Two focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. There are times when you’re running a business that you many need to rebrand and relaunch it. The following contributed post is entitled, Is It Time For Your Business To Relaunch.
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Now is as good a time as any to relaunch your business. Every relaunch consists of two distinct phases. First, you need to rebrand. Why bother with a relaunch if it’s still just the same old you? No, you’re a newer, better version of yourself. Then the phase of implementation arrives, where all your blueprints of your new face and plan are put into action. However, each of these phases will have lots and lots of steps that need to be addressed one by one. If you go about them in a linear fashion, it won’t take long before you are successfully back on top of the pile. So, let’s begin, shall we?
Marketing strategy
The first thing you do is, audit your marketing strategy. This will let you know if you are targeting the right customers, whether the old strategy was actually working as intended, or if you could take what was working well, and implement it into your new marketing strategy.
● What is motivating your customers right now?
● Does your marketing approach merge with the culture of today?
● How can you improve customer communication?
● How easy is it currently to purchase your product? Are you on all the relevant online shopping websites?
Could you partner with another business, such as Amazon? This wholesaler could help you with the marketing strategy by giving you access to their own marketing reports. Their analysis tells you what kind of customers they have in the relevant retail categories that matter to your business. You will need to give them exclusive selling rights for a matter of time, however.
Rebudgeting your strategy
The next thing you need to do is to budget your relaunch. When you know what kind of marketing strategy you have, then you can figure out how much it will cost.
● The expenditure is perhaps the most important. This is money which you intend to spend on things which you won’t get back. This could be more staff, outsourcing your marketing ads and potentially, things that you will need to buy such as more equipment or raw materials to satisfy demand.
● Expenses are able to be reclaimed by your tax return. However, your expenses should also be within a certain amount. If employees need to travel to spread the word of your relaunch, such as business trips to clients, investors, B2B partners or just a new market in a foreign land, keep your expenses in check.
● Take the time to make a realistic budget, but make sure it also remains flexible. If you need to spend more suddenly, it should not put a hole in your budget.
Your new face
The heart of this relaunch project, may well be your website. Chances are that you will be relaunching with new but similar products. You can’t veer from what you know how to do best. But your website has to give off the brand new vibe. A company like BizcaBOOM offers high end website design services that have been used by many relaunch projects. This is because they have a unique approach, it’s sales-driven and incorporates a new branding mission. A 4-step process, it’s easy to make a brand new website with their strategy.
First: you need to do research. The digital experts will learn about your website, how it’s been designed, how it runs and who interacts with it. It will be mobile-friendly also.
Second: the design is struck into its first stages. They take small but crucial steps to slow build up each page, each feature and each unique way your website can stand apart.
Thirdly: the mockup design is then shown to you. This is when you can make some important changes that will really impact your website’s overall look. The colors, themes, fonts and layout will be discussed with you.
Fourthly: then comes the launch. They will monitor the SEO side of the website to see how many new customers are arriving.
Humanize your business
Humanizing your business is the number one key when it comes to a modern brand. But why?
Favoring one type of customer over another might be old news, as the new way for businesses to allow everyone on board, is to be neutral. Ask yourself the following.
● Does your brand only bend to one gender?
● This may be because you have historically been a one-gender brand. But this doesn’t have to be so anymore. Can you make products or market your products to the other gender?
● Does your audience have hobbies they would likely use your product for? Why not do something like hold an event in this regard?
● Do you favour one age bracket over another? Does it have to be so?
Finding new grass
Maybe you would prefer to relaunch your brand in another country. So far, everything that has been covered could fit into that. However you do need to take on a new line. Study the retail history of the country before you jump in.
Expanding your business abroad is something many brands do to test the waters of their relaunch strategy. You need to do a few things regarding this.
● Evaluate if you have the budget for the launch you are doing. Is it purely digital or brick and mortar?
● Are you expanding into a hotzone, i.e. a major city?
● You should research the kind of customers present in the market. Are they more prudent, or do they spend more than the average person in the country you are already operating in?
● Consider new ideas, totally out of the blue. This is your chance to try out all those ideas you have put onto the backburner.
● Hire expert advisors in this new country, so they can help you with your strategy. They know the lay of the land and the people in it, better than you.
Relaunching your business is a daunting task but it’s also fun and necessary. When you seem to hit a wall and cannot climb any higher, relaunching can be like changing your old beaten boots for brand new ones.
