Top tips on rebranding your company

Here are my top tips on rebranding your business. Changing to a different name for your business can be scary.  But sometimes the name that you started out with just doesn’t fit any more.

Susi Doherty used to run a photography agency called Brighton Togs.  As Brighton Togs, they’d done well, established a good reputation for all kinds of photography, done a lot of SEO to come up first in the search engines whenever someone googled “brighton photographer” and things were going pretty well.

But Susi and her gang of photographers had outgrown the Brighton Togs name.  For one thing, no-one except the gang of photographers knew that “tog” was slang for photographer.  And they were now doing most of their work outside of Brighton, so no one cared about where they were from.  She needed to rebrand, but was nervous of losing what she had built up

Susi and I had some long discussions about whether to ditch the name, how to protect the reputation and the SEO work, and of course, what they should be called instead.  A year later, I sat down with Susi to talk about how the process of rebranding the company to Vervate had gone.

Susi Doherty and her top tips on rebranding

Susi’s top tips on rebranding in a list

1. Don’t be nervous, it will be fine
2. Do make sure your web people do the right re-directs, and the SEO will be maintained
3. Make a big fuss out of the rebrand so that people notice it
4. Don’t take too long to come up with a new name
5. Do use Scrabble letters as a way of coming up with a new name
6. Do plan the rebrand as a re-launch
7. Get advice and reassurance from someone who has done this before

My top tips on rebranding

1. The name, logo and colours are important to you, but no-one else is particularly emotionally invested in them.
2. Don’t just change the name without telling anyone
3. Don’t spend ages agonising over a new name
4. Don’t worry about the legal stuff, you can trade as anything you want, as long as the company name is on the invoices and somewhere on the website
5. Don’t just change the name – this is your chance to rebrand completely
6. Do make sure you go through all the links on social media, key referrers, guest posts etc to make sure the new name and rebrand are congruent
7. Do it all at once
8. Use a checklist and countdown to the big day

Photo credit – obviously I had to use a Vervate photo for this one.  That’s Susi Doherty in the middle, me on the left and Lynette Lowndes with us on Brighton seafront