A logo, color palette, signature fonts – all essential visual elements of your brand and, today, easy to create yourself using Canva or have a professional put together for you in an affordable brand kit thanks to Etsy.

But at some point, your branding will need upgrading – be that a more robust and inclusive brand kit with more guidelines, design changes to your branding, better implementation of your brand, or a complete overhaul.

When Is It Time to Change Your Branding?

While the thought of elevating your branding, especially visually, can be enticing, it shouldn’t be done lightly or too often, explains Jen Davis, Founder of Hello June Creative, a boutique brand identity and web design studio.

“As a creative, I know how tempting it is to make consistent updates to your brand, website, messaging, and style. I do believe that there’s a time and place for a rebrand, and it might not be as often as you think,” she says. “Changing up your branding too often might lead to lack of brand recognition and also create a disconnect from your audience.”

Instead, Davis encourages business owners to consider adjusting their branding when their goals have majorly changed. She says, “Perhaps you’ve decided to pivot in your business and goals — you want to start charging more for your services, you want to reach a new audience, or you want to feel a newfound confidence in your brand. If any of these apply to you, I say go for it.”

What Part of Your Branding Needs to Change to Meet Your Goals?

Once you’re confident that you’re not tackling a brand revamp or complete rebrand on a whim, figuring out what elements of your branding need to change or be added to meet your needs is essential.

Looking at Messaging and Aesthetics

“For improving brand design, I would suggest taking a look at what your brand is trying to convey,” says Emma Williamson, Owner of Emma Williamson Designs, which provides marketing, brand design, 3D rendering, and virtual design assistance services.

“Since branding elements are designed to convey your business’ overall message, as your message changes, so does the branding. This could mean updating your logos so they speak more to what your business represents or altering your color choices to help promote a specific feeling towards your brand from your target audience,” she adds.

Understanding what you want your branding to communicate and what it’s currently communicating are key to figuring out what elements of it need to change. Some questions you might want to ask to help you start evaluating this are:

Based on the branding (website, photos, colors, logo, copy, etc.) we have now, what words would people use to describe our business?
Are those the words we want them to use?
What about our branding leads people to use those words and form that image of our business in their minds?
What image do we want to portray instead?
Who is our ideal client?
Does our current branding resonate with our ideal client?
What would resonate with our ideal client?

Improving Brand Messaging and Aesthetics

Williamson says a great example of what brand evolution can look like once messaging has been evaluated and goals have been more clearly defined, is Amazon’s logo variation.

Graphic courtesy of Emma Williamson Designs.

She explains, “You can see it took multiple variations to meet their final version, a wordmark with a simple arrow motif underneath. The orange underline on the logo connects ‘A’ to ‘Z,’ showing the diversity of the company’s product collection while also looking a little like a smiley face, helping to convey Amazon’s commitment to excellent customer service.”

For many business owners, luxury perception and how much its ideal client/customer is willing to pay for its services/products is one of the ultimate goals a brand revamp needs to meet, says Davis.

“Our clients come to us needing to raise their prices and therefore their revenue, increase the perceived value of their services (which positively impacts the quantity and quality of new leads and inquiries), attract more press features and industry recognition, gain the confidence they’d been missing to show up and sell, unite and inspire their teams under a common mission and vision, and feel an alignment like never before with their brand and personal values,” she says.

How You’re Implementing Your Branding

You may find, though, after evaluating your branding that it’s pretty spot on for what you’re trying to achieve. The problem you could have is one of the other most common issues Williamson sees: implementation of branding.

“This comes down to how the person/business is actually using their brand elements. Anyone can stick a logo on something and call it ‘branding,’ but how you use your branding is just as important in its effectiveness as the actual design is,” says Williamson.

Brand Implementation Can Include:

How you’re using your branding on your website and your website’s design and layout
The photos and videos you’re using to represent your brand
Written communication from your business (fonts, tone, voice)
Templates (or lack thereof) for social media posts, newsletters, and other marketing materials

Improving Brand Implementation

So, how can you fix this? Williamson suggests that if you worked with a designer for your branding, check the guidelines they gave you for implementing your brand. The guide should cover things like typography, using certain logos for certain types of designs, colors, etc., when doing anything associated with your brand.

