your website mobile-friendly?
- Does your website have SSL/HTTPS security?
- Does your website get direct traffic from the search engines?
- Does your website convert?
- Do you think your our website is easy to navigate?
- Do visitors stay long and click around?
If more than three questions above get no’s, it’s time for a website redesign.
Website Redesign: Setting Goals
Have you thought about the goals you want to achieve with a corporate rebranding? How exactly will website redesign help in rebranding your business? A typical set of website redesign priorities may include the following:
- keep visitors longer on the website;
- improve visual alignment with your brand;
- add/delete/change content;
- improve navigation to increase the number of pages per visit;
- revamp on-site SEO;
- make a website 100% responsive for all types of devices.
Skyline MotoCMS business website template is fully responsive and looks amazing on all types of digital devices.
Redesigning a business website is a sequence of stages aimed to accomplish business goals and meet new market realities. To achieve maximum results, marketers and web designers are supposed to walk this road hand in hand. Let’s see how it’s done:
- Defining the brand attributes
In corporate rebranding, brand attribute is a feature that helps prospects identify your brand and single it out from the competition. According to UX strategist Jose Caballer, brand attributes have to answer the following:
- who we are;
- what we do;
- how we do it;
- how you’re going to feel when we do it;
- what it’s going to give you.
Source: The Futur
Marketers employ different methods to identify the brand attributes: customer research, SWOT analysis, even brainstorming with the stakeholders. The ultimate goal is working out a set of values that make your brand attractive to customers.
- Creating user personas
Creating user personas will help in making website redesign process more targeted towards specific needs of the real people. In a way, generating a bunch of user personas based on prior customer research and analysis will help you design the solutions appealing to “ideal customers”. According to the Interaction Design Foundation, there are four types of user personas:
- Goal-directed personas
- Role-based personas
- Engaging personas
- Fictional personas
Making them as detailed as possible will help you cater to the specific needs of each type with your design solutions.
- Generating user stories
As soon as you’ve worked out your user personas, it’s time to develop user stories. A user story reflects how a specific user is going to experience a website. Predicting certain user behavior in a user story, you can anticipate their needs and reflect them in the new website design.
A user story typically follows the template:
As a < type of user >, I want < some goal > so that < some reason >.
Source: Just In Mind
- Aligning website design with business goals
Business goals should come before website redesign. Business goals have to be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-related. This way, you will be able to align your business goals with the design.
Seomentro MotoCMS Business Website Template has user-friendly navigation and a call to action placed above the fold.
For instance, one of your business goals is generating 100 new leads every month. So, your task is to make sure the website structure and UI elements will work to achieve this goal. This could be reflected in subscription forms, calls to action, revamped navigation, etc.
- UX audit
Website redesign doesn’t necessarily mean you need to design a news site from scratch. You can as well base your work on what’s been done before. However, it’s important to understand which elements worked for the customers and which didn’t. If that’s the case, doing the UX audit will give you a bigger picture of what went wrong and make changes.
Pay attention to the following:
- Conversion metrics
- Traffic and engagement
- Sales data
- Usability problems
- UX friendliness
As a result, you might consider removing or prioritizing specific features to align the new website with your business goals.
- Sitemap creation
Sitemap creation is one of the crucial stages as it defines the direction website redesign process will take further on. Using site-map generating tools to put together visual sitemaps will help you understand how to use content for problem solving and answering questions.
- Creating a site prototype
Whether you use a website builder solution or build a website from scratch, the final stage is creating the rough copy of your new online resource. Make sure to invest some time into testing to see if everything works the way it’s supposed to. The best way to do that is combining manual browsing and automated site crawlers to identify possible problems.
When all is done, you’re good to launch your redesigned website and reap the benefits of corporate rebranding!
Written by: Alicia Wells
Alicia is a programmer who specializes in mobile app development and design. With her strong coding background and easy demeanor, she thoroughly enjoys blogging about all aspects of software development in her spare time.
