Whether you’ve spent months working on creating a new, compelling and relevant brand identity for your existing brand or you’re just preparing to launch for the first time, launching a brand is an exciting process. You get to tell the world all about your company’s new mission, values, and goals—which isn’t something to take lightly.
While new brands launch and are well-received all the time, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any risks along the way. For existing businesses that are rebranding, brand recognition can be significantly impacted once the new brand is launched. And for first-time launches, there’s a lot that can go wrong in this involved, time-consuming process. Because of these risks, it’s vital to carefully plan your new brand launch, so you can mitigate risks like these.
7 Ways to Prepare For Your Brand Launch
1. Develop a Communication Plan
The first step in preparing for your upcoming brand launch? Developing a communication plan—by audience. Who will you need to notify first? Determine who you’ll communicate the brand launch to, what they’ll need to hear, and how they should hear about it. Then, use this as your guideline for communicating your upcoming brand launch to your audiences.
2. Launch Your Brand Internally
As important as it is to launch your brand externally, it’s just as important to launch internally. Your employees need to know what’s happening with the company too, and if they don’t, they won’t be able to effectively communicate that to others, and you’ll be sending conflicting messages which will cause confusion. Everyone within your company needs to be made aware of the new brand, messaging, and what it means.
This isn’t something to announce suddenly. To make it easier, start involving your employees as early on in the process as possible. Discuss with them where the company is headed and get their input. This valuable insight can then be used to craft your key messages and to develop an overarching narrative for the brand launch.
3. Determine Your Overarching Narrative and Key Messages
In the brand launch process, it’s critical to develop key messages for your audience. Even though you’ll likely want to communicate each message differently, the larger, overarching narrative should remain the same. Think about what you want to emphasize to your audience. Launching a new brand provides an excellent opportunity to communicate the larger story that drives your business.
What story do you want to tell? Did something shift, and a new mission, vision, and brand were born as a result? To make your new brand memorable and ensure that it sticks with clients, customers, and stakeholders long-term, tell a compelling story that resonates with each of them.
4. Create a Brand Launch Timeline
Timing is a key component of any brand launch plan—and introducing a new brand isn’t a one-time event. You’ll need to create a timeline of when you’ll communicate to audiences, stakeholders, and internal teams. And order is important here, because failing to successfully communicate your brand launch can not only disrupt the rollout process, but it could even result in the launching falling flat.
5. Ensure Brand Consistency
Now that you have the visioning, personality and tone, messaging, and visual identity of your brand ready to go, you’ll want to start generating brand awareness and leads by applying the brand identity to both your core and foundational assets. These could be anything from your website to brochures to sell sheets, business cards, internal signage, and other assets. Neglecting to update these assets only causes confusion, so it’s important to apply the new brand identity as quickly as possible.
To ensure that nothing gets missed, here’s a starting point of items you’ll need to update:
- Email signatures
- Internal documents
- Directories
- AdWords
- Style guides
- Media kits
- Editorial guides
- Email templates
- Social media profiles
- Website meta data
- Logos
- Favicons
In addition to making these updates, you’ll also want to have your new brand guidelines ready for your employees is an easily accessible format and place. Your employees need to know how to use these new assets, and you should let them know who they can reach out to with any questions that crop up.
6. Preview Your Brand with High-Priority Audiences
Before you fully rollout the new brand to the public, share it with your most important external audiences. You don’t want high-priority audiences like stakeholders, clients, and customers to hear this news at the same time the general public does. Give them the insider treatment they deserve and preview the new brand launch with early them by doing a virtual presentation, webinar, or another exclusive event.
7. Make the Big Day an Exciting Event
Once you’ve previewed your brand with the most critical audiences, you can focus exclusively on making the big external launch an exciting, all-day event! Start by preparing blog posts, newsletters, brand launch video content, your social media marketing plan, and press announcements. Getting ready in advance will make a successful brand launch all that more likely.
Reestablish Brand Recognition with a Successful Brand Launch
It’s important to remember that not every brand launch is successful, but that doesn’t mean that yours won’t be! It all starts with a compelling and relevant brand identity. Learn how to create one with our new toolkit: Creating a Compelling & Relevant Brand Identity [B2B Edition].
With these guidelines to help prepare for your upcoming brand launch, ensuring that you’ve covered all your bases and are on track for a successful launch is a no-brainer. Just keep your story top-of-mind and maintain consistency throughout the launch and rollout process.
Still not feeling ready for your upcoming brand launch? Need help creating your brand messaging strategy? Sagefrog can help. Get in touch with us!
