Want to Change Your Brand or Rebrand?
Here’s How to Pivot or Rebrand Successfully.
I recently did a presentation on personal branding and discovering clarity, confidence, and connection for your brand. One of the questions I received was “Do you have recommendations on how to pivot or rebrand successfully?”.
My response was that you first have to be clear about why you are pivoting.
Why Pivot or Rebrand?
If you are pivoting because your current brand isn’t attracting clients, have you looked at every aspect of your brand to ensure that your efforts have been everything needed to attract the right audience?
Have you had clarity and confidence in your current brand?
Did you take time to differentiate yourself in your niche?
Has your messaging been clear?
Have you been consistent?
Do people understand what you do and the problem you solve for them?
If not, how do you see pivoting as a solution? Pivoting will not solve the problem or make life easier. You will still have to put forth efforts to communicate and connect with your audience to attract clients.
On the flip side, if you are pivoting because you no longer feel aligned with your current brand, then you need to decide how much of your current brand you are going to carry over with you.
When deciding on which components of your brand you are going to keep, you’ll have to consider the differences between a brand, branding, and brand identity.
The Brand
A personal brand is a perception others have of you. It is how and what people think, feel, and say about you. Your personal brand is how you’ve differentiated yourself from others in your niche.
What your brand is not, is a logo. And, it is not what you say it is. It is what “they,” say it is.
Branding
Branding is telling the story of your brand. It is communicating to the world what you are about and the problem you solve so that you can build a reputation and awareness around your brand. Sharing your brand story is going to help you become recognizable, memorable, and shareable while building the know, like, and trust factor.
Brand Identity
Your brand identity involves the visual aspects of your brand. The color pallet, typography, logo, and photography. The things that visually make your brand recognizable and memorable.
How to Pivot Your Brand
When you consider pivoting, you must evaluate how your brand is going to change, how you will tell the story of your new brand through branding efforts, and whether or not your brand identity components will remain the same or change completely.
If you’ve decided that pivoting is indeed the right action to take because you weren’t being fulfilled by the work you were doing, you’ll need to take steps to ensure your new brand has a foundation for success.
What steps can you take immediately to build that foundation to Pivot or Rebrand successfully?
- Have Clarity
- Define your niche – if you need help with defining your niche, go back to Episode 69 in which I detail the 5 questions to ask yourself that will transform your business.
- Don’t worry, you can be multi-passionate and niche down so that your brand is built on clarity.
- Defining your niche is imperative for identifying your ideal client avatar so that you can create content that connects directly with them. Talk to one person. If you are talking to everyone, you are talking to no one.
- Aligning your values, visions, and passions will be a key step to identifying if you are on the right path to obtaining clarity, fulfillment, and success.
- Be Consistent
- Your content, both written and visual needs to be consistent so that your audience can be clear on what you do and the problem you solve for them. Content should be consistent from your website to your social platforms to your email marketing.
- Build Community
- Your community is your ideal audience and those you collaborate with. When you create content that is clear and consistent your ideal audience will find clarity in your messaging and begin to trust you. Trust is the foundation of your brand. People make buying decisions based on trust. As you build a community, you’ll build relationships, which will result in trust.
I just summarized a few of the 5 Cs of Personal Branding. If you’d like to learn more about the 5 C’s of personal branding, you can go back and listen to Episode 9.
6 strategies for building a successful business.
Before You Pivot or Rebrand
But I have to reiterate. Before you take the initiative to pivot, be sure that you’ve evaluated your efforts for your current brand. Ask yourself if you are chasing a dream, feel that you are being called to pivot, or are frustrated with your current brand’s level of success and think starting over will do the trick. Because, if the latter, you will be much better served to revisit your current brand to ensure clarity than to invest resources in starting over completely.
When starting over, you risk confusing your current audience. If you decide the pivot is the way to go, lay the foundation so that you avoid confusion and hit the ground with complete clarity for yourself and your audience so that you can achieve success.
In summary, pivoting can be beneficial if done for the right reasons, but it is imperative that you lay the groundwork first and evaluate how you will ensure clarity for your brand, your branding, and your brand identity as you move forward.
If you are curious about how I can help you find clarity or create a brand with a detailed blueprint for branding strategy, book a call with me here.
To learn more about your host, Robyn Graham, click HERE.
