For most businesses, regardless of their niche, building a brand is an important task. That is because a brand allows a business to connect with its customers, both potential and existing, that makes for a strong business impact.
In fact, building a brand identity allows a business to establish a presence in their consumers’ minds, setting itself apart from others in the same niche or industry.
But how does one do that? Well, it involves designing a visual identity that represents the aesthetics and message of your brand.
Generally, this visual identity includes elements like a brand logo, a website, your color combinations, choice of fonts and typography, and more.
Now, as we mentioned earlier, most businesses who have been in the market for some time, have brands that are already established.
So why rebrand? Why would a business need to revisit their visual identity, and change into something new? And how does your website factor into it?
Let’s take a look at relationship between your website and your brand’s visual identity, and discover why you need to redesign your website when rebranding.
The Need For Rebranding – Why Do Brands Do It?
Rebranding can mean one of these two things – creating an entirely new identity from scratch, or tweaking your existing identity. Changing the corporate image of your company is no easy feat, and the more sentiments attached to it, the harder it gets.
So, a question arises. If rebranding is such a difficult task, why do brand opt for it?
Well, there can be many different reasons why a business decides to do that. For example, it could be that the existing brand image does not live up the current brand values or aesthetics. Or maybe the old brand identity has failed to keep up with the times.
To put it simply, a rebrand is usually driven by the changing needs and wants of the audience. And that is what makes a rebrand so risky.
If you fail to capture the essence or gauge the reaction of your target audience perfectly, you can end up diluting the impact of your brand identity even further.
A somewhat recent example is that of Uber, whose recent change of brand symbol triggered a massive backlash from its users who could not figure out what the new symbol represented.
No matter what the reason, when a brand decides to rebrand its visual identity, all visual elements need to change too. From logos to website, all elements that make up a business’s visuals are changed to conform to the new brand ideology.
How Does a Business Know When to Create a New Brand Identity?
Knowing that you need to rebrand is only part of the equation. One of the primary reasons why many businesses avoid rebranding is due to the sheer amount of visual elements that need to be changed to incorporate the essence of the new brand identity.
Moreover, many businesses also confuse a simpler design refresh with the more complicated rebrand.
icon-angle-right Rebranding vs. Redesigning
Generally, many people confuse the terms redesign and rebrand when it comes to the visual elements of a brand identity. In actuality, a rebrand and a brand refresh could not be more different.
A redesign is when you change the design of your website, logo, or stationary to better appeal to your target audience’s aesthetic. It is an intrinsic part of your brand development process, and is used to give your brand’s visual elements a fresh new look.
Take for example, the various iterations of Pepsi’s logo. Not every one of those designs was part of a rebranding strategy. A majority of them were simply made to appeal to the senses of their target audience, as part of their rivalry with Coca Cola.
That is why a rebrand, at its very essence, is much bigger in scope. It usually involves redesigning all of the brand’s visuals, as well as an overhaul of the brand’s business values, vision, mission, values, and more.
icon-angle-right When Do You Need To Consider A Rebrand?
Considering the scope of a rebranding plan, how should a business decide when its time to do it?
Let’s take a look at some of the most common reasons for successful businesses rebranding.
- The company’s original mission, vision, and values do not reflect the brand’s current identity.
- Your business is moving towards a new target region, one not addressed by your original branding.
- Your brand is now targeting an entirely new audience, different from the one you originally targeted.
- Your brand has merged with or has acquired another business, and you need a new brand identity to represent the next phase of your business.
Redesigning Your Website – Do You Really Need It?
Now that you understand that a website redesign is both a part of a rebrand as well as a distinct entity, let’s discuss how a business can know when it is time to redesign their website.
There are many reasons why you may need to give your website a new look and feel, and it can vary from organization to organization.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common reasons for your business needing a website redesign.
1. Rebrand your website
Having a website as part of your brand is all about having consistency in your branding across a wide variety of mediums. As such, when a visitor browses your website, they should find a consistent visual experience across the entire site.
Suppose they start with your landing page. It has a specific style of header and color combinations that appealed to their aesthetic.
Yet when they click on to another page, which page looks very different to the one on which they landed. The color palette may be different, or maybe the header or flow of the webpage is different.
In any case, that visual disparity will likely result in that lead being lost. And we can find many bad website design examples out there, making it one of the most popular reasons for redesigning your website.
2. Attract and drive additional traffic to your website
Another reason for redesigning your website may be to drive more visitors to your content. It’s a known fact that humans are highly influenced by visuals, as well as content that engages them.
So, you can redesign your website to add something that engages their senses, and entices them into visiting and browsing your website.
Let’s suppose your current website is a simple one, with basic webpages explaining your business services etcetera.
You feel as if your website is quite self-explanatory, yet you cannot get a steady flow of traffic to your website. So, you take a look at what your competitors are doing.
You discover that most of them have quite beautiful and fast websites, which also sport content in the form of blogs or vlogs. Therefore, you decide that your website needs it too.
And you hire a professional UI/UX designer to redesign your website to be more user friendly, and you also add a feature to post content as a form of generating user interest.
3. Want to add or fix UI/UX elements on your website
UI and UX trends change over time. As such, a website that might have been extremely user friendly a few years back, may feel old or non-intuitive by today’s standards. Therefore, another great reason to redesign your website is to fix its user experience.
Suppose you have a website that uses a conventional, intuitive UI, designed for your target audience a few years back.
But today, that target market has changed for you. And you discover that for your new audience, the old UI is not as easy or friendly to navigate.
What are you to do then? Well, you could have your website redesigned according to the needs and expectations of your new audience.
Times change, and user trends with the. As a brand, you need to adapt and change with the times, which makes redesigning your website to fix its UI so popular.
4. Want to make your website mobile-friendly
Lastly, considering today’s day and age, mobile-first development is quite popular, as 58% of search engine traffic in 2019 was via mobile phones.
But for those who do not want to undertake creating an entirely new website from scratch, optimizing your website for the mobile environment is a great option too.
Let’s suppose you have a website that you created a decade or so ago for your restaurant. At that time, most people used a computer to visit the website, to book their reservations or order food for takeaway or delivery.
Over the years, you have made minor tweaks here and there to ensure that your website is kept user-friendly despite its age.
But today, most of your customers use mobile phones to do all that, and your website does not cater to that medium, which makes it harder for a large volume of customers who are loyal to your brand. You do not want to lose this loyal clientele.
Therefore, you decide to hire a specialist to redesign your website, making it easy for users to use either a mobile or a desktop to browse their website.
Final Words
In short, redesigning your website can be a huge benefit to you, if you do it for the right reasons. We see many businesses who redesign or revamp their brand websites for no reason expect that they felt like a new look.
Decisions like these, especially in branding and marketing where your visuals are often intrinsically tied to your audience can have drastic results.
Therefore, if you feel that your brand website needs a refresh or a redesign after your business creates a new brand identity, evaluate the pros and cons quite carefully.
Only once you are sure that this is the right way forward for your brand, should you hire a professional website designer to recreate your website according to your new brand identity needs.
About the Author!
Huzaifa Khan is a content marketer at a renowned Custom Software Development Company – Baritechsol. He’s a passionate blogger and has keen interest in technology & marketing related topics. Besides writing, he’s also an avid skater.