Nicole Heymer, Owner and Creative Director of Glory & Brand, a business that provides website design and development services, plus branding assistance, tailored to the needs of interior designers, architects, and builders, suggests not only making sure the use of your branding is visually consistent and unique but also that you’re using a recognizable personality and brand voice. All of this should come through on your fully branded website, in your social media posts and pages, and in any other ways you connect with potential and current clients.

Heymer says a website is also where the narrative of your brand, one of the most important elements of it, lives. This narrative should answer questions such as, “How is this firm different? Why hire them instead of another?” she explains, adding, “We can't leave it to the reader to answer these questions themselves. We need to both say things clearly and prove them using images, testimonials, ongoing content, and possibly video.”

Finding an Expert to Help You

Because so much of your branding and brand implementation lives on your website and online presence, finding a graphic designer or branding expert who’s especially familiar with website design and structure is essential.

When many businesses decide it’s time for a rebrand, they also want to overhaul or completely rebuild their website. Thus, it can be helpful to hire a website developer or designer who’s well-versed in branding. At her company, Glory & Brand, Heymer and her team focus not only on building beautiful websites that nail your brand aesthetic and implementation but are also incredibly efficient on the backend — providing crucial data and SEO while incorporating time-saving automation. For businesses looking for a completely new website that’s practical and pretty, her firm basically has it all, along with the bonus of specializing in working with creative business owners.

On the other hand, you may be happy with your website overall but want to upgrade its elements – visual and text – something Davis specializes in. Through Hello June Creative, she offers an array of services, from more complete options like website design and development, style guides and identity systems to smaller-scale needs like icon and logo design, illustration, sales pages, digital brochures and guides, naming, and web and email copy services, among others. She’s also recently launched a budget-friendly version of her full-service branding experience specifically for fine artists called the Brand Masterpiece Sprint. Those interested can learn more here or by messaging her on Instagram.

When looking for a graphic designer to help you with a rebrand, Davis says, “The most important piece of advice I can give is to find a brand designer that aligns with your style and values. Many designers lean into a specific style (like editorial, bright and colorful, luxurious and neutral, etc.), and it’s important to choose someone who produces work that inspires and connects with you. Don’t be afraid to hop on a discovery call with a designer to chat more about their process, learn more about who they are, and find out if they are the right fit for you.”

Stay Focused on Your Needs

It's also important to stick purely with your needs and pick a professional based on that. If your current branding was DIY or a basic brand kit from Etsy, you might not need to shell out a lot for a complete overhaul but instead work one-on-one with just a graphic designer to tighten up and elevate the pieces you already have — gradually upgrading your brand before diving all in on a new website and such. For example, Williamson could take your existing branding and create branded marketing materials (social media templates, flyers, etc.) to assist with brand implementation. She can also improve existing branding with her brand design packages, which can be customized to include Instagram highlight icons, business cards, stationery, and other items.

Your website and visual elements may be on point, but you want to take things one step further, break away from stock photography and invest in branded photography. The Personal Branding Experience offered by CatMax Photography was created to showcase creative entrepreneurs authentically and to highlight not only their work but also their methods, inspiration, personality, and the other details that make their business unique.

Making the Most of a New (or Existing) Website

Subject: Cristi Holcombe Interiors & CH Home
Image Credit: CatMax Photography

If you do decide a completely new website is right for you, once you have it, it’s important to make sure you’re maximizing it. Heymer says, “Once you have a new website (or even if you don't!), it's time to do two essential things:

First, drive traffic to the site. You can do this in any way you choose — from getting serious about social media to ongoing search engine optimization. You can send thick, beautiful postcards to desirable zip codes. You can strategically network, pursue relationships with builders and architects, or run local events. You can post yard signs in front of big projects. My advice would be to start by choosing two methods and get good systems in place for those. Once you've got them running well, you can add other traffic channels.

Second, track your data. I would begin by simply taking a weekly look at the 'Acquisition' area of Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from. In other words, are whatever methods you're using succeeding? When they [website visitors] arrive, how long are they staying? Are they taking action by inquiring about a project or maybe signing up for an email list? As you track data, you can make small changes — both to the website and the methods with which you drive traffic — to improve your outcome.”

Deciding when and how to change your branding and brand implementation is a tricky balance to strike but an important step in keeping your business moving forward. Hopefully, this guide gives you a great starting point, and as always, CatMax Photography is here to help you with all your branding photography needs.